Microsalt (LSE:SALT) — Investor Presentation

0:01 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the MICROSALT PLC Investor Presentation. Q and A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just 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 we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet company platform. Before we begin, I would like to submit

0:32 the following poll. And if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from MICROSALT PLC. Rick, good afternoon, sir. Thank you. My name is Rick Caney, and I'm the CEO of MICROSALT. Thank you, Jake. And with me today is Conrad Dobrowski, our CFO. And Conrad and I will step through a presentation for you. So Conrad, let's let's let's roll. Alright. This is our this is our disclaimer. Nobody's surprised that we have one of those. Alright. Here's our company profile and mission. MICROSALT is commercializing a patented technology that produces full flavor, low sodium salt. What that means is that we can take the sodium out of the salt and still deliver the regular flavor for food.

1:24 We're a major disruptor in the food market because of our micron sized particles also have adhered improved adherence to foodstuffs, and we'll talk about that in in a slide or two. But the thing of it is is we deliver 50% less sodium at full flavor. Excess sodium consumption is a significant contributor to worldwide cardiovascular disease, and we and MICROSALT is new technology that drives us there. We make we meet the rising demand for healthier alternatives. Eighty six percent of US health care costs are related to chronic diseases with cardiovascular disease and product. The WHO, which is the World Health Organization, is targeting reducing global sodium by 30% by 2025.

2:13 We have 184 countries. Virtually, the entire World Health Organization memberships have committed to this goal. So it is a worldwide issue, and it's estimated that we'll save seven million lives by doing that by 2030. Our whole mission, our whole reason to be in business is to help people reduce global sodium consumption and therefore heart disease. And we do that by providing proprietary, full flavor, low sodium salt. Alright. Here's here let's get down to it. There are market opportunity. Our patented technology allows us to create full flavor with a much smaller crystals. And we do that by shrinking the crystal. We don't grind it. We don't cut it. We we physically shrink it so it becomes extremely intense.

3:03 And by doing that, you increase its surface area so when it hits your tongue, you get the full blast of the flavor of that crystal without ingesting all the excess sodium. It works great in crisps, tortillas, nuts, crackers, breads, popcorn, energy bars, cookies. It has the full functionality of traditional salt because it is salt. It isn't there is no potassium chloride. There are no other chemical based things in the salt itself. When you make something that small, you naturally improve its adhesion. So if you're on a production line, you're making let's say, you're running crisps, your salt isn't bouncing off. I mean, it happens to all of us. We salt our food and the salt bounces off.

3:49 Well, that's a big problem when you're running a plant. However, MICROSALT doesn't bounce off. It sticks to the crisps. It sticks to the nuts. It stays suspended in the slurry. So from an operational standpoint, it's really, really a great product. And, you know, it tastes like salt because it is salt, and I keep coming back to this because that's the secret. For twenty years, we've been struggling with trying to fix the sodium problem, and that's because they didn't have MICROSALT around. We do it without changing the flavor. We have a dynamic market growth trajectory with a global market expected to be $9,600,000,000 by 2032. We deliver 50% less sodium on average, and the current market is $5,500,000,000.

4:38 You know, operating in in a market this dynamic is giving us great increased health cons conscience among consumers and government sodium reduction targets.

4:53 Real simple. We deliver competitive advantage. Our unique patented technology delivers much smaller crystal salt with full flavor without ingesting sodium. It's it's it's speaking to a huge demand, significant health benefits of cutting sodium across the globe, both b to b and b to c. We have massive development potential because it is a global problem. We have activity from almost every country in the world, from South Africa, South America, Canada, the The UK, obviously, since we're here. But the the European continent, it's sodium is a big problem.

5:38 And to address a big problem, I guess, you address big customers. We talk to the world's largest food producers. We talk to the regional large food producers in order to get them to use MICROSALT to lower sodium. We have a really strong production and supply chain as we speak, so we have very limited risk profile. We use contracting packaging right now in The US. Our our team supporting all this is outstanding. We have senior level people in sales, international sales, supply chain management, and marketing. Our board is equally as strong. Here's you see my picture of myself on the left.

