Tristel (LSE:TSTL) Q4 2026 Earnings Call

0:00 Good morning and welcome to the Tricel PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&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 over to Chris Lee. Good morning, sir.

0:30 Good morning. Thank you. Good morning. Hi, my name is Chris Lee. I'm joined by my colleague Anna Vassel, our CFO, and it's a pleasure to be able to present the Tricel PLC's Auditor Results for 2026. I'd like to start by just drawing your attention to the disclaimer, which you can read at your leisure. And while you're doing so, I'd just like to tell you a bit about Tricel and what we do. We're a chemistry company who operates in the high-level disinfection space with a proprietary chemistry chlorine dioxide. Our whole mission is to prevent using our powerful biocell chemistry is to prevent the transition of microbes either from an object or a person to another.

1:16 As I'm new to the business, this is my third month in the company, I thought I'd just do a brief introduction of myself. I've been in the med tech space for over 35 years. I started my career at Johnson & Johnson. where I spent 18 years across multiple specialty segments in both Europe, the US and Asia and ended up my career there running the Ethicon franchise across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Since then I've worked in multiple SME type of organisations across the globe and my most recent one was the CEO of Summit Medical which is a UK-based private equity-backed medical device group. This is also my third public company that I've worked for as a CEO or as a deputy CEO. I've had extensive experience, particularly in the US, around customers, distribution models and channels, and leadership of teams. And it's an absolute pleasure to be here as a member of the Tricel team.

2:20 And although they're not my numbers, I'm delighted to present what's going to be an outstanding set of numbers for the business. With that, I'd just like to say that the board remains unchanged. Obviously, Anna joined the board a year ago, which just over a year ago when she joined the business. And I've just joined the board and the rest of the board remained as it was previously. And I'm grateful to them for their support and contributions to the business. I'd like to hand over to Anna now to talk about the financial performance. And in doing so, I'd also like to just thank the entire Tricel team for an outstanding contribution over the last 12 months to bring us to this point.

3:00 Anna. Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Let me tell you about two financial highlights. Our Tricel team has delivered an amazing year with a double-digit growth, 10% growth in top line. our revenues reached a record 51.1 million pounds and grew across the world in the UK our home market by 5% and overseas by 13% and America's sales tripled and of course we will spend more time on these figures in later slides our adjusted PPC grew by 15% to 11.7 million adjusted EBITDA to 15.7 million and we have reached a very high margin of 31% and adjusted EPS grew by 6% to 18.19%.

3:49 In terms of cash, our operating cash flow reached 11 million, was up 8% over last year and resulted in a 16 million balance at the end of the year of cash and short-term deposits. We remain debt-free and we're planning to pay the final dividend of 9.23% per share which we will pay in December of this year. And that will mean that the total annual dividend will grow by 5% year-over-year. I will now spend a bit of time on key performance indicators, which show our continuous strong track record. This last year, again, as I've mentioned, we have grown 10%. This mostly came from volume, so 4.3 million out of 4.6 of additional sales came from volume, and the remaining, basically, from strife.

4:38 That means that we've reached a 10-year CAGR of 11.26%. And in terms of cash flow, I've already mentioned the figures in the previous slide, but what you can see here is this continuous, strong growth, which gives us plenty of optionality for investments and progressive dividends going forward. Our profitability is very high with 31% of adjusted MPCA remains very well comfortably above our commitment of 25% margin. I will walk you through our summarized P&L, our summarized income statement here. I've already touched on the top-line growth, but what I would like to highlight here is that actually the 10% growth year-on-year looks even better when you look at the individual segments. So our medical device disinfection product grew by 11%, our surface disinfection by 27%, and it's actually our legacy product which decreased year-over-year.

5:42 Our gross profit increased, so gross profit margin to 82%, that's reflecting the savings realized from bringing in-house the manufacturing of 308, which was completed and announced previously, and as expected, brought solid savings in the second half of the year, and of course will continue delivering those going forward. Our gross margin for medical device disinfectants grew to 85% because of that project, and our surface disinfectants margins grew to 61%, mostly due to volume. Our administrative and distribution expenses grew by 8%, and this is largely driven by increase in employees, with 18.8 million of our staff costs. That's related to increasing headcount, and as we've announced before, we continuously invested in commercial expansion, so we've brought sales heads into the organizations, and a few more sort of clinical focus employees as well, and we will continue doing this investment in 2027.

6:50 Our depreciation, amortization, and impairment line you will see it increased to 3.5 million by 48%. And this is largely driven by a one-off impairment of some of the intangibles related to surface line. And that was 0.8 million. That brings us to adjusted profit before tax of 11.7 million, which is a 23% margin, very, very solid. And finally, the tax line. So you will see here we have the tax expense has grown from 1.8 to 3 million, by 69%. And this is largely driven by two things. Firstly, by a further reduction in patent cost benefit.

