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 that is received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I would now like to hand you over to Jerry Randall, CEO. Good morning, sir.
Good morning. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining our presentation. You're here today with me, Jerry Randall, CEO, one of the founders of the business, Danny Wells, CFO. You joined us a number of years ago. I think you've all heard from us before. We are going to take you through the presentation for our results for year-end, 31st of December 2024. As per usual, any questions you submit along the side as we go through the presentation, we'll endeavor to answer in the time we have on this call. Really happy to present our 2024 results. You'll have seen in the results announcement that we've exchanged contracts on a divestment of the business. As we go through the results, both the presentation here and also the R&S that you'll have seen and in the annual report, those discontinued operations are split out.
You'll see us referring to continued operations, divested assets, discontinued, etc. Just bear that in mind as we go through. As I say, any questions at the end, happy to clarify. If we look at the whole group to start with, including the bits that we're now divesting, total revenue, GBP 51.5 million. Gross margin up at 42% compared to 39% last year, adjusted EBITDA GBP 11.4 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin of 22%, just slightly down from last year. If we look at the continuing business as we go forward after divesting of certain operations and assets, which we'll talk about a bit more, and we look at the remaining business, which is the Venture Life brands business, that grew nearly 19%, GBP 26 million. Underlying growth, about 15% there, a pro forma about 11%.
That is really through increased advertising information, increased investment in our products and our brands to grow them. Gross margin increased 4 percentage points, nearly 45.8% compared to just under 42% last year. What you are seeing in the remaining business that is continuing is the higher margin. Venture Life brands, they have better pricing power, better marginality. Adjusted EBITDA for that continuing part of the business for last year was GBP 6.2 million against just under GBP 5 million last year. Good growth and an increase in that percentage margin as well. Towards the end of the period, we acquired the Health & Her brand business, giving first revenue contributions of GBP 0.8 million in the last part of the year. We will talk more about that Health & Her business as we go through. Post-period end, we have divested all of our CDMO operations.
That transaction has exchanged on the 12th of May, and we expect that to complete between the middle and the end of July. It's just subject to some foreign direct investment regulatory filings, which are progressing at the moment. We don't expect any issues with those. That's in the hands of the buyer. We're also, as you will have seen in the announcement, actively marketing our oral care brands for sale. They're non-core for us going forward, and we'll be looking for a buyer for those brands, and we'd expect to include that by the end of this year. After those headlines, I'll pass over to Danny to talk a little bit more detail about the financial results we've just presented.
Good morning, everyone. As Jerry said, we've split out the presentation results this year to show the continued business, so our higher margin power brands and the discontinued operations. On the right-hand side of the slide, I thought it'd just be useful to start with the discontinued part of the business. If I just talk to the top right-hand number, GBP 24.9 million revenue, that's the discontinued operation. That comprises, in big ticket items, GBP 4 million from the oral care disposal that we've just announced. It includes GBP 2 million of the private label foot care products that we've had in the portfolio since 2020, around GBP 1 million of the legacy brands of Venture Life, the non-marketed products I'm talking about, Vonalei, Lissio as an example in there, and Procto-eze as well.
The balance, around GBP 18 million, is the customer brands, which is the third-party customers served from our Italian business. All in all, that business was, as you can see, just under GBP 25 million last year, down 14% year-on-year. That part of the business was contracting together with all four components of that part of the business. It was lower margin. It was dilutive to the portfolio at 38% gross margin. You can see on the left-hand side of the slide that gross margins on the core ongoing business were pushing 46%. EBITDA margin, similarly, down at 20.9% on the discontinued business relative to 23% on the core ongoing business. We have extracted away the contracting part of the business that was dilutive to the portfolio. We want to focus on our core ongoing business and the power brands within it.
You can see if I just rattle through some of the key numbers. Revenue was up 19% year-on-year to GBP 26.6 million. We'll talk about the growth drivers behind that in more detail later on in the deck. On that 19% revenue growth, we drove an absolute gross profit improvement of just over 31% to GBP 12.2 million at better margins, 45.8% gross margin. Previously, when we reported the business altogether, we were a 39% gross margin business in 2023. We've shown the numbers like-for-like on this slide. You can see that in 2023, gross margins were 41.6% on that core business. There is a like-for-like improvement as well on the ongoing operation. Only that's driven by two key factors. One being pricing power, as Jerry mentioned.