6:25 I've been a food guy my whole life, including Procter and Gamble, Anne Issabush, Corn Foods. I also ran my own company for over thirty years. We were a bulk snack producer. With me is Conrad Dobrowski, a really great CFO. He was he's previously finance director at Lucid and global accounting manager for restaurants branch international. For those of you who don't know, that's Burger King. And at Popeyes, I believe, Conrad, if that's if I'm not right about is that? Correct. And he's a qualified accountant for five years with Deloitte. Our our chair is Judith Bachelor. Judith is an OBE. She is the highest ranking nutritionist in The UK. She's had thirty five years experience in the food business, including management positions at Sandsbury, Safeway, and Marks and Spencer.

7:12 She's a fellow of the Institute of Food Science and Technology and is really a really strong resource for us. Gary Ormstad has over thirty years of

7:22 experience in the food industry. He was the CFO of William Jackson Food Group. They did over 300 British pounds. He's extensive experience in m and a, governments, and internal controls. And Dan Emery. Dan is a sales guy. Everybody needs a sales guy. He he worked for Pilgrim's Pride and and grew Pilgrim's Pride into one of the largest chicken companies in the universe. Great board for a company our size especially. Here's a real quick look and go from right to left of what the competitive market might look like. You have all these products and they have potassium chloride as their main ingredient. And before Microsoft, that was pretty much the only the only game in town, but it has a severe metallic aftertaste because it is a metal.

8:11 When you go to the left, you'll see the Morton table salt at a their serving size at a 100 and 1.5 is five hundred and ninety milligrams, and our product is a 148. So it's there is a significant savings. And if you can look at the ingredients statements there, salt and non g m o maltodextrin in ours, so we we deliver the salt flavor with real salt.

8:42 K. There's a there's a there there's a couple things going on here inside the company. First, where our meat is, where where our strength is the b to b business. Obviously, selling to the world's largest food manufacturers who who need to lower their sodium to make the the government regulations that they're facing. Depending on your country and the severity of those regulations dictates the severity of how quickly they wanna move. In The UK, you guys are pretty aggressive. In South America, they're extremely aggressive on their sodium reduction plans. What this also brings, though, is that brings long term revenue base. When you lower your sodium, you're not gonna go back and start selling unhealthy food again and risk all you've you've gained in the terms of product placement and labeling.

9:30 That's just not gonna happen. In addition to all that, we have a strong b to b b to c profile. We made a line of crisps for proof of concept only. Proof of concept came out so great that we're in over 400 stores as we speak. We also created two sizes of shakers. You know, even though most of the sodium we ingest comes from processed food, some of it does come from uses at home. And we felt it was important that people could put Microsoft in their pantries.

10:04 We have two size shakers. They are available currently on Amazon UK and Amazon US. And if you add that all up, we're in about a thousand stores total across those two venues. And, of course, we have ecommerce where where we sell both of those items and some bulk, believe it or not, on various ecommerce sites. Alright. This is a just as a snapshot of the of the supply chain the supply sales supply spectrum. Just we can go right to the end on the right hand side. We have two customers that have already two multinational major food customers that have already placed orders. We have a third in rollout conversations.

10:50 We have a fourth and a fifth in ongoing testing.

10:55 So we have five significant major food companies, of which two of them are already given us orders. We can go to the next slide. We can kinda fill this in. Okay. Customer a. It's a it's a major Fortune 500 pharmacy retailer chain. We've already they've already placed orders. We're converting four items of their private label in 800 of their stores. And during the year 2024 and in 2025, we'll be converting from the 800 to the 9,000 and from the four SKUs to cross their entire package line. Now that's not gonna happen all at once. They're gonna bleed that in, but there's a marriage of mission here, and we are well well on track. Customer b, very exciting. It's the Mexican subsidiary of customer c. Customer c is one of the world's largest food companies.

11:49 We've already commercialized in in Mexico. They've given us orders totaling 29 metric tons. We have regular orders are continuing. We are going to go from two items to five items. I'm gonna say before the end of twenty twenty four, and it's Latin America and South America are the gateways for growth for this particular company, and they are very excited with us. And to use their terms, we are their alpha launch when it comes to low sodium initiatives.