7:36 and secondly, by reclassification of our IRDEC. So, in the past, the R&D Expense Credit was recognized on the tax line as a Redux Tax Liability, and currently it has been reclassified 1026 to Other Operating Income, so above tax line. And since we consider that the IRDEC is not truly dependent on Tristell's actions and it's just dependent on HMRC policy, we decided to adjust it out from our adjusted profitability measures. I will move on to Balanced KPIs, where you will see that our networking capital remains at very healthy ratios, at around 15%, and over the last two years, as we grew the business in total by 22%, the networking capital only increased by 16%, releasing a lot of cash into the business. Our return on capital employed remains very robust at 27% in last year, speaking to our high operational performance efficiency and our ability to create long-term value for stakeholders.

8:49 And finally, our progressive dividend, which, as I mentioned, will increase by 5% and reach 14.91 pence per share in the year. I have a balance sheet slide here, but to be honest, I will spend very little time on it, because it really serves more as a reinforcement that we have a very healthy and strong balance sheet, which remains debt-free. We have seen 25% increase in cash and short-term deposits. Our liabilities remain quite low, and that gives us plenty of capacity to support our plant investment and growth initiatives. Now I would like to spend a little bit more time explaining where the growth came from.

9:34 So UK, our home market grew by 5%, but similarly to the group level, the growth has actually been better when you look at the individual segments. So our medical device disinfectants grew by 8% in the UK, and 21% for surface disinfectants with the legacy products that's declining. When you look at Europe, Middle East and Africa, the overall growth was of 15% to 24 million, and that really came from a range of markets. So starting from Germany, which grew by 8% in medical device, the contamination products, despite emerging competition on the market. We go to Italy, growing by 16%, also in medical device decontamination primarily. And that market grew significantly despite the fact that quite a few tenders have been delayed, which means that most of the growth came from increased adoption among our existing customers and moving the products to the new departments, such as ENT and cardiology.

10:40 In Italy, we have also seen first signs of increased dual-ULT usage following the clinical studies and publications around HPV transmission with the use of ultrasound devices. That's really clearly an area where our strong cooperation with the opinion leaders and work on clinical studies helps us to raise awareness around these issues and to really influence the clinical practice. If we move on to France, also grew double digits in both medical device and surface disinfectant. We've seen significant gains, especially in surface disinfectant portfolio, where we have seen in a few hospitals, where in difficult outbreak situations, we have chlorine dioxide products really outperformed competition and allowed us to transfer the cool surface disinfection practice to our products.

11:37 Overall we see that surface disinfectant products globally have grown very strongly and what we see there is that they differentiate very nicely not only because of higher efficacy than competing products but also because of simplicity of use. So we have one contact time for all the different microbes while competition refers to different contact times for different types of microorganisms, which in practice means that it's quite difficult to use the product with full effectiveness. So we're really happy with development there. Our Middle East team has also performed very well with 24% growth year-over-year. And in APAC, we saw a similar performance to the first half of the year, where it was quite a varied picture. So in our mature markets such as Australia and New Zealand, we've seen quite flat performance over the last year with some competitive headwinds in Australia.

12:37 In New Zealand, the medical device, the contamination portfolio actually grew slightly. However, the legacy product declined and sort of dragged the whole growth down. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Singapore grew very strongly, 21% and 16%. very happy with that performance. And if you look at Americas finally, in Americas we've reached 0.8 million in revenues. And I would like to spend a bit more time and explain the different revenue streams related to Americas Fitness. So first is the direct US product sale. That's the line where our newly launched OPH product is reported. And you can see really great growth there. So the 340,000 pounds is mostly consisting of the growth in OPH product.

13:27 And the second line, which is the royalties line, that's related to Parker's sale of Streissel UMP. So these are our royalties that we receive on that sale, and that, of course, flows through our income statement at 100% gross margin. Our distributor sales in America, coming mostly from Canada and Chile, grew by 54%, and that overall meant that America grew 202%. And now I would like to ask to Chris, who will tell us more about the U.S. profile.

13:59 Thanks, Anne. The U.S. has been obviously one of the high priority markets for us, and there are two parallel segments we run in the U.S., one on the ultrasound business and one on the ophthalmic business, and I'd like to touch on both for you now. So with the ultrasound business, we obviously work with our strategic partner, Park Laboratories, and our royalty income has grown to $355,000 in the last year. procedures have grown from 300,025 to 736,000 last year. So it's a very significant increase in the number of procedures that we're now trying to use them. There are approximately 50,000 procedures in the U.S. in this space, which just gives you some measure of the potential that we have ahead of us here, and we're looking to see how we can exploit that further. The way the U.S.