As the Lift product has grown in particular and volumes have increased, we've been able to negotiate better supply prices from our manufacturers. We also internalized the production of Earol into Biokosmes pre-divestment, but that also gave Venture Life a better supply price from what we had previously. Those are the two key drivers. Finally, just on the left-hand side, you can see that we've called out the marketing spend as a percentage of revenue. We've highlighted this as it's an area of focus going forward for us as we want to drive forward the top-line growth at higher marginality. That 6.1% of marketing costs relative to our revenues is up from about 3.9% the previous year. Over the next couple of years, we see that netting out around 10%-12% across our core brands.
Balance Activ, Lift, Health & Her products as well, and Health & Him newly launched portfolio. We see these brands have an opportunity to drive the top line, but also driving gross margin increment in the business. As we invest in that marketing spend, it will also drive gross margin improvement and enable EBITDA margins to still push up towards 25% over the next three years. Adjusted EBITDA was GBP 6.2 million, up from GBP 4.9 million the previous year on a like-for-like basis again. Higher margins, 23% off 21.9% the year before. Good cash flow coming off the business, GBP 4.3 million of free cash flow on the ongoing operation, nearly 70% cash conversion. As we go forward, we would expect the free cash flow conversion to increase notably. If you look at the new business, it is capital-light in its nature.
We do not have big lease costs. We do not have big machinery and plants to maintain. There is a high conversion of operating cash to free cash flow going forward. We will still invest in R&D, of course, but we have a much lighter structure than we had before. Leverage, just briefly, crept up to 1.83 at the end of 2024. We had just done an acquisition at the end of last year, the Health & Her acquisition in November. Post-period end, leverage has fallen down to about 1.6 times at the end of May. When we receive the proceeds from the divestment before end of July, we will pay down the drawn funds on the facility completely. We will have around GBP 36 million-GBP 40 million of cash in bank at that point.
Just a few headlines now on the revenue and where that growth is coming from and where that portfolio looks like today on an ongoing basis. You can see in the left-hand side of the slide we are showing the percentage of revenue that each therapy area comprises within the group. Energy management is now the largest segment of the group at 35% of 2024 revenues. That continued to grow strongly last year, up 28% from the previous year. That is driven largely by Lift on performance through pharmacy channels. We will talk more about the details around that later on. The women's intimate health, including our Balance Activ brand and our newly launched Hervitality brand for menopause within that range, that grew 15.5%.
In the U.K., that was about a 10% growth, but the international business grew more strongly, particularly through some of our blue chip partners such as Bayer, who have continued to roll out and gain increased volume in their local markets. Ear, Nose & Throat, a year-old product, that was up 12% last year. Earol launched onto Amazon at the end of 2023. We have got an annualisation impact coming through on there. We also launched a new product into the Earol portfolio, which we will show you later as well. Hormonal Health next that was acquired on the 8th of November, completed to like November last year. It has delivered around GBP 800,000 of revenue in the post-completion period. When we acquired that business, it was generating around GBP 6 million of revenue. We expect it to do over GBP 9 million in 2025.
Strong growth coming through that part of the business of those brands, and that will form a bigger share, much bigger share of the portfolio next year. Oncology support, lastly. As you'll have heard me talk before, it's quite lumpy in nature. It's part of the business. It's partnered products, Pomi-T and Gelclair. We don't sell it directly through retail. There are some certain key customers that have fallen outside of a standard 12-month order cycle. In 2023, we had some big orders and some stocking up from two key partners, and that's unwound during 2024. We expect to see those orders come through in 2025. The adverse 14% is driven by the phase and effect of those customers. Final one on me, just to give you an operational feel. What does the business look like today post-divestment?
You can see we've got nearly 60 employees in the group. We've lost 120 people through the divestment of the Swedish and Italian facilities. Of those 58 people, around 15 or 16 of those were acquired from Health & Her in a new acquisition at the end of last year. We brought in some exceptional talent to the team, bringing new skill sets to the business. We've got around 31,000 distribution points. That's up around 5,000 distribution points on the previous year. We've made a notable inroads into retail and a key retailer in Holland & Barrett during the last few months. Jerry will talk more about that later. R&D capability remains a key focus for us and new product developments. You can see on the slide we're showing we've launched 17 new products since the start of 2023.
