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4/30/2021
and with me on the webcast today are Alvaro Torres, Chief Executive Officer of Chiron, and Joel Friedman, Chief Financial Officer. To provide a brief agenda, we'll start with a discussion on our operations and plans for 2021, followed by an overview of our financial results before we open up to call to questions. Forward-looking statements. Before we begin, please note the following caution respecting forward-looking statements. which is made on behalf of Chiron Life Sciences and all its representatives on this call. The statements on this call will contain forward-looking information that involves risks and uncertainties, including those introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Actual results could differ materially from a conclusion forecast or projection of the forward-looking information. Certain material factors or assumptions were applied drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection that's reflected in the forward-looking information. Additional information about the material factors that could cause actual results of different material from the conclusions forecast and projections of the forward looking information and material factors and assumptions that were applied to drying occlusion or making a forecast projection as reflected in the forward looking information contained in the power and life sciences filings the Canadian and provincial securities regulators, which are available on CDAR at cdar.com. Now, with all that mumbo-jumbo, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Alvaro Torres, CEO and Director.
Thank you, Chris, and thank you to everybody for tuning in. To start off, I'd like to provide an overview of the company for those of you who are new to the story. Four years ago, we founded Kaino with the goal of improving the quality of life of patients and consumers through the applied use of cannabis. We are based in Colombia, and we benefit from the excellent growing conditions here. But at the end of the day, we are a B2C company, and we believe brands and services will decide the winners in our core markets of Latin America and Europe. Our goal is to reach one million pensions and consumers by 2024, and we plan to do this by delivering the best possible pension experience and building a first-mover advantage through our regulatory expertise, supply chain, marketing expertise, and a very unique medical cannabis education program. In March of 2020, we became the first company to issue medical cannabis prescriptions in And we have been growing 50% per month since April 2020 to December 2020. Because of our vertically integrated model, we are also able to capture a large portion of the value chain. And in 2020, we generated gross profits of 90% in our medical cannabis segment. Of course, 2020 was an extraordinary year, but like most of you, we are also happy to put it behind us. And this year, we are focused on expanding our regional footprint and growing our presence in six markets, Colombia, Peru, Germany, and the UK, where we have already started selling, and Brazil and Mexico, where we plan to start sales this year. So 2020 marked a very big turning point for the company as we transitioned from more to the sales execution phase of our strategy. Our platform is built. We have proven that our vertical integration strategy is working. Our first prescriptions are behind us, and we have the dominant position in a market that is growing rapidly due to medical cannabis insurance coverage. Four months into 2020, we're now in the end of April. I am very optimistic about this year ahead, and I want to share with you some of the numbers we made into our first quarter. We started sales of medical cannabis insurance coverage in Colombia in December 2020. The company has filled approximately 135 prescriptions, more prescriptions in Q1 of 2021 than in all of 2020. in this quarter as well, in 2021, 60% of those medical cannabis prescriptions in Colombia were fully covered by insurance, which is an improvement from Q4, where 45% of those prescriptions were covered. In terms of returning medical cannabis patient volumes, we continue to improve that, increasing from 25% of total monthly patients in Q3 of last year to nearly 50% in Q1 2021. Between Q2 of last year and Q1 this year, we have increased our daily prescriptions from doctors, from one prescription a day per doctor to almost 4.5 prescriptions a day in our clinics. We launched our first Serenia medical cannabis clinic in Medellin. Until then, we have opened three additional satellite clinics in Colombia, and we have plans to open another three locations by June of this year. Additionally, we plan to deploy this Serenia medical cannabis clinic and telehealth strategy in Mexico, Peru, and Brazil to create the largest international medical cannabis clinic network. In March of this year, we began sales in Germany, which is something we are very excited about. Germany is the second country where products qualify for quite poor insurance coverage. Going after that, I'm talking a little bit about the proof of concept that we've set. Of course, 2020 was very challenging, but also very transformational year for the company. I said before we became the first company to sell medical cannabis in Colombia, and we received our authorization to sell one day before the COVID-19 shutdown. As hard, of course, as that was, we believed in our clinic strategy and we persevered. And