14:50 works in this space is that new accounts start with small volumes of the Inventory Protection Cooperative's trial, develop training protocols and update procedures and observe for competency and performance before they get rolled out. And then it becomes a management practice after that time for utilization. So to give you a working example here, one of our biggest customers in Florida had 10 user sites in 2024. There are now 33 user sites at the end of this financial year. And a huge amount of work has been done to drive adoption and growth in that particular institution. So that gives you a sense of the time it takes for us to take an initial interest through to exploitation of the technology across multiple sites in the hospital.

15:42 What we have done in the last year is we've managed to increase our pipeline significantly. So we added 190 new user sites in the last six months since the March report, which means we've now got 275 open opportunities in the pipeline with 175 in different stages of completing value analysis and are in trials and implementing training. So I'm very, very excited and confident about the future of TriStyle Alt in the US with Parker as our strategic partner over there. And I'm also encouraged by the feedback that we've had from our customers on the ground with the testimonials. And you can move here to your leisure, but I think if I was to try and summarise what these customers say, the three things that come out across the board here is one is the convenience that Tricel offers them. Secondly is the time reduction that it takes. And thirdly is just that the the impact it has on their systems, on their compliance, on the joint commission, and the overall approvals makes this a very easy technology for them to adopt. And we're actually delighted to receive these glowing testimonials from our customers.

17:05 Now moving on to the OPA side, the ophthalmic side of the business, and this has been a huge success for us in the last 12 months. So if I look at the revenue here that we've increased to $260,000, which exceeded our initial expectations, with 111,000 custom procedures performed across this marketplace. So a very substantial increase with some very significant institutions, both high institutes and major hospitals, who have adopted this technology, which gives us great encouragement for the potential for this product across the US. Again, the significant number of new accounts have been opened, 73 at year end are now using the product and we have 304 open opportunities with 207 at trial and evaluating with 97 of those currently engaged.

18:00 We have strong partners in Advancing Eye Care and Kela and we are looking to add a further distributor to our ranks very shortly who will be very much focused on the government opportunities around veterans affairs and the military, which is another significant strength that we hope to open up. Just to graphically show you what that looks like for the business, a year ago, this gives you a visual representation of where our live users were across the US and the pipeline that we have built behind us. And if you now overlay what that looks like at the end of this financial year, you can see the huge increase you've had across both the pipeline and live users.

18:46 And this is largely as a result of the recruitment that we've undertaken. So we have two new sales reps, one in the Midwest, who's been with us for about seven months now, and one on the West Coast who just joined recently. And I draw your attention to the Midwest, where you can see a vast number of new accounts that have been established or opened, and more trials taking place. And we can see directly the impact that our clinical specialists are having on the marketplace. We also have got more student partnerships with the device manufacturers and we've now got compatibility with some of the major providers in this space that also significantly helps us to drive adoption in this particular area. Finally, I just want to share a bit about the multi-centre study that we've been carrying out that we've been supporting to create best practice recommendations for reprocessing and ophthalmology.

19:42 This study has now been complete and the lead authors are looking for an appropriate place to publish this work, which again I think will be hugely beneficial for us as we look forward to driving future growth in this space. And once again, some nice testimonials from very significant institutions in the US that have highlighted just how convenient it is for tricell, OPH, to support the ophthalmic high-level disinfection opportunity at point-of-care use, which has not been available to the US before and gives us huge encouragement for this segment moving forward. With that, I'd like to pass back to Anna, who will talk about progress made in a couple of the areas of the business that we've been focused on.

20:32 Yes, I will tell you about some important developments and I'll start with education. In July we have launched Tricel Academy. And why have we done it? Well, we believe that buyers who understand our chemistry are our best defense against competition. And even though, you know, our chemistry is clearly extremely effective, it is very complex and it requires explaining. We have launched this academy as a virtual initiative to turn published studies, clinical studies, published articles into very specific kind of practical guides for IPC leads, practical answers to questions they may have. You know, it's not only about our chemistry, it's also about guidance, disinfection regulations, which are quite complex and we believe that by explaining and educating we can truly build a better understanding for why TriStell is the best product in the market. We have currently been live in eight regions, but we are planning further expansion and we have seen so far really great engagement. So we see a lot of interest in the site and we believe that this has been truly a very good step forward.