During 2024, that generated 58 new listings into our retail trade in the U.K. We have high retail concentration these days, and that has been strengthened on the back of the Health & Her acquisition. We have a much simpler portfolio of SKUs. We have around 230 SKUs today. We used to have 850 because of the nature of the CDMO business, producing products for third-party customers. You could have one or two products which have seven or eight variations of those products. We have a much simpler portfolio today, easier to manage, and easier to forecast as well, by the way. Digitalisation progress is the one we call out regularly. The online business has continued to grow 30%-40% over the last couple of years, as you will have seen us talk about. In addition, in 2024, we have had success in growing our e-commerce website.
We have our own Lift D2C website, but we have also got the e-commerce website from the Health & Her brands that we acquired last year. Digital progress and revenue from online has continued to grow strongly. Around GBP 5 million of our GBP 26 million revenue last year came from e-commerce channels, mainly through Amazon. That represents about 18% of the business today. Lastly, revenue from new products, that bottom left-hand box, that was 6.1% last year. On a like-for-like basis, that is up from about 3% the previous year. This is a real key number for us going forward. We measure this revenue based on the first 12 months of launch for a new product that we have developed. Going forward, we want to introduce a term called the Fatality Index, which I am sure you will be aware of.
That looks at three-year rolling revenue from new product development. Over the coming years, we want to push this up towards 20% and continue investing in our R&D capability and also our marketing investment to enable that innovation to deliver commercial results.
Great. Thanks, Danny. I noticed in the chat we've had a few questions already on the financials, and Danny will pick up on those at the end of the presentation. Commensurate with the divestment that we've done and the focus now on the brands of the business, we've been working to refine our strategy and be clear what we're doing going forward. What you see here on the left is our defined strategy as we've now set out. Obviously, there's a difference because all of our manufacturing and development operations are now external. I'll go through the divestment of the CDMO shortly, but what's really important to understand is those businesses we've divested of will still be making the products that we're making with them currently under a long-term manufacturing agreement that controls pricing, quality, and supply.
Also, by them joining a bigger group, we'll have access to further CDMO expertise, particularly in areas of food supplements, which will enable us to perhaps transfer more business there and improve our marginality. What we focus on going forward is acquiring and transforming core brands that have a clear runway to profitable growth. That's really important. We've done it before. We've done it recently, and that's a part of our growth strategy. As well as investing in some new products and new assets that we want to buy, we are going to be investing in our brands that we have concurrently. Danny's mentioned that already about the increase in the amount of marketing spend as a percentage of revenue. That's really important. We're going to make sure we go forward with a number one brand mindset.
That's really important because that enables you to grow the market, grow market penetration, gives you pricing power. That is what retailers look for, is brands that have a real presence in their niche and their category. Having an omnichannel strategy is really important to us. What that means is that you're going to be where the shopper shops because we have two people who are effectively buying or using the products. We often talk about the consumer, the user, the person using the products. That is the person that we need to influence the market to drive demand. Most importantly is where does the shopper shop? Who buys those? You will see later on in the presentation that mom is one of the biggest buyers of the products.
It is important our products are in all of the channels so that wherever that shopper is shopping, they can buy the products. It might be themselves as the user, it might be a family member or someone they are caring for, a child that is using it. It is important to be where the shopper shops. An increasing use of integrated digital capabilities. You will have seen that we are implementing a new ERP system that is ongoing at the moment. The team is working very hard on that. That will be complete by the end of 2025.
It's a big investment for us, but it will bring us huge improvements in reporting, processing data on the internal side of the business, but also it'll enable us to aggregate and look more closely at lots of the market data, EPOS data, sales data to enable us to look for those sweet spots where our product should be, where we can gain penetration and growth. Making use of advanced AI, and we are in the process of recruiting a digital officer into the business as well as we see. That's a very important competency to have. Finally, to all of that, retaining o ur core entrepreneurial competencies, what's helped us to grow and adapt so far, and we want to retain and keep those.