12:20 Customer c is the same customer as customer b, except in different locales. You we're including this in in The US, in Europe, and Canada. We're also talking to them about developing a joint development agreement for additional product innovations across this low sodium perspective. There's many different ways we can use MICROSALT, and we're exploring all those with them as we as we speak. And we expect two or three additional item lines, SKUs, from the North American folks first half of twenty twenty four. Customer d is one of the world's largest global bakery companies. We've already passed through the r and d. We've already worked through their supply houses, and we expect this product to begin in June.

13:10 It's an extremely popular line. And again, I wanna point out once you go low sodium, you can't go back, and you can't just have one item low sodium. And, you know, since we're talking about full flavor, we're not saying to the customers, okay.

13:26 Item x have one version high sodium, one version low sodium. No. We're not saying that. We're just saying lower the sodium on your traditional product and go from there. They don't need extra x a SKUs. They don't need consumer change because the consumer won't know. It'll taste the same.

13:46 Yeah. This is this is really the key point, I think, because it's so central to you know, you have a great new technology that's patent protected. You have a great team. But at the end of the day, it's about how easy and costly it is for prospective customers, especially large food companies to adopt the technology like MICROSALT. Right? And it's very easy because one

14:10 and I'm already kinda I'm proceeding one of the questions, but it doesn't involve any additional capital expenditures. Existing spray drying equipment can be used to produce MICROSALT. There's no additional

14:24 spending involved on the customer side whatsoever. It works well with a number of services. Right?

14:31 And so it's it's it's one it's one of the key points. And the customers being the large food companies don't need to launch new products, invest into marketing, the launch, which can take years, right, as we know it, versus all they do is just simply changing their existing SALT vendor to MICROSALT. And customer acceptance, nothing in terms of that is

14:59 actually changed or affected in the process. Right?

15:03 All they do is they discontinue production day by day of their of their snacks, whether it be popcorn or or crisps or a number of other SKUs we're launching with them. And the consumer doesn't even taste the difference. That's the beauty of it. It's simple. It's obviously not as simple, you know, when you go into patent and and how it's actually produced, but it's at the end of the day, it's simple for big customers to adopt it.

15:31 And custom to to find to move on from this, Custom Re is one of the largest suppliers of meat and poultry products in The US. And they, quite honestly, they serve a lot of chick a lot of their chicken nuggets to schools. And they have to get their sodium down in order to keep their lunch business. So they are really trying hard to find the ways to make it work with Microsoft. We we know they're gonna we know they're gonna succeed. We know where they are in their testing. We've tested independently, and we know that they're gonna get there. So it's a really great customer base for us. Yeah. And then just to kinda not to confuse, this is like our the forefront of our customers and near term opportunities, but, obviously, the company has much more beyond those five names in in in the pipeline, in in the testing phase, and the and the commercial commercial opportunity.

16:23 Yeah. Our pipeline is really something. And this is all this is all, Conrad. Yeah. Now, again, we're looking at the numbers from previous year into a little bit of

16:32 2023, which is primarily only reflecting sales of the b two c line items, the proof of concept. And just to be clear, the company and the team have been focused on putting resources into launch of these big b two b products at the end of twenty twenty three with customer a and customer b. So those are the two customers already paying, and we've had to reshuffle resources into into into those launches a little bit at the expense of the b two c sales, but we do obviously expect the b two b to grow as a portion of the of the sales by going forward. And funding has been historically provided for convertible loan notes through the incubator tech capital just under $6,000,000 at the end of twenty twenty three.

17:22 And, again, we just want to reiterate that we're at a very interesting junction right now where the effort that company has put into rollout of Microsoft with two of these major b to b customers is bringing is coming to fruition, and we obviously expect more to come in in 2024 and and beyond. And, you know, some of these companies are really large. Right? They have multiple geographies, and we're working with multiple teams across the board, across across the continents, really, sometimes. And this is why on the balance sheet side of things, the company needed funds to grow inventory and working capital to satisfy needs of some of these large manufacturers because we're talking about pretty high quantities, obviously. If if you can imagine some of their SKUs are are are really selling very, very, very well.