21:53 And now I would like to present to you our new product, which is called Unicome. and that's a product addressing hospital drains. So hospital sinks and drains are now recognized as a major reservoir of bacteria and drug-resistant bacteria in hospitals. Why is that? Because there is biofilm forming in drains, which is sort of a protective slime layer that allows the bacteria to live and thrive and which makes it very difficult for chemicals to kill them. It's not a theoretical problem. There are real-world consequences and outbreaks related to these bacteria living in drains.

22:41 For example, if you just look at some of the UK headlines, there was an inquiry in Scotland related to infections in child cancer patients that were related to hospital drains. The UK Health Security Agency, which mandated reporting of drug-resistant organisms since 2020, has already registered 22,000 of such cases. The product that hospitals use today is a wide variety of things. It's chlorine, maybe parasitic acid, hot water, cold water, different measures. But they are really ineffective against biofilms. and uniform there is really a special proposition, quite unique, because of course chlorine dioxide as a gas, as a gas molecule, has a better ability to penetrate the biofilm and kill the bacteria.

23:36 It's a product which the key opinion leaders have been asking for for a while, and here you can see Phil Norville, Dr. Phil Norville, and James Jerry, where some of the very recognized voices in the UK, in the IPC community, really asking for a product which could be used consistently to make a difference and prevent the creation of biofilm or destruction of the ones it builds up. And therefore, we are very happy that we have done a soft launch of the product already in September in a UK conference for IPC, the IPF conference in Leeds. and we've seen great interest from customers there with 14 NHS trusts registering for trials just on this conference itself. The trials are ongoing and we believe that in January we will bring to the market the first phase market of a few core European markets and the UK.

24:35 The product will be launched then and then of course as the registration and regulatory approval continues it will spread to more countries. And finally, I would like to spend a little bit of time on 3C. You have seen us present it before and what has happened there. The product has really developed tremendously in the last year. So, as you know, hospitals have had to evidence during the contamination process for years, especially in the UK, especially in some markets. And we believe that they've obviously found a way to log it, whether it's a manual log or a digital log. We think that just offering a digital log is not enough anymore to be a true differentiator. And that's why 3C is aimed at becoming more of a real virtual member of the ITC teams. And what does it do? Well, it allows to not only train and certify staff, but it also allows to verify that the right product is used on the right device, that the product hasn't expired, It enforces the steps of cleaning and decontamination, and it can also track devices through its life and finally provide IPC needs with not only ability to monitor how different users disinfect and how the devices are disinfected, but also can provide dashboards and reports that they may want to use as preparation for audits.

25:57 And commercially, this is really important for us because as the compliance of the hospital relies more on the PC, it becomes harder to switch away from our chemistry as well. So what we've done in the last year, as you know, in the Capital Market Day in July 25, we have said that we will launch the product in 26, and we have done so. So end of June, we have gone live with the product in the key markets that cover 80% of our current 3D users, so that UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand. And already now, the 3T is a product which is quite widely used.

26:42 So it's used by more than 270 customers. Just in last year, a quarter of the contamination cycles were logged in it, and more than 48,000 staff certificates were issued. And we believe that now with the introduction of the paid tier, we will signal the value to customers. We will, of course, encourage daily usage that will bring reliance and that will really build the product loyalty as well. And finally, the multi-year subscriptions can actually help us contract, in a way, the customer to continue using our chemistry throughout the years that they've been using the software. So it's really kind of a reinforcing product.

27:30 And with that, I would like to pass back to Chris, who will tell us more about the Outlook. Thank you, Anna.

27:38 I think ShoreCell is in a fantastic place. I mean, not only have we developed a proprietary chemistry, which underpins a great business that's been built so far, but we operate in a space that's highly attractive. If you just take ultrasound, As an example, a lot more of the ultrasound is moving to the point of care, well beyond what used to be all centrally reprocessed through imaging departments. And there are more image-guided procedures being done with pros that need fast, compliant, high-level disinfection, either close to or at the bedside. And all of that builds a bigger marketplace for us to play. The other key significant thing is guidelines.

28:23 Every time guidelines are altered or changed, where chlorine dioxide or tricell is named, that opens the space and the opportunity for us to grow our market. And just over the last year, we've had three more guidelines that have been released. We've had the American Institute of Ultrasound and Medicine, who have specifically mentioned chlorine dioxide as an approved method for high-level disinfection of ultrasound probes. We have the American College of Emergency Physicians and the Maternal People Medicine Society as well. Both of those have referenced chlorine dioxide as a technology for the disinfection of the space and Shysol has been named specifically as well. So these are all hugely beneficial for us as we seek to expand and get adoption across the market.