today, we are seeing tremendous sustainable growth and we're developing a very unique business model that we will replicate all across the region in the Tambar list. Since then, that was March 19 of last year, we've dispensed and sold over 17,000 prescriptions and growing. that includes 5,700 prescriptions in 2020 in Colombia and Peru, and almost 8,000 in the first quarter of 2021. We continue to achieve a retail average price of $50 to $60 per unit with a gross margin before the fair market value adjustments of about 80% and 90% in 2020. So I think we are all very proud of these results, and I believe that these results validate our go-to-market strategy that we've set out since we founded the company. While our vertical integrated clinic model is proven to be very effective, I believe that the government of Colombia's decision to add medical cannabis to its insurance protocol last year has been a major catalyst for patient demand and retention. If you look at what that means in terms of doctor and clinic growth, probably insurance coverage, our quarter-on-quarter Q4 2020 sales increased by 80% compared to Q3. We're at 120% between Q4 of last year and Q1 of 2021. Of course, you know, this could have not been possible without the amazing work of everybody in the regulatory team at Cairo and our designation as a national strategic priority from the Colombian government, which we received, I believe, in September of last year. In early 2020, we launched our Serenia flagship medical center in Bogota, which is the first of its kind in Colombia and Latin America. And following the launch of the Serenia flagship, we opened our first satellite clinic in Medellín in December, followed by Primo and Q1 across the country. By leveraging the infrastructure of our large clinics, our satellite clinics are proven to be very cost-efficient and effective in winning or acquiring new patients. You look at today, almost 25% of the patients that come to our flagship clinics are living with a medical cannabis prescription, but in the satellite clinics, it's more about 80% of the patients who come to the satellite clinics are receiving a prescription in the satellite clinics. Our therapy clinics have also been a huge success in terms of educating doctors. I know I've said it many times, even since we started, and I'll say it again, of course, we cannot control what our doctors prescribe, and we don't plan to, but we have created an education and residential ecosystem that is working very well to turn doctors into believers, prescribers, and eventually fellow educators. And as a result of that education platform, along with the amount of clinical data we are generating, the number of prescribing doctors in our clinics have increased 225% from eight doctors in June of last year to 26 doctors in March of this year. And not only that, but the increase of the daily prescriptions per doctor has expanded by fourfold in that period. So there is still a lot of room to grow on that aspect, considering that our top doctors in the clinic are prescribing from 20 to 30 prescriptions per day. Actually, we continue to generate high margins through our vertical integration strategy from tip to patient in Colombia. And as we enter new markets in the coming year, we look for opportunities to stay as close to the patient as possible while leveraging the assets we build in Colombia, including production, education, marketing, technology, and clinical platforms. As I've said before many times, the closer we are to the patient, the more value we can provide for that patient, and that value results in more value for our shareholders. So to talk a little bit about the COVID-19 pandemic, you know, of course, 2020 was very transformational and challenging year at the same time, but I'm very proud of how the team responded to the pandemic, cutting costs and accelerating initiatives very quickly, such as telemedicine and home delivery that allowed patients to save money for medical cannabis and our clinical service. I think our team showed incredible resilience and commitment to our mission. And if we have been able to accomplish this growth in the last 12 months, in the middle of this terrible pandemic, I cannot even imagine what we can accomplish when this is all behind us. Following the start of the recovery in June 2020, our Q1 concentration volumes have increased almost 70% from the lows of Q2 of last year, which reflects a sequential quote-unquote increase of 20% from Q4, following a 25% sequential increase in Q4. And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the team. And, you know, I think as we expand our reach globally and domestically, I believe that regulatory educational marketing and operational expertise will create a very significant competitive advantage that is setting Chiron apart from everybody else in Latin America. We have a strong balance sheet. We have financial growth through equity today. And as opportunities emerge, we will continue to evaluate that balance sheet, keeping in mind those growth opportunities. In Colombia, let's shift the focus on what we're planning for 2021, starting with Colombia, and to tell you the variables that are going to help us to continue to grow sustainably, as we have done so far. These variables include clinic expansion to extend our patient base, increased acquisition of new patients by creating patient awareness on medical standards, increase the doctor's prescriptions to evidence on education, focus