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Metro Mining Limited
10/30/2024
across core markets to achieve break even for the whole company. So let me break down the strong top line numbers from the quarter. We delivered a record quarter for our core tests, up 88% year on year with continued growth and clinical adoption in both Australia and the United Kingdom. So in Australia, we saw Meta Explore achieve record sales for the quarter, continued growth in ordering clinicians, And we released landmark meta explore study results from over 4,600 patients identifying actionable results in over 70% of cases. And we released breakthrough study results for meta panel showing the ability to detect undiagnosed pathogens in 20% of patients with 80% of those not routinely detected with any standard testing. In the UK, Full market access for MetaExplorer was achieved to target at the end of May, with June then delivering a record month. And that delivered a record strong growth result for the quarter, with the product now representing 66% of all GI tests sold in the UK when we got to the end of June as we complete the transition and discontinuation of legacy product lines. And useful to call out on this chart related to our guidance and break even objectives for FY26, we expect a similar growth profile in FY26 as we had in FY25. So remaining consistent in Q1 and then stepping up each quarter aligned to growth in clinician adoption and usage in conjunction with planned product feature releases. In the prior quarter, so Q3, to support all investors to understand our transition of product and revenue mix, we put out guidance for Q4 and for the full financial year. So I was very pleased when we released the results to state that we delivered in line with our guidance, landing in the middle of the range with a full FY25 revenue result of 15.67 million, which was up 30% year on year. A strong result whilst pulling out substantial revenues aligned to discontinuation of legacy products. So that all sets up well for what lays ahead in FY26. As a quick reminder on the reference to legacy products, after years of work to distill the clinical value of microbiome testing and launch our world-leading MetaExplore and MetaPanel products, we've been strategically transitioning to focus 100% of our resourcing onto these core testing products. We've made great progress. in liberating our team's focus here to continue accelerating growth of our core tests. So to clearly showcase our progress here, we've grouped our products into three categories here, growth, base and legacy to make it easier to understand. So growth at the top there are our core tests, opening up this major new $25 billion category with accelerating sales. Our base products include supplements and some strategic international partners, which we expect to remain relatively stable with potential for future growth. And our legacy products and services are being discontinued and superseded by our core tests. And that transition is nearly complete with the last UK products to unwind and be fully discontinued before the end of this calendar year. So if you have any questions on this transition, we actually did a deep dive of our diagnostic strategy and all of the details of that transition in March, which is all available publicly online. So if you've got any questions, please go back and reference that material. There were a range of milestones and highlights from the quarter. We summarised the key highlights here, but I'm going to take you through them in more detail on the following slides covering our continued momentum in Australia with our core tests, our accelerating growth in the UK with MetaExplore and the partnering focus for our therapeutics with upcoming deal catalysts. Before I get there, it's important to highlight the two major sets of clinical study results that I spoke to before that we released during the quarter. So for chronic GI symptoms, analysis of over 4,600 meta-explore reports showed over 70% identified actionable results and a separate study in a subset of patients found over 65% reported health improvements after meta-explore result guided care. For GI infectious disease analysis of over 800 metapanel patients would not resolve their condition through routine testing showed that we could detect a pathogen in 20% of patients with about 80% that would be missed by routine tests. And then an independent study showed 100% symptom resolution in patients treated using the therapy guidance in the report. So these are just the headline results, but I really do encourage people to go back and read all of the full details. These are significant results, not just for microba, but for the whole microbiome sector. And this mounting evidence clearly shows the clinical utility of our tests, which supports increased clinical adoption and usage and our growth ahead. Now with the intimate linkage between product advancement and the adoption curve in our growth strategy, which we recently outlined, we're gonna start providing more updates on the advancements that we're making on product. And there were two key ones from last quarter. The first is a new feature for Meta Explore, which we call Marker Cards. And this updates the presentation of market information in the test result to make it clearer and more intuitive for clinicians to interpret. So here as leaders in the field, we're seeking to really set a new standard for the display of this type of information. And this sets the foundation for a number of other upcoming feature releases aligned to increasing rapid interpretability and actionability of the test results. We also released another feature for MetaExplore, which is an advanced version of our report sharing. This gives patients secure control over access to their report, and it allows practitioners to share results directly with colleagues and collaborating peers. It's typically a care team of various specialists supporting these