29:20 infections remain extremely high profile ever since COVID there has been a much greater awareness and knowledge around infection prevention and with the antibiotic resistance growing with one in six infections now being resistant to antibiotics it keeps compliance in real focus and therefore guidelines changing contributes to our opportunities We've also added a further 20 device manufacturers to our list of devices that have been approved for compatibility. So we now have 72 mobile device manufacturers that we work with, and that relates to over 2,150 actual individual models of products, whether they're scopes or ultrasound probes, that have got compatibility with Tricel, which means the consumer, the customer has got confidence that the product not only works but is safe and efficacious to use. When budgets across many healthcare systems in the world are becoming tighter and more difficult, capital projects are becoming harder to find and therefore point of care and high level distribution is a very viable alternative that's been attractive to our customers.

30:43 So in terms of the outlook, I think we've got huge opportunities that we can focus on. We certainly want to make sure that we exploit the significant opportunities in the US where ultrasound and ophthalmology remain significant growth opportunities, not just this year, but over the coming years. And we're looking to try and accelerate that and put more headcount in to drive that growth as we move forward. In addition, we're looking at all of the markets that we currently play to see whether we can grow faster in the existing markets or whether we can actually enter new markets that may take longer time because of the regular perspective to enter, but ensuring that we've got medium to long-term growth opportunities around new markets that we enter.

31:35 We'd like to underpin all of that with a program of work that looks at Tysel having a clinical leadership position across the globe with key opinion leader engagement, podium presentations and clinical support that wraps a halo around the business that demonstrates that Tricel is a significant partner in the infection prevention space and that we're supported by the professional bodies and by the clinicians who operate at the highest level within that market space. Within our existing opportunities with markets we're currently playing, some analysis has demonstrated to us that there is a significant opportunity just by bringing all of our direct markets up to the median distribution of the number of products bought by customers. That would give us an opportunity somewhere in the magnitude of 40 million just by focusing on that piece.

32:36 And there's further opportunity up to 60 million from our own internal benchmarks by looking at the markets that we operate in with a range of maturity levels if we were to focus on driving more revenue potential for existing customers. This is probably the fastest single way for us to grow the market alongside the new market expansion that will provide longer-term growth and the R&D pipeline. Again, this is something that we'll be looking at for long-term growth potential organically. Anna has touched on Uniphone and 3G Pro. These are both the revenue streams that we're excited about. Uniphone is in a completely unmet space that has enormous market potential and opportunity, and we're very excited to see what that does. And the development of 3G Pro has given us a whole new opportunity to both offer our customers additional features and benefits around not just compliance, but also education and learning.

33:41 and also is a huge protective barrier for our business going forward. And finally, we'd like to fuel our future growth by having a much more robust R&D pipeline. And in that context, we're looking to put a team together that is much more connected from a product development perspective to our customers and to their needs and understandings so that they can translate it to our development teams and our scientific teams to develop products that will give us a future pipeline of growth both from our organic pipeline and from our existing portfolio. So I think from terms of our financial commitments I think we can firmly commit to the principles we've made up to 2030 of revenue growth that's not less than double digit on an annual basis an EBITDA margin that exceeds 25% and currently is significantly above that and a progressive year on year dividend growth policy.

34:45 So in summary, I think results remain in line with expectations and the business is firmly on track to meet its financial targets. We're committed to the US growth, both with our partners and with our direct team, and are looking to accelerate investment into that marketplace in particular that will allow us to get there quicker than we've been able to achieve so far. But we are encouraged by the performance of the last 12 months. We expect to increase penetration across selected existing markets and that our new product launches and our digital platforms will give us significant new growth revenues as well and support that. So all in all I think Tristell is well positioned to have a long term shareholder value.

35:31 With that I would like to say thank you very much indeed for your attention and for listening to our presentation today and would be delighted to take any questions you might have. 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&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of the screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the public's Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Paul, if I could just hand over to you just to share the Q&A and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you very much. Chris and Anna, we have a couple of questions pre-submitted regarding competition out there. So how would you, or how do you compete against Trophon?

36:19 Trophon and Nanosonic is a clearly a very established competitor. But I think it's important to remember that it very much operates in the disinfection space in capital systems. They don't really operate or play in the manual high-level disinfection area. And they continue to grow their business and help the industry generally by establishing disinfection across multiple sites in the hospital as focused down to care and norm and that compliance to that grows for all of us and grows for the market. And we've had a lot of success with moving the high-level disinfection to the manual operations. and some of that has been at the expense of some of our competitors, but a lot of it as well is just bringing high-level disinfection to areas that were either employing low-level disinfection previously or not complying in any way before as well.

37:14 So I think there's plenty of room. It's a big enough market space. It continues to grow, as I alluded to, and we're very comfortable with the position that we've been able to achieve in the marketplace and we'll continue to focus on what we do really well. And then what about other technologies? So ultraviolet lamps and other technologies regarding sterilization. Are they beginning to impact you?