18:17 And to me as a CFO, that's one of the best uses of capital you can imagine, which is really working capital and and inventory. Again, worth saying again that no major capital expenditures is needed in terms of already existing equipment that is making MICROSALT. In the future, we might need a manufacturing plan that will further help with our our margins. But as of now, we have a very good capacity with third party contracted manufacturers. And over time, we can also invest into a little bit into r and d as to other line extensions, and this goes into, obviously, the use of proceeds slide.

19:02 We're talking about, again, inventory and working capital, which I just went through, sales and marketing, obviously. The good thing about sales and marketing spend is that we're already talking and servicing a number of major companies. And our investment in sales and marketing is not just called approach or trying to get customer to the table and start talking to them, but it's more so really really servicing already existing customers and helping Rick and the team manage multiple geographies and and and and teams within oftentimes the same large snack food companies. Line extensions and product development is an interesting one because we have a product that's already working great on number of surfaces and product extensions and ready to go meals.

19:56 It's not just crisp. It's not just popcorn. It's ready to go meals. It's cereal. Over time, we can add more to it, like French fry applications and different different other applications. And then finally, obviously, staff expansion and g and a, which is growing the core team. You have to remember that all of this progress was accomplished with an average seven people on on the team, and Rick and the team really need help to service these these already existing customers and the upcoming opportunities. Thank you, Conrad. And, you know, just just to summarize, we have a serious competitive advantage in the sodium reduction market through our patented technology.

20:43 It tastes like salt because it is salt. Part of the genius of this is its simplicity. And as Conrad mentioned, all we're asking the customers to do is to pull their salt out and put salt back in. We're not asking them to re rebalance their flavor profiles. We're not asking any of those things, and we're not asking the consumer to change their behavior. We're just asking them to change their salt bender. You know, a a health concern of this magnitude has led to pent up demand both b to b and b to c channels, and the the government pressure across the globe is only giving us significant tailwinds. And the government pressure is not gonna go away. If anything, it's gonna increase.

21:29 And this gives us a dynamic potential to for growth across the world. We're the we're the new guy in town. We have the new technology. You know, we're the Wi Fi compared to the old dial up because we have technology for the food business that wasn't there before. We our our pipeline and our visibility is the best companies in the food business. And no matter where you might be, we're there trying to talk to them. Again, very limited risk profile on production supply chain. And as we grow, you'll find that we we can replicate production in other countries because it's a simple product to make. There is nuance involved in exactly the the science of of of it all, and I'm perhaps downplaying the science a little bit, but there is some nuanced technology involved.

22:23 But we can make MICROSALT where we need MICROSALT to be delivered. We got a great team. I mean, it's a fabulous team. It really is. These people know what they're doing. They're experienced. They're committed, and it's really great to have them every day working every day. Anyway, and we have a clear use of our our proceeds and focus on capital growth for our shareholders so that we can build a viable long term company. Just, you know, not to downplay it, but Jack Stein, one of the high profile chefs here in The UK market, has fully endorsed MICROSALT. And in the coming months, as we develop The UK market, you'll see Jack in much more of an of an aggressive stance using MICROSALT, providing MICROSALT recipes, perhaps even on a on a podcast or a webinar of this magnitude to really get Microsoft, you know, on the street for lack of a better term.

23:25 Thanks, Rick. Yeah. If I just may add to this great finish by Rick, you know, by just reiterating the health problem that it's so obviously inherently related to the commercial traction because I think half of the customers we're getting and speaking to are already putting the product in. They came to us, a small company. They had to look up in search of a solution. So that's making our sales job that much easier. In The UK alone, according to the British Heart Foundation, approximately seven point six million people have cardiovascular disease. Over a hundred seventy thousand people died from it in 2022 and half of that at least is attributable to excess sodium consumption.