chronically unwell patients. So this not only supports that collaborative care model, but it unlocks new levers for referral growth and clinician engagement. It also sets a foundation for future features on the roadmap related to these collaborative care models, which you'll hear more about in due course. So now let's dive into each of those categories, starting with growth, our core testing products and clinical software targeting that $25 billion market. Starting in Australia, it was a record quarter for Meta Explore. We saw continued strong growth with Q4 sales of 3,451 tests, which was up 88% year on year. Ordering clinicians reach 790, up 89% year on year, with that growth being driven by a continued increase in the number of ordering clinicians supported by clinician education, our targeted field sales activities, and those product advancements that we keep making. Switching to the UK. We saw breakout sales for Meta Explore at the end of the quarter aligned to shifting from what was closed group early access into full market access, where we saw sales hit 429 tests, which was up quarter on quarter 74%. And that strong growth was underpinned by successful onboarding and adoption of new ordering conditions to the product, supported by success with the team's education events and our targeted field sales activities there in the UK. Next, metapanel adoption continues to gradually build in Australia. So Q4 sales of 266 tests, which was up 85% year on year. Now, current focus here with metapanel is on the development of gastroenterology specialists. It is the specialists that will drive adoption activity down into the rest of the clinician market. And that starts with gastroenterology key opinion leaders at the top. And the team have been making some really great progress there. And we expect a gradual rate of adoption over the next year. And then it's really from FY27 where we see the opportunity for larger volume from Metapanel through our KOL and evidence generation work starting to then translate into broader adoption and routine referral behaviour. So I would say still very much in an early market development phase for that test. Now to our base category, which are products which we expect sales and revenue to remain largely consistent, but with opportunity for future growth. And this is our supplements and select strategic international partners. Here we saw growth of our in vivo branded and owned products against a reduction in distributed supplement products. So UK supplement sales were 1.1 million, which was down 11% year on year. And that was due to a focus on our higher margin in vivo owned and branded products where we delivered sales of 0.68 million, which was up 12% year on year. Aligned to that, we saw our top selling product, a prebiotic supplement called PHGG achieve multiple record months with really good management from the team and execution on digital campaigns and distributed management. And there's a strategy playing out here, which we will share more on as this starts to reveal itself over the year ahead. Finally, our legacy category. These are the products and services that we are phasing out and discontinuing. This phase of our legacy products and services is almost complete. So our non-diagnostic insight testing was completely discontinued in the last financial year. Our research services business in that year was also sold. And the last piece is to finalize the discontinuation of legacy products in the UK. And that migration of customers from legacy ecologics testing to Meta Explore in the UK is going well. Legacy ecologic sales officially close at the end of July and then processing ends in October. June Meta Explore sales got to 66% of total GI tests in the UK with strong clinician demand. So that transition from legacy products to core is very much on track and expected to complete before the end of this calendar year. Now an update on therapeutics, which is the attractive upside to microbe leveraging our leading data bank and years of R&D. From our data, we've developed a rich pipeline of what the FDA have defined as a modality called live biotherapeutics. We've now moved from an R&D and investment phase into a partnering focus phase. So no further R&D expenditure is planned from here. We're focused on deals and there are two catalysts coming up before the end of the year, which we expect can stimulate deal activity for our assets. So we are ready and in position after many years of work and IP protection on these assets to capture that deal activity with deal precedents ranging from $1.5 to $11 billion. So what's our focus and the upcoming catalysts? Well, in diagnostics, we are focused on continued momentum in Australia and UK for core test sales and clinical adoption, supported by multiple new meta-explore feature releases supporting that growth. In therapeutics, there are those two sector deal catalysts before the end of the year, which we expect can stimulate deal activity for our therapeutic assets. And aligned to our FY26 guidance, we will advance towards our regional break-even milestones in Australia and the UK, supported by 100% year-on-year growth in core test volume, targeting over 24,000 tests for this year, remembering that it will build quarter-on-quarter, as it did in FY25. So that closes the quarterly update. And on that, I will now go to some of the submitted questions that I can see here. And a reminder that any that I don't get to live, I'll ensure that I answer after this on Investor Hub. Also a reminder for anyone new to Microbar, once we've completed some of these live questions, I'll do a quick recap on the business. So let's start with the first question here. The growth is positive in Australia and the UK, but how sustainable is this trajectory and what's driving it? Well, it's a big market. I routinely say that we have barely scratched the surface of it. We are only in the first thin slice of this with what we call innovator and