37:35 Yeah, I think UVC, there's a lot of interest in UVC and the potential for these systems. But I think there are some well-known shortcomings that have been identified in studies that have been done with UVC. And I think there's a lot of, the jury is out and there's a lot of questions remaining just about the viability of UVC. Because inevitably with these static systems, They cast shadows around the environment with which they operate, and it's very difficult to establish just how, in the real-world environment, how well they work and whether they're actually performing the tasks at hand. I think a lot more work needs to be done. We're certainly working on a lot of studies ourselves to show our efficacy and what we've improved without high-level disinfection technology, and we look forward to more evidence as that arises from that space.

38:28 You've had a bit of time to get your feet under the table. One of the questions is, have you identified anything, having come on board, that you would like to change or would like to implement?

38:40 I've identified two things that we're already doing that I'd like to do faster and do more of. And those are that I'd absolutely like to drive acceleration of the US opportunity. I think we've had a very encouraging year. at a confidence level in the off-farm. Our business is huge right now, given the success we've had in the last 12 months. And we're really looking to see how we can enhance the outstanding team we've got there in the US to drive a much superior performance. On the ultrasound side, I had a recent visit with Aaron and myself to the US and met with our strategic partner, Parker, there. We're absolutely aligned on the potential of the opportunity there. I'm currently discussing ways we can drive growth across the board, both with additional clinical specialists, but also with a much more robust clinical platform to support the business going forward. So that's one of my areas that I think we can really do more of. The second one is, the second part of that is that globally, we identified before my time that we should be a stronger clinical advocate for infection prevention.

39:51 and that Tricel is a leader in that space. So we've hired a dedicated clinical director, and we've hired a team of clinical portfolio leads, and across that group of people, we'll be looking to connect much closer to the customer, produce more clinical evidence in support of infection prevention using hyaluronic disinfection, controlling dark side, and also to get a much more prominent place at conferences, at meetings, on the podium, in presentations, in clinical presentations, around Tricel and its overall performance and contributions to the area. Thank you. A few questions on cash, so probably for you, Anna. Obviously, it's not gone unnoticed by many of the investors that you've generated quite significant free cash flow in these seven results. So there are questions about what are you going to do with these cash reserves?

40:40 The first question is, are you considering another special dividend?

40:44 So, as you said, we have closed the year with a record high balance. And at the moment, we really want to keep the optionality for our investments. So we do have some needs around investing in commercial areas, as Chris has already mentioned. So increasing commercial plan in the U.S. increase in clinical kind of clinical outreach and engagement with opinion leaders and sort of clinical generation of clinical evidence so that will be our key investment area we will also have some need for capital for CAPEX going forward and that would be related for example to Uniform our new product that I spoke about We currently are planning to produce it on our existing lines, but of course if the product is as successful as we hope, we will be building, we will be investing in a certain line.

41:40 And of course there are other potential opportunities. Maybe Chris, you want to mention a little bit more on your views as well?

41:47 Sure, yeah. I think one of the obvious areas is there is a potential for Tysome to engage with more M&A activity. Historically, we've had a track record of growing markets very nicely with competent distribution partners that we've then engaged and brought into the tricel family and that's served us very well in terms of the growth what we've achieved at this point in time they remain an important part of our business going forward but I think we'll obviously have a diminishing return and a limited opportunity to be able to bring more of those on board so we would like to look at technologies that are either adjacent or in our space whether that's chemistry or whether that's other products that would be additions and complementary to our portfolio or potentially even enhancing our market entry into certain tricky markets like Japan or China or Brazil for example where we could get a better foothold quicker by making some investments in those spaces. So we're actively looking to see what could be done at this period of time to complement all the other investments that we've touched on.

42:54 So I think your answer answer a couple of questions that we've already got on here but there was a specific question about the priority of those are you able to give an idea of priority and of course as well as the word special dividend buyback also comes back comes up in many of the questions so is there a way to prioritise at the moment and are buybacks on the table?

43:17 Let me touch on the priority of these first and I'll talk to the buyback. Theo, the prioritisation process and I'm in my tenth week and I've had a chance to get around all of the business and speak to all of our teams and we're formulating a good idea and an understanding of where the opportunity lies for us and that's exactly what we're doing now is doing that prioritisation of those opportunities but I'm absolutely certain that will incorporate more focus and attention around our existing markets where we think we've got a significant opportunity for growth both with our existing portfolio and those new products that we touched on and we'll be looking at how we can accelerate that growth in those markets. And clearly the US, the biggest medical advice market in the world, with some of the most toxic rights in the world as well, we're making progress, but we think we can do an awful lot more. So I would say those two are the most significant priorities, with Turkey making some bets around long-term market entry and building an R&D pipeline that gives us long-term growth.