24:11 We wanna make a dent in this number and I think it's a great mission to be associated with especially when it comes with a feasible product that's easy to adapt for large snack manufacturers and really see effect of that fairly fairly fairly quickly. Again, financially, our goal is to make a meaningful stake in the 5,500,000,000 global sodium reduction market. And even though we're technically already actually penetrating outside of this 5,500,000,000 low sodium market because we're technically replacing normal salt, not low sodium solutions that are out there. Right? When we speak to customer a or customer b, they're not launching new lightly salted versions of their product portfolio.

25:04 They're using MICROSALT on their already existing product. And that's one of the reasons why we're so optimistic we're going to be able to really reach that mission in a relatively short amount of time. Thanks, Rick. And Jake Thank you, Brian. Perfect. Rick, alright. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q and A tab that's situated on the top right hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Comrade, Rick, as you can see there in the q and a tab, we have received a number of questions from investors that were both presubmitted ahead of today's event as well as those that have made their way through during your presentation this afternoon as well. So firstly, thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions.

26:03 And, Rick, Conrad, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you, Jake. Rick, we have a first question from Andrew who's curious about how how easy it is for a product line to switch out existing high salt provider or, I guess, regular salt provider and replace with MICROSALT? Does it require modification to the product line, etcetera? Maybe you can talk about, you know, that process a little bit. I'll tell you that MICROSALT has the same functionality as traditional salt. It works great in slurries. It works great in in a sheeting application. It looks great on a sprinkler application. So to answer your question, Andrew, no. The customer doesn't require any CapEx to our experience to date.

26:55 It's very easy for them to produce it on the line. And in fact, the operating guys like it because there's there's no salt on the floor. There's no excess salt in the bag. In the nut business, it's not uncommon to have to salt your nuts twice because so much of it bounces off. Well, you don't have to you don't even have to do that. If you're making dry roasted salted almonds, you're all set. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the process usually looks like this. We all these larger, I mean, almost all of these large snack food manufacturers, food companies use their flavor houses. Right, Rick? So we we usually work with them. And oftentimes, it's actually the flavor house that provides, like, seasoning for, you know, customer a's crisps.

27:40 Oftentimes, they're the biggest advocate of our solution because they do have less scrap, less mess on the production floor. It sticks well. It works well. So I think that's that's one of the advantages of MICROSALT. And there are some cost savings actually from that improved product adhesion and kinda addressing already another question in terms of pricing. Yes. MICROSALT is a premium priced product. Salt is one of the cheapest commodities out there. It costs more than regular salt. However, the benefits are obviously from low sodium and health effect and advantages to the top line of the customers, but also from the product adhesion. They lose less salt on the production for in the process of production versus normal salt.

28:28 And then finally, while MICROSALT is more expensive, at the end of the day, when you look at the unit cost of a serving size bag of crisps, sodium salt is oftentimes around $1.02 pennies per bag. Now, obviously, it adds up on high volume, but from the p and l perspective, it's it's a pretty easy decision making process, and we've never had issues with with pricing with with customers we have so far. And so we're we're very happy with that aspect. Rick, another question, maybe it might be more for me, was from James, more around actual listing on AIM and why we listed on AIM, for example, given, you know, overall, I think, where the indices and the market has been.

29:18 So first of all, we're we're very pleased to, you know, list MICROSALT in The UK just because of historically how strong the food sector has been, and Britain is home to many of the world's leading food companies, you know, from Unilevers, Compass, Tate and Lyle, Nomad Foods, Craigs, and and many others. Second of all, the UK government and NGOs are actually very much on top more so than some other countries in terms of their their will, say, to reduce sodium and to really go after companies that don't. Right? So we've got good degree of commercial opportunities coming from that. One of the reasons why Jude's bachelor OBE joined the company is because she was involved in some levels of sodium reduction since early two thousands and has been complaining about lack of ingredient that could really help companies meet that those sodium reduction goals that would not sacrifice the taste in the process.

30:23 And then another reason, you know, more more financial is it's actually more affordable for a small company to listen AIM versus some other more well known, if you call it, markets. So we thought that it was a good good trader for the company. And at the end of the day, good companies will perform one one way or the other regardless of where they're where they're listed. Let's see. Question from Austin. When will you be able to name a b to b customer? So we're obviously in the process of discussing. It's going to be you have to, you know, work with these large snack manufacturers to process through their different departments, but we do we do expect to be able to do that.