early adopter solo clinicians that fit a certain clinician profile. We have a whole roadmap expanding one tightly defined customer segment at a time. We have a range of drivers supporting that growth aligned to what we call the clinician adoption curve, which I've got at the back of this slide deck and I'll go through in the next part. And that includes our continued clinician education, KOL development and peer influencing activities, includes targeted, specialised field sales and the release and dissemination of study results that continue to validate clinical utility. And finally, multiple product features that will open up usage with more clinicians as we go from left to right on the adoption curve with different clinician types and different clinician settings. So the next question here is metapanel is growing, but it's very slow. What's the plan to accelerate adoption? So as I said before, metapanel usage will in large part be driven by gastroenterology specialists, which will in turn drive expanded use into general practice and into other clinical settings. So metapanel is in an early market development phase, evidence generation and dissemination of that evidence takes time and educating and influencing specialists takes time. So on the surface, it can look like not much progress, but underneath, lots of groundswell, particularly leveraging our recent study results, which is resonating with clinicians. And although not visible in the numbers, the team have made good progress in developing key opinion leaders and partnerships like colonoscopy clinic, which is progressing well. So we have an intensive focus on meta-explore in FY26, which will deliver much of the growth for this financial year. And as I said before, Metapanel, I expect a continued gradual build in sales over the course of this next year. But then from subsequent years, we expect Metapanel can be a larger contributor to volume as our KOL and evidence development work really starts to translate into that adoption and routine referral behaviour that we can see in the evidence supports. Okay, so the next one here, supplement sales and revenue dipped overall, but in vivo owned and branded supplements grew. Can you explain that further? Yes. When we acquired in vivo, the supplements part of the business had two parts. It had a distribution right to sell a brand called Designs for Health, which is a respected US brand, and to be able to distribute that into the UK, which they've been selling for many years. And the second part was a compelling but relatively new portfolio of well-formulated evidence-based in vivo owned and branded supplements. And now we're prioritising our higher margin in vivo branded products over those third party designs for health products. And aligned to that focus, we made some strategic moves which impacted the designs for health sales. And we expect those to now from that new base to hold relatively steady for those designs for health products. So the impact in this quarter was a specific strategic move, not a trend. And we showed what we can do with some liberated focus on our own higher margin products with our top selling PHGG product, as I mentioned, hitting a new record delivering 12% growth year on year. And so this strategy we expect to gradually improve revenue and margins for that supplements business and set a foundation for future growth in that part of the organisation. Next one here, therapeutics. So no more R&D spend. What's the partnering timeline and what are the risks? Yes, so R&D stopped. We've got our IP Now fully focused on partnering aligned to the two upcoming catalysts with peer companies, Microbiotica and Vedanta, that are due to read out on phase 1B or phase 2A studies before the end of this year. As I said before, a positive result from either of those trials can spark deal activity for the modality. And we believe we have some of the best assets in the class. So we are ready and in position to capture that deal activity if or when that fires up. The risk would be that the trials don't hit their endpoints, and that delays deal activity until another catalyst moment for the sector. But our assets are heavily de-risked and packaged. They're ready to partner. Next one here. Regarding the FY26 guidance targeting over 24,000 core tests, and regional break-even points, how confident are you? We feel good about our strategy. To achieve our target in Australia, we don't have to accelerate. We need to maintain our average quarter-on-quarter growth rate. For the UK, the number we're targeting is aligned to our first year in Australia. And so we feel good about our position for FY26. Next is capital raise seemed tough. Why that timing and what can you share about how it went? I would say it's easy to look back at the share price chart and say that we should have raised in February. But based on market feedback, there were two necessary ingredients for that capital raise. The first was sonic participation as a cornerstone. And the second was demonstrated growth in the UK. So starting with the second part, Q3 was our first full quarter of Meta Explore Access in the UK. So we were only able to show those UK growth results when we got to April. And then our terms with Sonic for their investment and our plans for the UK, including the laboratory services agreement also took time to complete. And so in April with those ingredients coming together, we then engaged with key shareholders and with institutional investors. We introduced new guidance on our path to break even and more information on our growth strategy, product roadmap and product accelerated growth model. Unfortunately, the timing seemed to coincide with, you know, end of financial year and likely tax loss selling impacting the share price. And I would say, you know, I'm a shareholder like everyone else. And it was a really painful process. And I've said a few times that I feel it is a real dichotomy at the moment. The business is