44:20 I can address maybe the buyback part of the question. So, of course, we get this question quite often from investors, whether we are planning that. Some people may say that arranging for a share buyback actually sends a message that the management thinks the shares are undervalued, which we can definitely confirm that is the case. But on the other hand, it may also mean that we believe that we don't have a more attractive way of investing it ourselves that would generate even higher returns for shareholders. So we believe that actually being able to move a needle in terms of share price, we would need to spend significant amounts of cash. And that would really limit our ability to have the options to invest. And actually, it's not even a given that that the share price would be really impacted. And we have a great example, actually, of our competitor, Nanostomics, that we referred to before, also on this call.

45:18 They have spent significant amounts of cash last year and this year on share buyback, and they continuously run a share buyback program. And their share price is currently 40% below last year's. And why is that? Because the market values more the ability to deliver on the results on the guidance in line with the expectations and deliver growth rather than the share buyback itself. So I think it really gives us a strong feeling that we need to invest in the business.

45:48 Thank you. I would just say that I accept the shareholder view that that kind of deployment needs to take place. And that's absolutely up to most of our minds how we use some of that in the best possible way for shareholders here. Another question comes back to the point you made earlier. Obviously you were talking about priorities and about how investing in the US growth opportunity. There was a question here about would you add people in the US in the next 12 months and would they be sales or is that just Parker's job? You know, would you put more Christel feet on the ground?

46:21 We would do both. I think, yes, the other side is Parker's job and we've had a very open dialogue about how we and grow that business faster. They are absolutely supportive and open to further investment, in particular around clinical specialists who can help drive adoption. I refer to my example area with the Florida institution where we built a very nice business across multiple user sites. We believe addition of clinical specialists would help us drive that faster. And that's certainly one of the areas that we're looking at. But also unquestioning the confidence we have in the family opportunity and we are currently looking and surveying just how we can accelerate that with more both sales specialists, clinical specialists and masking support in order to drive that further, even though we've already put three additional heads on the ground in the last 12 months.

47:15 Thank you. Do you mind if we stay on cash, Anna? There was a question about where do you keep your cash? In terms of cash reserves, how do you hold them?

47:24 Yeah, we invest in short-term, medium-term deposits, so really kind of with different maturity dates. Yeah, we really focus on our core business, so we don't spend time investing. It's not what we are paid to do. It's not our core competency. But we do make sure that we take advantage of the interest rates that are on the market. I have a question from a shareholder just regarding the number of shares in issue. So could the management please explain the recent increase in shares outstanding and the reasons behind the dilution and how much of this relates to the employee share scheme and what measures are being taken to limit future dilution and protect existing shareholders earnings per share?

48:06 Yes, so it is true that the number of shares in circulation increased and it is driven by the employee share scheme. So there has been an employee share scheme in place which was launched a few years back and there is a couple more years that is to remain valid where the longer standing employees will still have a right to receive shares. However, we don't have a current new plan in place so going forward this dilution will decrease. Yeah, so that's really the main reason for the dilution that we have seen in the market. Just a question regarding future expansion plans as your products get stronger and worldwide markets are sort of increased. Would you have any consideration to manufacture directly abroad or would you always continue to use companies who manufacture in country like you do with Parker?

49:06 Parker is a great example of a really great strategic partnership that works really well where we provide the chemistry and the support and the manufacturing systems from the UK, but everything is on site, including in this case the commercial end of the operation as well. I think local expertise of manufacturing speed is crucial in this situation, particularly in dealing with chemicals. At this stage, I think we're much more likely to enter into strategic partnerships and joint ventures than we were setting up tri-cell owned manufacturing operations ever since. looking at the slide that you had regarding the training academy one of the investors suggests does that slide mean that your protection is needed against copycat capacitors and are there other competitors that would use carbon dioxide chemistry?

50:01 I'll address the second part. So as of right now we are the only player in the manual high level disinfection space with a carbon dioxide technology a lot of work has been put in by the company to develop in that over many years we've got a raft of patents and application that covers across multiple countries and an awful lot of know-how that goes with that there is nothing novel per se about crawling the outside but the formulation and the way the company has managed that makes it extremely hard to replicate and we continue to drive the outreach of that proprietary technology into the marketplace.

50:48 That's not to say we're complacent. I fully expect there will be other parties who will try and enter this space with a similar type of technology. But other than that, we've seen nothing that exists in the corn dioxide space. So it's the wording on the slide, I guess, the way it says about competitors positioning look-alike products. How much are you seeing that?