That is about giving our team and our people the responsibility and the accountability to deliver what they are good at and give them an entrepreneurial mindset and to make sure they drive value, growth, and margin. Looking at corporate development, we have done a few things. Some of those I have mentioned already. We acquired the Health & Her business in the end of October and completed early November 2024. I am going to talk more about that business shortly to tell you a bit more about what it is and why it is so interesting for us. We are simplifying the business structure and streamlining certain entities in the business. Through acquisitions in the past, we have accumulated a number of entities that we no longer use because we have moved the assets around. That will help us reduce our reporting burden and simplify reporting. The new ERP system we have mentioned already.
We divested of the CDMO business. As I said, that's exchanged in May and will complete towards the end of July. With that, we sold some small brands as well, some of the non-core brands, as Danny's mentioned. That has allowed us to focus on growing the business as a brands business. Pure Brands, a consumer healthcare platform that will ultimately attract higher valuations because of high margins, pricing power, etc. We think that's a good thing for the business and for shareholders. We are working to divest of our oral care products. They're non-core for us going forward. They're not within our core categories. We're in the areas of women's health, men's health, maybe sexual wellness overlap in there with Type 1 diabetes. We're obviously in ENT with Earol. Oral care is a non-core area for us.
We're not looking to invest further in the oral care space. So we'll be divesting of those brands this year. As part of our growth going forward for M&A, we've appointed a new M&A head. They will start in the middle of this month. Experienced energetic person with a lot of transactional experience of both buy-side and sell-side M&A. Looking forward to them joining because, for example, the Health & Her acquisition, that was Danny and I. We didn't have a dedicated resource at that time. And we have retained our RCF, our revolving credit facility. We entered into that a year ago. When we complete on the divestment of the CDMO businesses, we will pay down all of the existing RCF debts, but the facility will still remain available to us for another, I think, two plus one years going forward.
We'll be looking to use a modest amount of debt with our M&A strategy to make the money we have go a bit further. I'm going to talk a little bit about the Health & Her business. We acquired this towards the end of last year. A very exciting business that fits well into our portfolio. We acquired the business. We paid an overall consideration of GBP 10 million, but GBP 2.5 million of that GBP 10 million is deferred and contingent upon the performance of the business to the end of October 2025. That will be paid up. Revenues for their financial year to May 2024 were GBP 6.2 million. I think as Danny said earlier, they'll already do much more than that this year and probably nearing GBP 9 million. It's the number one menopause brand in Holland & Barrett.
It is a food supplement brand that helps support the effect of hormonal change. Initially within women, now moving into men as well. I will explain that in a few more slides. There is a deep NPD pipeline, lots of new products coming along behind that. It fits very well with our women's intimate health range, which is a topical range, the Balance Activ range covering bacterial vaginosis, thrush, etc. We have now just launched our own topical menopause range, Hervitality, which again I will talk about later. This business is launching to the U.S., launching with CVS, one of the big five retailers in the U.S. with 6,000 stores. First three products for the first half of this year and then more products in the second half. We are very excited about this acquisition.
Simply, the mission of that business is to improve the lives of millions suffering with the impact of hormonal change. That is where hormonal change is depleting nutrients in the body and the supplements are there to replace the nutrients that are depleted through that. A brief timeline of the business. It was founded in 2019 by two entrepreneurs, Kate Bache and Gervase Fernandes . They founded it with a vision to support hormonal health. Spent a lot of time early doors investing in data and research to make sure they understood the target market. Developed some products, began to launch some through 2021, 2022, moving on into the online space in the U.S. and across certain territories in Europe, also into China. In 2024, struck a deal to enter the retail space in the U.S. and those products are now launching out there.
They are now developing their new product development and expanding into lots of retailers. One of the real attractions of this business is it has a very strong relationship with Holland & Barrett. That is a retailer we did not have a relationship with before this transaction. Already the team have managed to get a number of the Venture Life products into Holland & Barrett, including Earol, including Balance Activ, and showing the strength of that relationship and the synergistic action that we have got. Really talented and strong team of people with that business too, particular expertise in digital marketing, digital activation. Again, as we integrate the teams with Venture Life over the rest of this year, we will look to exploit those skills across all of our business.