in the best position that it's ever been. The share price doesn't currently reflect it. Although with what we can see in FY26, we expect that to change quickly. So I'm going to close the quarterly and any questions there in the interest of time. The questions that I haven't gotten to yet, I apologize, but I will get to them on Investor Hub. And now for anyone new to the Microba business, I will do a quick recap so that you can understand the business in its entirety and get a full appreciation of the global opportunity. So let's start by diving into who we are, why we exist, our traction and excitement of what lays ahead, starting with a clear summary of the opportunity. So first, why we exist. Your body is home to trillions of tiny microorganisms. Most of them, about 95%, live in your gut. And we call this ecosystem of organisms your gut microbiome. And these tiny organisms are essential for your health. In fact, they're so essential that there are now more than 21,000 studies showing that they are key to how we can develop and treat chronic diseases. In fact, there are now over 150 studies demonstrating that if we change these tiny organisms in our gut, we can improve and even treat chronic diseases ranging from cancer to depression to diabetes, bowel, heart, and many other diseases. From that, we have a clear global and ambitious vision to realize what we see is set to be a revolution in healthcare, a world where there is broad acceptance of the microbiome as critical to health and disease management. Testing your microbiome is commonplace with your doctor and microbiome therapeutics are approved and routinely used for both maintenance and treatment of multiple chronic diseases. And that ultimately leads to millions of patients living healthier lives. Taken together, if microbiome diagnostics and therapeutics indeed play a meaningful role in supporting these patients, this market opportunity could ultimately be worth more than a trillion dollars. And this is not theoretical R&D. We are commercial stage. And we are already making both of these parts of our vision a reality. So for our diagnostics business, we're opening up a major new diagnostic category, which could be worth more than $100 billion. Our focus today is $25 billion of that, patients with unresolved gastrointestinal disease, We have accelerating traction in our first two markets, Australia and the United Kingdom. FY25 delivered $15.67 million in revenue. We have regional breakeven milestones targeted in FY26 aligned to 100% year-on-year growth for our core testing products. For our therapeutics business, we've invested for five years in R&D to build a rich pipeline of live biotherapeutic assets, completed deep preclinical and early clinical validation, and now in position to harvest the fruits of that labor. We've transitioned from an R&D phase into a partnering phase. We have multiple streams to value return with deal precedence between $1.5 to $11 billion and upcoming deal catalysts, as I spoke to earlier, for the modality and sector expected before the end of this calendar year, which we are in position to leverage. Now let's dive into our products and the clinical data supporting them. With the central impact that the microbiome has on a range of diseases, there is a lot of opportunity here in the microbiome. And today... primary, secondary and tertiary research, including a large body of work with a Boston-based consulting firm called Veronix. We have a clear understanding and breakdown of the addressable market here and how we target it, as I say, slice by slice, bite by bite. And so even from the first handful of markets here and a focus on one patient population, these individuals with unresolved gastrointestinal disorders, we only have to capture a fraction of a percent to hit our internal targets over the next three years. And we have testimonials from high impact clinicians and patients that have been suffering for 10, 20, or even 30 years now completely resolved. So let's dive into our growth model. Our growth strategy is intimately aligned to the adoption curve. And at Microbot, we talk about this internally also as something that we call the skepticism curve with four dimensions. So on the left of the innovator side, we have integrative and functional medicine clinicians, which have low demands of the testing products in terms of interpretability, actionability, business integration, and workflow integration. That's those four dimensions. And then all the way on the right at the laggard end, we have someone like a very traditional general practitioner being the most sceptical and slow to change, who have very high demands on those four dimensions of interpretability, actionability, business integration and workflow integration. But the key thing to call out is that the demand across the vast majority of this spectrum is already strong. The clinical importance of the microbiome is accepted. It is an essential organ that doctors have missed, and we now see it discussed at almost every clinician conference that we visit. The product just needs to meet the increasing needs from these clinicians as we go from left to right through the adoption and scepticism curve. And the way that we do that is by delivering features one step at a time from left to right, opening up more and more of the clinician market, addressing their unique needs from the product to surface their practice model and their patients. The team have an incredibly clear product roadmap that they're executing, shipping new features every quarter. And here you can see little snippets of those features across those four dimensions. And over the continued quarters ahead, we're planning more significant feature releases related to interpretability and actionability of the report, as well as features that serve high volume clinics, which stand to be a key growth driver for this next step of the adoption curve ahead of us. In parallel, we believe that brute