51:13 There are other competitors selling wipes. As Chris said, none of them are reliant on PLC chemistry. We have one example of a company in Germany that makes a lot of claims claiming that their effectiveness is as high as our product and that's where we believe that it's really important to educate the customer on the strength of what PLC drink. Thank you. This is a great question, but I'm not sure how easy or quick to answer. So how do Tristel, Cache, and 3C fit together? What does this mean for Tristel's future strategic positioning and growth opportunities? Where does Unifoam fit in with that portfolio?

52:00 And what other innovations do you have around your core technology? So it's a pretty broad question.

52:06 Yeah, that is a broad question. Let me try and address at least some of it. So I think the medical device segment and the service solution segment, trying to solve service solutions, are clearly two distinct areas of the business and have different focuses for us. I think the 3C technology sits extremely well into any space where compliance is required or where you need to record any kind of disinfection process or protocol that's in place. And presumably that's growing. There's more and more need to actually record it.

52:51 Absolutely. Historically that would have been either not recorded or it would have been manually recorded and we're trying to provide a very easy solution for our customers not just to record traceability and compliance but also to get other layers of features from that site that provide education and support beyond just the compliance piece. So I think 3T has an underpinning technology that sits nicely across that part of the business. The drains, the Unifone product, it absolutely firmly sits in the surfaces portfolio. Whilst you may not think of it as a surface being a drain, it absolutely sits in that portfolio and I think is a very innovative approach to addressing an unmet need that currently offers variable opportunity out there for customers to deal with that right now.

53:47 And I have huge confidence that that is going to be a significant project for us in our surface solutions portfolio as we move forward. And it also, I think, has given us the encouragement to look further afield into surfaces where we think we And this is the question that was being asked about future innovations. I realise from a competitive point of view, you don't want to say what you're doing before it launches, but presumably that is what you're looking to is to have new innovations, new products coming out, investing in the next set of products that come out. I remember you saying earlier the sales people, they will have new innovative products.

54:32 I presume there is a pipeline there. Yeah, absolutely. I can't talk about individual products.

54:38 What I would say is that we have a highly talented team of scientists and development people internally that are actually committed to bringing the next generation of tricep products to the market. And what we've introduced in the last 12 months is a team of people that sit between that group and the customers our clinical portfolio leads who each own one of the segments that we operate in and those people are dedicated to working with customers to translate ideas and unmet needs to our scientists and development teams in order that they can hone their expertise and skills to bring out more relevant products to give us a much more robust pipeline so we can see more products coming through that pipeline over the coming years ahead.

55:25 A couple of more questions. One was regarding the changes in inheritance tax and the impact on AIM equities. The investor is asking, have you seen an exodus of private investors? Certainly from our experience as your PR and IR company, we haven't seen that. But unless you've not experienced that, I don't think there's been any impact on your institutional shareholder base either as a result. That's the evidence that we've seen at this point. Yeah, thank you. And then, Chris, the last one is, you know, you've come in as the new chief exec. What is it that excites you the most about Tristell? This is the last question.

56:03 Yeah, I'm absolutely thrilled to be here. I have a very high regard for Tristell and what the former leadership achieved and the business they built here around their proprietary technology. And I think that excitement has only been increased tenfold over the last three months. When I look at the scale of the potential and the opportunities that we have, both in selling more of our existing portfolio across existing markets entering new markets and really extrapolating the value out of the US opportunity I think all of those they're endless what we need to do is be much very focused and strategic around the opportunities we go after and make sure that we get the best return on our investment I'm also absolutely you know, blown away by the quality of the team we have at Tristell, the experience, the knowledge, the commitment.

56:59 I've never felt more certain of a team of people who are, you know, motivated and driven to continue to drive the growth story forward. And, yeah, I'm very excited and looking forward to the next one, Max. Thank you, Chris, and thank you, Anna. Chris, you may just be echoing very similar comments to what you just said then, but in terms of, I will hand over to you for some closing remarks. Perhaps you could talk about your view of the results and the ACMUC and I'll leave it for you to close.

57:29 Yeah, thank you. It's an extremely encouraging set of results. I think it builds on the platform and the financial commitments that we've made and I think it's just a huge endorsement of Tricell as a business and the space that we play in. I think it's absolutely clear as the business grows it becomes more difficult to keep achieving those same financial metrics and we're working extremely hard as a leadership team, as a company to ensure that we make the right investments, that we use that cash, that we accrue wisely and that we give the shareholders the return that they expect and that we continue to see the growth trajectory of the business as we move forward over the strategic plan horizon. Thank you.

58:15 That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. I'd like to ask investors not to close this 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 will only 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.