Just talking about the hormonal changes that women see through their life cycle, you see that here, the higher levels of estrogen, the lower levels of estrogen. This can include exogenous estrogen as well. Through all these times, women need support to help replace those nutrients depleted by those hormonal changes. In particular, what you see here on this next slide is just an initial look at the range of the different products and how they support at different times. You'll see in September of this year, we'll be launching a maternal journey that's going to go into the key retailers and supporting a broader and broader range. Very exciting business, very well put together and in a high growth category. As men, we don't have the same variability as women do with their levels of hormone.
Over the life of the man, you see depletion in the levels of hormones. Again, there's a range of supplements to support. You'll see particularly there in the paternal time, a dip in the levels of testosterone. I think those of us who have been dads know why. Again, we have a specific product to support. What I'd also draw your attention to on the right-hand side of the page, again, an example of the synergies from acquiring this business. There's a product called Prostagard that will be launching in Holland & Barrett in September of this year. That is essentially our Pomi-T product. So Pomi-T, which is for support of men with early stage prostate cancer. We sell that through the oncology channel in a number of places, U.K. and a number of other territories. We've imported that product, improved it with some various other ingredients.
That's now a prostate product in the Health & Him range, which is launching through the retail channels. One of the other strong attributes of the Health & Her business is the app. This was developed by the business to support women through their perimenopause and menopausal journey, give them support ideas. It's not an app used to keep flagging up to buy the products, but it is an app that helps with all the symptoms and all the support necessary going through those phases. A really good clinical study that the business undertook, you see on the right-hand side there. It proved through that study using the app that if you use the app to track the symptoms for eight weeks, you actually see a reduction in those symptoms. That's independent of taking the supplements as well. Really valuable.
are 150,000 women using this app regularly on a daily basis and many more than that who have been through the app over recent years. That is an asset we can use to introduce some of our topical products into that group of people who are using the app and also to use the app technology and begin to spread it across a lot of the Venture Life products. Really good synergistic activity there. Where is Health & Her today? You can see the retailers where they are in the U.K., in the U.S., and a little bit outside in Europe. There is the key target. Mom is the shopper. She shops for herself, the family, elderly parents, has the spending power. That is a common theme across all of our brands in terms of making sure we are where the shopper shops.
A few highlights from this year, sorry, from 2024 within the business. You can see there the active products and customers. You can see on the right-hand side the new products that were launched just during that time and the customers they were launched. Launches in U.S. retail as well as CVS. The business also sells through the Vitamin Shoppe. That is a smaller retailer. I think there are about 700 stores in the U.S., but they tend to sit in the strip malls in America as opposed to the main malls where you will see CVS and the others. Again, good coverage there. Extending products in the U.K., launching new products, getting the products online in China and using disruptive NPD to expand the range of the distribution. More of the same in 2025, more new products being launched into more retailers.
In terms of marketing, we've had some great wins already. We advertised during an Oprah menopause documentary that's going on in the U.S. for really good pickup in interest and sales. Lots of new products, the maternal range is coming out this year, vaginal probiotic as well. U.K. retail, good range extensions on the NPD, U.S. retail expansion. Again, we're talking to other retailers in the U.S. As I've already mentioned, the synergistic activities of starting to sell the Venture Life brands across some of the portfolio and estate of Health & Her and similarly the other way. Really happy with the way that's progressing. Moving on to the divestment, I'll give you a few more details. We divested the CDMO business. That's our Italian business based near Como, Biokosmes, and also the Swedish manufacturing facility in Gnesta, south of Stockholm.
We had a total enterprise value for selling of those two businesses of EUR 62 million. That represents about a 10 times run rate, but it represents 11 times of the historic profits from that business last year. We'll be signing a long-term manufacturing agreement that will be signed on completion to continue to manufacture with those facilities that we sold, controlling pricing both up and down, quality, regulatory, and all the support we'd have with a normal CDMO. We'll be working with that same team and those same people, that same business, delivering the same high-quality products that they've always delivered. It'll be at an arm's length situation.
We'll be sad that the team from Biokosmes and Gnesta are no longer in our business, but we're really happy they're going to be working with us in the future as we go forward to continue to deliver great quality products. What this means is going forward, we'll have a less capital-intensive operation here at Venture Life. We won't be investing and supporting a manufacturing business, but obviously we'll be buying products arm's length from them. That means we give away a bit of profit, obviously, to CDMO. As you've seen earlier, we're already seeing an increase in our overall profitability and marginality. Just to be clear, the brands that are being disposed of, that we will no longer be with Venture Life, these smaller brands, they are also being sold to the same purchaser going forward. Partnerships relating to them.