on patient retention, expanding insurance coverage, and then last but not least, improve our services. So regarding clinic expansion, I would say that we plan to expand our network of clinics. We're targeting 10 locations in total by the end of June and a presence in 13 Colombian cities by the end of the year. And at the same time, we will continue to leverage our telehealth platform, which today accounts for more than 15% of the total consults that come to the clinic. On the patient side, our goal is to increase patient awareness and interest while improving access and convenience. So in Q1 of this year, from January to March, we acquired 75% more new patients than all of 2020. And we will continue to do this trend by improving word of mouth, advertising for our clinics, and continue to show real evidence to patients across Columbus. Regarding doctor prescriptions, we will continue to generate evidence and begin to present this evidence within the clinics and outside, so that we can continue to grow with what is described. We are working to increase doctor engagement through evidence, which we know drives higher prescriptions per doctor, which in turn drives higher revenue. Of course, we know winning a patient is not the same as retaining an existing patient, which is why patient retention is a major focus for us this year. We are obsessed with service. We are committed to constantly improving our telemedicine platform, our patient program, and our home delivery services. So by April of this year, we have obtained more patients than all of the new patients that we won in 2020. And we have now today a 50% returning patient volume per patient in April of this first quarter of 2021. Of course, insurance coverage has been a tremendous boost to our strategy, but the opportunity for growth is a lot higher. Even today, more than 90% of the insurance coverage patients that are coming to the clinic today come from one insurance company. There are more than 50 insurance companies in Colombia, and today we are working to ensure that we can implement the protocols with them to provide more access to more patients. So when we say we are in the first a game of this world series, we truly mean it. There's still a lot of work that we have to do regarding insurance coverage. Our companies focus on service. We win on service. More than 95% of our patients receive their medication through home delivery. We have implemented call centers to service patients. Our service rating is about 9 out of 10 in our clinics. We will continue these efforts to ensure that our brand is embedded in patients' minds, which is how we build a competitive advantage around COVID. So that is the term for Colombia, and I would say that this is very much a blueprint for what we want to do in Latin America. And so having said that, I'm going to go into what we're planning to do in the rest of the countries. I will start with Atenu. Atenu is a very exciting market for us, given what we see today as the cultural acceptance of alternative treatments and the velocity that we are seeing the market growth. In 2020, we became the first company to sell both high-tech health care products in Peru. And what we have seen in the first few months is that on a per capita basis, sales to external health care providers in Peru actually have outpaced third-party sales in Colombia. It is clear to us that our go-to-market strategy works, which is why we have opened our first international terrestrial clinic in Peru at the end of this quarter, or before the end of this quarter. We expect to see the same growth in prescriptions that we have seen in Colombia, and we will continue to leverage our agreement with Farmacia Universal, which is a major family chain in Lima, that produces and distributes our medicinal preparations. So stay tuned in Peru. I think Serenity is going to be a great success there. We're going to take all the in-learnings we've had from Colombia. When we look at Brazil, the next market we expect to enter, it's a massive opportunity considering that it has a population that is four times larger than Colombia, at 200 million And, of course, given the success of our strategy in Colombia, we plan to bring Serenia to Brazil by the end of the year. From a supply chain perspective, we plan to enter Brazil by leveraging our facility in Uruguay. And so between our low-cost production and target extensions, we see an opportunity to disrupt the market where prescriptions today cost over $300, which makes cannabis mostly inaccessible for a lot of patients. Our products are already approved for compassionate use, and we have secured that partnership with a major distributor in southern Brazil. We are working right now to the final steps to get the product into the country. This has taken longer than we initially expected, given that the government's priority rightfully remains to the health emergency at hand, but that doesn't change the fact that we are going to enter into Brazil certainly this year. We continue to advance our go-to-market strategy, and again, we will leverage everything we've learned in Colombia And we believe we can enter markets ahead of competitors, and I remain very confident that we can get it certainly done this year. Regarding Mexico, you know, many of you have questions about the countries' adult use. Now, I have no doubt that adult use is going to happen in Mexico. But that being said, our medical strategy does not depend on the recreational regulatory