Itaconix plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Ataconex plc 2026 half year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin I would like to submit the following poll and I would now like to hand you over to CEO John Shaw. Good afternoon to you sir.

Thank you. We look forward to going through our results today and give you some overview of what we've done and where we end up. We'll be going in the near term here. So we started with a very good first half, record half year revenues, our fourth half of revenue growth, excellent commercial progress. What's most exciting is we achieved our first half of breakeven EBITDA profitability. We expanded our overall revenues to existing customers. We've landed new important customers and we achieved that breakeven profitability while still investing in new applications, new products, and key operating improvements. And we ended the half of $5 million to fund continued growth. If you're new to us on this call or want a quick refresher, we have a very straightforward business and value proposition. Idaconic acid is a natural metabolite found in our bodies in nature, safe and effective. It's produced at industrial scale by fermentation using plant-based feedstock from corn. We purchase it on the open market we bring it into our US operations to react it using our patented processes to produce a broad line of proprietary safer ingredients. That improve the performance affordability and sustainability of consumer products we ship our ingredients either directly or through partners around the world to be used in hundreds of consumer products. Generating demand and revenues for our ingredients is also straightforward. Consumer products, consumer brands are constantly looking for new competitive opportunities and advantages by formulating new products or reformulating existing ones. We use a range of direct and indirect efforts to influence brands to formulate or reformulate using our ingredients. When we're successful, we are a partner or distributor receive a purchase order to supply our ingredient. Usually to a contract manufacturer that's making the end product for brand relatively rarely less than 10% of the time, the brands actually that we work with actually produce their own products. Very simple business on it. We operate in three segments. Performance ingredients are where we produce and sell our key products. Sparks formulated solutions is how we accelerate the process of influencing brands in North America to develop and produce idaconic-based formulations. Through that, we also sell some other ingredients to the contract manufacturers that need to produce our formulations and capture some additional gross profits from these sales to support our technical marketing and sales efforts. Our third area is bioasterous, which are specialty idaconic monomers and polymeric bindings used to make plant based ingredients. Laura will show you how we are turning demand for our ingredients into attractive financial results. Our goal is to become a large specialty ingredient company. We started the 2026 financial year with record revenues and major profitability milestones. We're confident we will have the reorder rates from existing customers and new customers for a strong second half. Beyond 2026, we believe we have the ingredients and customer base to reach $30 million in revenues in the next three to four years. And we can do it comfortably with our existing US operations. Beyond $30 million, we have broader growth opportunities in our core detergent applications, and we are progressing new potentials in crops and paints. We had a great first half, and we're just getting started. Let's have Laura get you into the financial details.

Thanks, John. Hello, I'm Laura Denner. I'm the Chief Financial Officer of Itaconix, and I'm delighted to share the exciting financial progress that we've made over the first six months of 2026. So we did achieve 8.3 million in total revenue. This was an increase of 72% half over half. Again, the primary driver of this success was the performance ingredients business. The performance ingredients are those proprietary polymers that we manufacture and sell. The revenues in this business unit more than doubled to 6.7 million. This growth reflects both higher reorder volumes from existing customers and contributions from new customer wins. Gross profits increased as well by 74%. This contributed $3 million of overall gross profit. Our margins remain stable at 36%. So maintaining margins while growing at this rate demonstrates the value that our customers are putting on our polymers, as well as the pricing discipline that we do have. But I think to John's point, the most important thing that we achieved this year was, or this half was our adjusted breakeven EBITDA. And we did all this while continuing to invest in product development, commercial expansion, and production capabilities for our future growth. So as we turn our attention to the revenue buildup, we saw our fourth consecutive half of growth. North American revenues increased by about 29%, half over half. EMEA grew at an impressive 166%. So as a result, EMEA now accounts for approximately half of the group's revenue compared to about a third in H1 2025. So after many years of developing this market, the sales volumes in EMEA have hit that new phase of takeoff for us. This also is an important milestone because it helps reduce our reliance on any single geography and allows us to build a more resilient, broad revenue base. north america our north american revenues which are comprised of both our sparks and our performance ingredients grew as we engaged with more customers to bring tablets and capsules to market we expect to be able to achieve our near-term goal of 600 million unit dose detergent pods in north america in 2026 EMA revenues which are comprised solely of our performance ingredients showed significant adoption by customers in that region. Our detergent polymers are providing those key claims that that market is looking for. John will go into some of the use cases shortly to show you those key claims that we can support. And in 2026, we did land a new EMEA customer that has the potential to bring in some significant volumes. So we're currently monitoring the reorder rates, but we're enthusiastic at the progress of this opportunity converting to a customer. So now that we've achieved growth in EMEA, we are looking at other markets to assess the progress that we can make in those geographies and for future expansion. This is really just an assessment phase, though. So as we look more closely into where the growth is coming from, we use our land and expand