I think just to add here, just as it's not on the slides, the footcare portfolio as well is the other key element of the peripheral brands. So you've got these legacy brands on the screen and also the footcare portfolio is around EUR 2 million shop review.
Where does that leave us? We've got a good injection of cash. The company's focus now is really to push on more into, as we said right at the start, this area of proactive, healthy longevity or supporting people's health span. Lifespan is the length of time you live. It's from when you're born to when you die. Health span is the amount of time you live an active, healthy life. In today's environment, obviously we see a lot of chronic conditions which impair the quality of life towards the end of people's lives.
You have this tail off of living with a chronic condition quite often for a long time. That has a high healthcare cost and it also impacts on the quality of life of that person. Where we're focused now is in this area of preventative opportunities. You'll see Health & Her is a very strong preventative set of products. We're looking to help people live a healthier, longer life. There are about eight causations of over 80% of the chronic illnesses that we see today. By chronic illnesses, obviously we mean things like dementia, heart disease, cancer, obesity, etc. Those eight causations are things like lack of sleep, stress, alcohol, diet, exercise, etc. By moderating and modulating those eight key areas, you can significantly reduce your risk of these chronic illnesses.
Within those areas, there's a lot of opportunity for preventative products and supportive products. We are going to use this cash that we receive from divesting of these CDMO operations to both invest in our existing brands, to increase our A&P in a profitable way, to have good returns on A&P, to acquire more interesting brands that are complementary to the portfolio and increase the good architecture of our P&L with increasing gross margins and increasing net margins and develop and become a stronger player in women's health, men's health, sexual health, and some of those other areas. It is a great opportunity for us to significantly grow and develop the business. In summary, we want to be the partner of choice for proactive, healthy longevity, improving the health span.
This simplification of our business, the divestments, the simplification we've been doing, the investment in technology will allow us to evolve into a pure brand consumer healthcare platform, invest in our power brands, innovate with data-driven insight, and grow in key markets, which is going to be U.K., U.S., and EU. Just looking at how we're going to do that. We're going to focus on our key targets to empower and enable self-care to extend people's health spans and making sure in what we acquire that each of the assets and the products have a strong runway for profitable growth and have the capability to be successful. As I mentioned earlier, we've divested in some certain assets. Just to be clear, these are the key brands, power brands that are going to remain within our portfolio at Venture Life.
We're going to be talking a little bit more about those brands, particularly the power brands, and what we've been doing with those in 2024. At Venture Life, with a simplified business model for growth, capital-light structure, we're not investing heavily in development manufacturing facilities. Brand focus, high margins, number one mindset, data-driven insight, omnichannel approach, integrated digital technologies, entrepreneurial, pure play consumer healthcare with core geographic focus. Just to finish up, I'd like to then talk a little bit more about some of the activities that have been delivering the growth that Danny talked about earlier within our core brands, our power brands. I'll start with Balance Activ. There's quite a lot on this page, but essentially what's been happening here is we've grown Balance Activ by 10% in 2024.
That outpaces the overall women's health category, which actually was in decline by 1% last year. It's been driven by annualization in the grocery channel of our Balance Activ launch in 2023 and the introduction of the Thrush cream with Tesco. The thrush cream is a new product we developed. It was launched at the back end of 2023. It's been growing in 2024. We've had pharmacy growth, driving listings through wholesalers and pharmacy and plugging the gap in our women's health range in this channel. If we look at the U.K. market for women's intimate health, about two-thirds of it is dominated by thrush. That's obviously Canesten, which is a big player there. That's a drug product, but we've now launched a medical device product which can be used for the long term.
The thrush cream has been launched everywhere in pharmacy, in Superdrug, in Tesco, and Morrisons. It is growing very well. The percentage growth numbers are very high because obviously it starts from a low base and it is nearly 300% for the first five months of this year compared to the first five months of 2023. It is the only product in growth in the thrush segment. Whilst Canesten is in decline, Canesten was down 9% first five months of this year compared to the first five months of last year, whereas the thrush cream represents now 18% of the overall revenues for Balance Activ. We have had secondary fin displays, aisle displays, floor mats, etc., increasing awareness. We launched our Hervitality range this year. That is a topical menopause range. It sits very nicely alongside the Health & Her range, five products there.