31:21 Question from Gavin. Are you aware of any other new low sodium alternatives that are under development, Rick? You know, we haven't come across anything that that's start startling new. There are naturally, there are some salts that have various sodium levels in them depending on what part of the world they're mined from, whether it's sea salt from Australia or mined salt from Pakistan. There are various sodium levels available to manufacturers. However, what they don't wanna do is get involved with a complicated supply chain problem, where you're buying your salt from some, far off destination and you're counting on a very weak supply chain, I think COVID taught everybody a lesson in the food business that that's not smart.

32:09 And one of the other things we offer is that we offer a rock solid supply chain for people. The product is currently made in The US. We can make it anywhere in the world, and it's only two things. It's just salt and maltodextrin. Yeah. And then direct answer to that is that some of these Fortune 500 large food companies are working with us and already are trying to deploy product into other countries within their member firms as well. What guidance That's a question from Gavin now again, I think. What guidance have you given with regard to whether the company can be self financing from here? So I can't answer, at least as of now yet, that question directly specific timeline and and all. All I can say is that as a CFO, that the business model is is very attractive and that it it it it targets b to b customers, and that helps with margins because when you really focus entirety of your business model on a b to c or retail name out there that you have to grow, you have to spend that much more money on marketing, consumer marketing, online awareness.

33:24 Now we're still doing some work for trade shows and and things like that. But like I said, some of our biggest customers and opportunities really came through them reaching to us. And so that ultimate customer acquisition cost is is very, very low, and that helps with cash burn. Another thing that helps with cash burn is lack of need for any large CapEx. Right? And so we don't need to buy or help these companies, you know, outfit anything in terms of their already existing equipment. So it's a pretty capital light business model that's going to be focused on working capital and inventory. Alright.

34:14 Question from Beth. Could you speak a little bit more about the patents you hold? Rick, maybe you can take that one and kinda just discuss different parameters, and it might actually help the audience also with understanding of the actual technology and, you know, more or less, obviously, on a high enough level, what happens when we bring that salt to a dry spraying facility. Sure. The the patent there are there are a number of patents, but the the major overriding patent is for the production of MICROSALT. And what happens is our patented technology allows us to shrink the salt crystal. And the patent is written in in a manner so that we have a a wide range of salt crystals that are maintained inside the patent, whether it's depending on what size crystal we need for the customer, we can do that. The process itself is what's patented, not necessarily the size of the crystal. So we've have a rock solid grab on how you make MICROSALT.

35:18 In addition to the patent, ours will have a a wider range of trademarks and, you know, industry know how. You just can't drive up to a spray facility and say, let's make MICROSALT. There's been years of trials and runs, and and it's a combination of water pressure, heat, time, nozzle size to get the crystal size just just right. It's because we want that crystal size just right so it delivers the impact on your tongue, the flavor that you're looking for, without having to ingest the excess sodium. There are several other patents that are pending, and I'll leave those, off for now because we don't officially know yet, but they are pending regarding the uses of MICROSALT, and that's that.

36:10 Yeah. Alright. Another question veering more more into the financials, which was who owns the convertible loan notes, and how do we find all the terms on these? So you can read through the admission document for details, but it's it's tech capital, the incubator that has funded the the business amongst other shareholders because there's been a few others. But it's it's Tech Capital holding over $2,600,000 in convertible loan notes, and they've been incredibly helpful in building out the management executive team, the IP portfolio, really helping MICROSALT stand on its own on its own legs as well.

36:56 Let me scan if we if we have any other questions. I think there's a question, Rick, around maybe overall marketing strategy in terms of any other influencers, but brand ambassadors the company wants to pursue, you know, in the foreseeable future beyond Jack Stein. Sure. You know, there's a lot of high exposure, colony related celebrities that were just bluntly out of our out of our budget range. The people that can really drive influence are extremely expensive, and that's I don't think I'm saying anything that people don't already know. So as we grow and as we develop deeper into the culinary world where we could walk into a restaurant and help a chef make his own recipe recipes.