process, because the countries' medical regulations are completely separate from the adult use laws that pass during the year. It means that any delay in the adult use laws should not impact our go-to-market strategy for a medical strategy, which is very similar to the model we're executing in Colombia. So we've looked at the medical regulations. We believe that they align very well with our serenity of go-to-market strategy, which we plan to launch this year as we expand our international clinic presence all across the region. I also believe that we have competitive advantage in the context of the regulations that set us up for success. I mean, this experience includes developing magisterial preparations, operating pharmacies, health centers, importing and exporting medical cannabis, and generating clinical evidence. So we have a good lead in terms of developing our supply chain in Mexico. We already have agreements already in place for the manufacture of our products in Mexico, similar to what we have in Peru, and we are going to enter Mexico through our selenics. Lastly, in Mexico, as you may know, we have trained several hundred doctors in partnerships with the country's leading university, the Tecnológico de Monterrey. And through this partnership, we also introduced the first internationally recognized medical cannabis diploma program in Latin America. I cannot express enough how important it is to focus on education and evidence so that we can have doctors' willingness, which is quite increased, just like we've seen in Colombia. So, again, I am very confident that this market is a market where we can establish an early lead once our products are in the country. We're going to leverage our vertical development strategy from chief to patient. And right now, our team is working to make sure that we have supply chain, that we have our clinics, and that we're going to be there certainly in 2021. When we look at Europe, we have the need for the European medical cannabis market. It's essentially where many U.S. states were three or four years ago. And we've seen, however, in the last few months, a lot of very positive developments, which tells you that we will change into the horizon. Our strategy in Europe is very simple. Everything we've learned in Colombia never exceeds as much as we can, taking an asset-light approach. We have a whole class team. delivering a defensive doctor education platform backed by the clinical data that we're developing in Colombia, backed by our registered strains, which we recently exported to Europe. And additionally, we're benefiting from clinical IP, including systems, processes, and expertise related to telemedicine, avoidance of consumer supply chain, patient loyalty, and home delivery. So we plan to apply all the experience and experience from Europe back in the time whenever we can. And following something we've done now since Q1, Q2, I believe, you know, we have all the pieces in place to accelerate growth in the United Kingdom and Germany. So we look at the U.K. You know that there's almost 1.4 million people that are right now self-medicating with cannabis. And our goal is to increase patient access and product selection to improve patient switch to the legal market. That means that prescribing specialists remains one of the biggest challenges for patients. And this tells us that to expand the patient base, we first need to increase the number of prescribing specialists. But this is something our company really, really knows how to do. And we've been proving that in Colombia in the last 12 months. But also, this is why we joined Project 2021, and we continue to leverage all these medical education experiences in the town through our partnerships with the two leading doctor education groups, MCCS and CELF. We recently announced that we received the CPD accreditation for our Chiron Academy platform, and we have seen excellent and very positive doctor involvement and certification since we started with that accreditation. From a supply chain perspective, in June of last year, we issued our first prescriptions of Chiron Med products T21. We recently announced that we added new offerings, including both high-key products. So far, the reception from patients has been very positive. And, of course, you know, COVID-19. challenges. In fact, the dollars we were able to deliver in 2020, but we have already worked with these issues and we're positioned for accelerated growth this year. We've already established an inventory of dry flour for UK patients. When we look at Germany, before I hand it off to Joel, you know, we've been targeting the German medical cannabis for some time. This is the most mature market in the EU. We are very excited to have achieved our first sales last month in Q1, thanks to our partnership with Nibus Health, which is leading Germany to the of medical cannabis products, and they have a reach of over more than 300 pharmacies. And we continue to supply, to improve our supply chain with this asset-light approach. We are actively educating doctors and raising awareness for our products. And as much as I believe in the UK, we believe that our unique education platform, the clinical data that we're developing, the TAM, and the distribution network that we have been setting up will certainly distinguish us from the competition. So having said that, I will hand it off to Joe to talk a little bit about our financials and the end of the year and so on. So thank you, everybody.