strategy and we're seeing some good results. A significant portion of our revenue growth came from existing customers increasing their order volumes. So this is their products gaining wider distribution and greater market acceptance. These reoccurring orders are a key indicator of our sustainability for the growth that we're seeing. At the same time, we successfully added two new major customers during this period, one in North America and that one in EMEA that we just discussed. We also brought on 10 new smaller accounts. So the combination of the expanding activities that we're seeing with existing customers and bringing new customers in gives us that confidence that we need for our medium-term growth ambition. So how is the growth supported by our customer base? As the business continues to scale, we're seeing a broader mix of opportunities move through the pipeline from major customer wins to smaller emerging accounts. In the first half, two of our customers contributed over a million dollars, representing about 40% of our revenues. It's important to note that these customers are contract manufacturers, and they're both they're manufacturing for multiple different brands. So there is that additional layer of diversity beyond the headline customer count. We are also seeing growth across midsize accounts that contribute between $500,000 to $1 million, along with a wider base of smaller customers coming online. So this broader revenue distribution reduces the concentration risk and demonstrates the increased adoption of our technology across the detergent sector. Taken together, our customer diversity gives us that strong foundation that we're going to need for a long-term growth strategy. So as we continue to grow our revenues, this did translate into improved profitability. Gross profits increased by approximately 1.2 million during the period. At the same time, we did increase administrative expenses by about $1 million. This was to support future growth initiatives. So despite these investments, we did achieve break even adjusted EBITDA. This is in comparison to the first half of 2025, where we had a $200,000 loss. So most importantly, what this does, it puts us on our track to achieving a small positive EBITDA for the full year. So as we continue to invest in our growth, those administrative expenses that did increase by about 49%, half on half, to about 3.2 million, much of that was an increase that is reflected at targeted investments. So one from additional personnel, two product development initiatives, there were some transportation costs associated with the higher demand in EMEA that we saw, and finally some commercial activities that we were doing. It's important to note that these costs are proportional to our revenue growth, so they are variable in nature, so they will scale alongside our revenues. So as we talked about additional personnel, we went from an average headcount of about 26 employees to 33 employees. This was done primarily to support those volumes in manufacturing. We also were doing a lot of work at innovating new formulations for the detergent market, as well as developing some of those new revenue opportunities in crops and in paint. So that's where a lot of our administrative dollars went. So alongside with the investment in people, we continue to optimize our throughput in the plant that we have here in our stratum facility. We've done most of the improvements to date without a significant capex expense. So that puts us in a good position. We believe we have all the infrastructure we need to make it to 30 million, which is our medium term objective and beyond. One of the things that I do like to mention here when we talk about the stratum facility is that we do have an exceptional metric that is way beyond our peer group. Our fixed asset turnover is 15x for the period. So what our equipment can do out there is generate significant revenues. We expect that to continue to grow as we continue to scale the volumes in our facility. So we believe that our existing facility has all the capacity that we need and we can further leverage that asset base. Lastly, our balance sheet remains strong, giving us the flexibility to support all these initiatives that we're working towards. We did end the half with cash and investments of 5.1 million compared to 4.4 million at the end of 2025. Working capital was about $4.4 million at the period end. We benefited from some lower inventory balances as a timing effect due to one large customer order leaving at the end of June. So inventories were slightly lower than our target. We probably will invest again back into working capital, $300,000, $400,000. However, we left the period in a good cash and working capital position. um during this period we also did some capital spending to support the growth that we're looking to do this includes the implementation of an erp system we're in process of doing that we plan to have that live by the end of the year and be utilizing that for the full year of 2027. We did some production optimization projects and we did some capital work on developing those future applications. So all that was capitalized onto our balance sheet. But overall, we left the current period in a great cash position with sufficient funding for our medium term growth ambitions and beyond. So I think what we've been able to achieve here in the first half of 2026 was an important period for Itaconix, and it shows some of the impressive metrics of what we can do here. We delivered strong revenue growth. We maintained stable gross profit margins. We achieved EBITDA breakeven for the first time in the company's history. All at the same time, we're using our land and expand strategy to continue to further our work with existing customers by increasing volumes new customers are coming online and there's a broader more diverse base of customers across all geographies What we're doing is we're continuing to invest in people, systems, product development, production capabilities needed to support that growth. We're all doing this within our existing infrastructure. So our stratum facility has all the capacity that we need to support that medium term growth. And we have those impressive fixed asset turnovers. And finally, we have the cash and investments that we need leaving the first half to support all of our growth plans and to continue to invest in those future opportunities. So overall, these results show clear progress towards our goals of building a large, profitable, attractive specialty ingredient company. So I'm going to turn it back over to John to talk a little bit about our growth path and how we're going to achieve those ambitions.