37:47 That's where we're going with that. You know, that's gonna that's gonna probably come at a market by market attack. Obviously, in The UK, there's a number of high high levels celebrities, and we started with Jack Stein. We're very happy with Jack, and we will be doing more of that in the future. Yeah. And then let's see. Let's make a couple questions where where I'm at it, I believe. I think we talked about pricing. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. So, Eric, someone asked last night. I'm sorry. I I memorized the question with not the name in here.

38:38 What are our concrete plans for next twelve months in terms of what we wanna accomplish commercially or or or not? Obviously, without, you know, talking things that we haven't disclosed yet. Well, you know, our focus is the b to b expansion. And we are doing it although we're doing it across the planet, we can't we can't be everywhere at one time. So we're focusing on The UK for right now and on Latin America because we have already have a foothold. So we expect within the next twelve months to be able to say that we have significant penetration with with significantly sized food manufacturers. Now along with that comes some b some b b c business. Along with that will come some, in home shaker sales. But the real thing is get the b to b business out of the blocks, you know, and and especially now, we've already got that happening in Mexico for us. And Mexico will lead to Brazil.

39:33 Brazil will lead to South Africa. I mean, in our work in The UK is significantly down the road. So in twelve months, we'll be talking to you about the named stores, retail chains, and brands that have gone with MICROSALT. One last question that I think we we can, I guess, answer together? Who developed the manufacturing process? I guess, who's the person responsible for inventing the product? And the technology and the patent was filed originally by two carbohydrate chemists out of University of Arkansas, which was then subsequently acquired by the incubator and then sold or transferred to MICROSALT. MICROSALT owns it now.

40:23 And you'd think that, you know, maybe University of Arkansas doesn't sound like MIT or or or Stanford or or, you know, or Oxford, but it's in the food industry, actually, it's one of the top notch research and, you know, schools in the world. And the two the two chemists are very, very well known and respected and was a great find at the time. And that's how the entire journey really started. It started with the incubator identifying and finding the patent, and they had relationship with the chemist before too and then building the great team, great board around it. Alright. Let me see if we have any questions added. Oh, what is the life of the main button from here? It's until 2030, which by itself is more than enough for us given the kind of name recognition of customers we're speaking out that are already using MICROSALT on them.

41:25 We think it's enough for us to build on, maintain that first mover advantage. Now there is other things that Rick mentioned. We find additional patents, further improvements on the technology that, if granted, would extend this patent coverage until 2039. And then we have trademarks, obviously, which cover MICROSALT, you know, very, very catchy name out there. And then we have the know how, which is also very, very important. But because when you think about Coca Cola, it's not covered by patent for decades now, but it's covered by their know how that they're very secret about. So all of it, we think, adds the very strong IP portfolio position for a young company like that. Right? You have to remember that MICROSALT doesn't even have five years or just over five years, I think, at this point.

42:20 So I think that would conclude the questions, Jake. Can I hand it over to you? Absolutely, comrade Rick. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous of your time then, addressing all of those questions that came in from investors. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended just for you to review to then add any additional responses, of course, where it's appropriate to do so, and we'll publish all those responses out on the platform. But, Rick, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that'd be great. Sure. You know, it's in the business world. And as you can tell from my the color of my hair, I've been around the block a couple of times.

43:07 And it is rare that where everything falls in place. You know, usually, there's a problem with the product quality or the market's not ready or there's a big giant competitor or something will get in the way. None of those things exist with MICROSALT. It's the right product at the right time that's been completely vetted that delivers a significant health benefit. And every day, it seems there's more and more and more research that just backs us up. It's every day our story gets stronger without us having to convince anybody. It's it's not magic because it's true, but it's like magic because it's so good. You know, and sodium is is such a sensitive issue no matter where you are, in The UK, in The US, Canada, up anywhere you are, sodium is on people's minds, and they're looking for solutions. And finally, like I said earlier, you know, we're the Wi Fi compared to the old dial up stuff. We're the new technology, and it's it's gonna work. We know it works.

44:15 Perfect. Rick, comrade, thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of MICROSALT PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all. Thank you very much. Thank you.