force sales in med tech, as a general statement, is outdated and increasingly ineffective and inefficient. Micropa is in a unique position in that we have a laboratory in vitro diagnostics component to our product, but the major value unlock is through our medical software stack that sits over the top of it. So I'd like to say that we have the clinically trusted medical device component. So like a cochlear is to hearing health, microbe is to gut health. But then we have a sticky clinical software stack that sees us scale like a medical SAS company, like ProMedicus. So like ProMedicus is to medical imaging data, Microba is to gut health data. And aligned to that, we're leveraging a combination of what I would call SAS and medical sales best practice in our growth model. So sales, don't get me wrong, is an important base layer of presence in market, but we are executing what's called a product-assisted and product-led growth system that will continually reduce customer acquisition costs, increase resource efficiency and shorten sales cycles and time to value. What does that mean in practical terms? It means that rather than a microbe specialist onboarding, training and supporting a clinician to be successful with the test and embed it into their routine care protocols for these patients. That we have efficient digital systems that enable scalable self-serve onboarding, training and support, always on and increasingly AI assisted. We are intensively focused on growth, but in conjunction with the underlying unit economics of the business. And we have a clear formula that we're executing, which is laid out here. So customer and market growth metrics going up together with multiple metrics improving underneath for unit economics and profitability. And that drives us in the short term to those regional breakeven points in FY26, but fast forward a few years more to breakeven for the whole company. Finally, we have partnerships with two of the world's largest medical diagnostic companies, which has given us the opportunity to leverage first the laboratory networks of these companies. So we don't need to build labs everywhere and we can scale as a software company, not as a laboratory services company. And we recently announced our agreement with Sonic in the UK, which their subsidiary is called the Doctors Laboratory, executing exactly that model. And the second opportunity for our partner leverage is to leverage their large customer networks to efficiently educate and acquire customers, enabling these partners to refer and then triage those customers to us to be fully serviced with the world's leading clinical microbiome testing services. And finally, there is the attractive additional upside to microbe leveraging all of the data generated from our diagnostics business and years of R&D and investment. So from our data, we've developed a rich pipeline of live biotherapeutic assets here targeting multiple chronic diseases. We've moved from an R&D and investment phase into a partnering focus phase to deliver return on investment. No further R&D expenditure is planned from here, focused on deals. And as I said earlier, there's these two catalysts that are coming for the end of the year, and I'll speak a little bit more to that in a moment, which we expect can stimulate deal activity on these assets. And we are ready and positioned to capture that deal activity. So we've built an incredible platform here for drug discovery from the microbiome leveraging artificial intelligence. We've taken those assets through deep clinical and early clinical validation with our lead asset, MAP315, ready to advance into phase two. We have two major pathways to value return on these assets. Pathway one is what we call live biotherapeutics. So that's the traditional drug route, disrupting and advancing standard of care across multiple chronic diseases with these deal precedents ranging between one and a half to $11 billion. And then pathway two is what we call next-generation probiotics. So disrupting the $79 billion probiotic market with new healthy human-derived products, advancing from work that we recently completed with the world's largest probiotic manufacturer, International Flavors and Fragrances, or IFF, with deal opportunities there ranging between $50 to $100 million. There's a range of relevant deal comps and recent activity that we've laid out here for both of those tracks. And there are these two major deal catalysts coming up before the end of this calendar year. So we have two peer companies expected to read out on key clinical trials before the end of 2025. Everyone is waiting to see a strong phase 1A or phase 2 result for this new live biotherapeutic modality. They specifically want to see a clinical result in patients in a chronic disease population that is appropriately powered. The results from these trials, if positive, would deliver that data that everyone is wanting to see and validate this new modality. And if that occurs, it's reasonable to expect that competitive deal activity could commence and deal precedents like the ones on the price slides become a real opportunity for Microba. And we are ready and in position with best-in-class assets to capture those deals. So I will close by saying, as I always do, I'm incredibly excited about the opportunity, the impact and the growth ahead for Micropa. We have a world-class team. We have best-in-class technology and category-defining products. For patients, we are already changing lives and there are a lot of patients and people that need our help. And Micropa represents a real category-defining company with the clinical side of a cochlear and but with the medical software and scaling opportunity of a Pro Medicus. We have decades of growth here to unlock. And it's an incredible time, I believe, to be a Microbus shareholder. So thank you all for listening and to all our shareholders for your ongoing support. And I'll close there. Thank you, everyone.