Joe? Thank you, Alvaro. While the initial months of the global pandemic were particularly challenging, we reported our strongest quarter of the year in Q4 with total revenues of $2.5 million. This represented a 31% sequential increase from Q3 2020 due to a 25% increase in health service revenues and 113% growth in medical cannabis product sales. Year over year, Q4 revenues of $2.5 million were in line with Q4 2019. as revenues from medical cannabis products offset a 6% year-over-year decline in service revenues. Here, I would like to point out that fourth quarter service revenues in Colombian pesos were actually 2% higher this year than in the fourth quarter of 2019. However, as a result of the devaluation of the Colombian peso, revenues in Canadian dollars decreased by 6%. Looking at the medical cannabis segment, we reported 370,000 in medical cannabis product sales in 2020, including 234,000 in Q4 alone. Sequential quarter-over-quarter growth of 130% in the fourth quarter was attributable to insurance coverage for medical cannabis starting December 2020, and an uptick in average prescriptions per doctor, as Alvaro described earlier. we recorded our first medical cannabis sales in the last days of March 2020, and as such, there were no medical cannabis sales in 2019. For 2020, in total, we generated $8 million in revenue, which reflected a 16% decline year over year due to COVID-related revenue declines in health services revenues, partially offset by the start of medical cannabis product sales, which commenced in late March 2020. Looking at our revenue mix, 2020 revenues consisted of $7.4 million in health services, $370,000 in medical cannabis products, and $217,000 in wellness products. This reflects a 20% and 30% year-over-year decrease in health services and wellness product revenues, respectfully, while we did not report any medical cannabis sales in 2019. Looking at a geographic segmentation, medical cannabis product revenues outside of Columbia were not significant in 2020 or Q4. However, as 2021 progresses, we expect sales outside of Columbia to continue to grow. Moving on to gross profit, on a full-year basis, assets, the company reported a margin of $1.5 million, or 18%, compared to $2.4 million and 25% in 2019. The year-over-year decline was attributable to COVID-19-related procedures put in place to maintain a safe environment. COVID-19 measures continued to be a factor in Q4 as well as throughout the entire year. During the fourth quarter, we reported total gross profit of $400,000, versus 323,000 in the third quarter of 2020. Sequentially, gross profits increased 25% on revenue growth of 31%. While we saw strong growth in our high margin medical cannabis business unit, health service margins saw some compression in the quarter due to our service mix, along with building an investment in the future growth in the near term. We expected clinic margins to improve as patient volumes increase. Having said that, our Q4 medical cannabis product margins remained high at 92%. I'd like to point out that as our revenue mix shifts towards medical cannabis, we expect our overall margins to continue to increase. However, I do caution that medical cannabis product margins may be impacted by our sales volumes and product mix, market conditions, and our revenue structure in new markets, including the extent to which we rely on third parties for production and distribution. Turning towards expenses, at the onset of the pandemic, the company implemented a series of significant cost saving measures. Since then, we have continued to prudently manage our costs. In 2020, SG&A costs were down 8% reflecting ongoing cost reduction measures. Year over year, fourth quarter expenses declined 22% while increasing 3% sequentially from Q3 2020 as the business continued to expand globally and at home in Columbia, Q3 from COVID. EBITDA losses, a non-IFRS measure, for the year were 18.7 million, down from a loss of 24.5 million in 2019. During the quarter, we reported an EBITDA loss of 4.3 million versus 6.3 million in the prior year and 4.7 million in Q3 2020. During the fourth quarter, We completed a bought deal financing, selling 32.2 million units at 45 cents per unit for aggregate gross proceeds of 14.5 million. We ended the year with cash of 21.6 million, working capital of 29.1 million, and no significant corporate debt. We entered the year in a strong capital position. With that, I will pass it back to Alvaro to provide a brief wrap-up before opening it up to questions.
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