Avacta Group Plc

Good morning and welcome to the Evactor Group PLC interim results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right corner of your screen. 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 will 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. And I'd now like to hand you over to Alistair Smith, CEO. Good morning, sir.

Morning. Thanks very much. Morning, everyone. And thank you for sparing the time to listen to the interim results presentation. It's cracked straight on. It's quite a lengthy deck. So I'm aware that most of you will be very familiar with the company. So, you know, just very brief introductory slides. The group comprises two divisions, therapeutics and diagnostics, with a you know, combined objective of improving patients' lives, leveraging the two platforms, the two proprietary platforms, Atoma and Precision, that we own. I won't read through all of the investment highlights, but let me just sort of focus on, you know, key points and certainly throughout the reporting period and post-period as well, the outstanding progress with ABA 6000 in the clinic is clearly attracting a huge amount of attention and we'll talk through that and I'll, everyone is up to date, but I'll go through the most recent announcements again in this deck. Following behind that, our second precision which is 3996. We'll talk a little bit about that. Still on target to get into human, so the second precision drug into human later next year. On the diagnostic side, I'll give you a quick update on the progress building a significant pan-European diagnostics business. We'll talk through the vision and the mission for that division. Focused right now is on growing the acquired businesses. So the two businesses we'll talk about briefly, the focus now is not on additional M&A to add to that at this point in time, but really focused on benefiting from the synergies across the division. I think it's worth saying, and Tony will speak through the financials in a moment, but it's worth saying that with that balanced business model and a really clear understanding of where capital allocation has to be made within the you know, greatest growth in shareholder value. We are, you know, well funded and we have plenty of optionality around non diluted commercial sources of funding as well as, of course, diluted funding. But we're well funded through to late next year to achieve the milestones that we're, you know, we're all focused on. I'll hand over to Tony to talk through the numbers, please.

Thanks, Alison. Good morning, everybody. Just to run through the financials for the half year. In the income statement, we reported revenue of just shy of £12 million, which was the biggest revenue number of actors reported in a six-month period. And as you can see from the slide, significantly ahead of the position 2022. The revenue in the first half of the year the benefits of launch diagnostics for full period, and the acquisition of Chorus, which came on board at the start of June. Scrolling down the P&L, the most important number, I guess, on the face of the P&L is the adjusted EBITDA buying, which is essentially our cash usage from a P&L point of view. So we're just shy of 8 million cash EBITDA loss in the period compared to 15 million December 22. The items below that on the P&L are all essentially non-cash items with the exception of the tax, which is R&D tax credits, which we will receive back over the course of the coming years. The retained loss, obviously, £11.5 million. And if we just move on to the next slide, we can see how we've broken that down by the divisions. And the important point here is the diagnostics division, which we are aiming to be a profitable EBITDA business in the near term and you can see the loss in the six months was just over £400,000 compared to £2.5 million the previous six month period. So that is progressing well and we will obviously have the full benefit of six months of chorus and launch in the second half of the year. So we're hoping to see that become positive in the not too distant future. the biggest spend obviously is the research costs in therapeutics there you can see the 5.3 million as we continue to progress the clinical trials moving on to the cash flow we start to deal with 42 million the 8 million outflow ties back to the adjusted EBITDA that we mentioned earlier the investing activities of £7 million relates to the acquisition of Corus, whereas obviously in the period to December 22 we had the acquisition of Launch, the disposal of the animal health business and some CapEx costs there. So the cash at the end of June was £26 million, at the end of August it's about £24.5 million and we've received a tax refund of £2.3 million to do with 2022 tax. So that cash runway gives us a good runway through right into the back end of 2024. From a balance sheet perspective, obviously the key assets are the goodwill and the leases around buildings and facilities, given the increase in the chorus acquisition, the cash position of 26 million, and then the convertible bond. There's been a subsequent amortization and conversion since the end of June, so the amount outstanding on the bond is now down to 43 million, which we anticipate will all be settled in equity. I'll pass that to Alastair.