That's already been launched in a number of retailers. We've been running the Re-Revolution digital marketing campaign. We've had 1.2 million symptom checker completions through that. Lots of downloads of the data and reports that we've done. Really good progress there. Looking into 2025, as we talked about, Hervitality is now in Boots. That's launched and that's moving. We've got more field salespeople now out on the ground in the U.K. At the moment, Balance Activ only has 5% distribution in pharmacy. A key target for 2025 is to drive that and make more of it as a GSM opportunity and open sale in the pharmacies. Balance Activ has been agreed to be launching both Boots and Holland & Barrett—sorry, excuse me, WH Smith and Holland & Barrett—into this year. WH Smith, when they're larger stores which give the majority of their revenues.
We've also implemented price increases on Balance Activ Gel. That's across most of the accounts already because we see opportunity for price increase there and marginality improvement. Really good activity on women's health and also some good international increases as well. Looking at Lift, it's been a great year for Lift, 32% growth overall year-on-year. That includes the Glucogel brand as well, which is a more concentrated gel used for applications of the gums. In 2024, we've had 23 new listings. Lift, primarily driven by pharmacy, contributing about 61% to the overall growth in this category for us. In value terms, about GBP 1.4 million. It's due to where we had a CPI annualization, cost-price increase for customers. Across it, we've had a sales push, which has got new listings.
All of this has been supported by strong activity with all the forms and paperwork we have put into pharmacies. We have launched some new flavors of shots. The shots contribute 26% to the overall growth in this area for us. We have NPD listings. Sainsbury's introduced some products in 2024. Wholesalers introduced new flavors that we had. The overall marketing campaign has done really well with overall brand awareness of 44% and now increasing to 53% compared to last year. In 2025, as I say, new pharmacy sales reps are going to be pushing that. We are going to increase, we hope, the level of prescriptions for the products and push more into this area and informing more into the type 1 diabetes market. Finally, just picking up on Earol. Earol grew by 10%, achieving 10 new listings last year. We had this great accolade as well.
Last year, it won the most valuable products through the Pharmacy Magazine, being nominated again this year. A great achievement there. Retailers consistently consider Earol as the top brand of choice in earcare. The product now represents 13%. Sorry, Baby Earol that we've launched represents 13% of our overall Earol revenues. Some great NPD launched in 2025. You'll see on the page there. We've launched the Almond Earol product now. For some people, olive oil isn't such a good remedy for them. It maybe causes irritation. Almond oil is much softer. We launched that product, plus an aftercare product, which helps if you had your ears cleaned or wax removed to help soothe the ear afterwards. Again, really good activity in the retailers. We've got good shelf positions, as you can see in that bottom right-hand side of the slide.
We're currently working to deploy more training into pharmacies. Earol is enjoying great expansion, as I've said, going into WH Smith, going into Holland & Barrett, and being shortlisted for a fantastic award. A few highlights of our current power brands, but we're very interested for the growth and the synergistic effect of those two Health & Her and Balance Activ women's health brands together. Just to finish on that slide, and then we'll get to the questions. As I said before, simplified capital-light structure, focusing on higher margin, higher multiple consumer healthcare landscape. I mean, exit multiples in this space, historically, look back the last four or five years, averaging sort of between 13%-15%, 14.6% we say there. We believe that having this more pure play branded business will deliver higher value for the business ultimately.
Good net cash position after the completion of the deal to sell the CDMO. That obviously does not include any proceeds for selling the oral care business, but that leaves us in a strong position by the end of July. RCF still available, clear focus, investing in organic growth and selected complementary acquisition. That finishes our presentation. Now I am quite happy to move over and we will try and go through as many of the questions as we have had already. If we start at the top, there is a couple of, I mean, there is one I will kick off straight away. One of the first questions was, when will the company pay dividends? Just to say, it is not our intention at this exact moment in time to pay dividends because we are obviously in a growth phase and investing growth.
As the company becomes more and more meaningfully profitable, we would look to have a progressive dividend policy. We will talk more about them when we have reached that point in the not too distant future. Danny, can I do it?
Yeah, I will say it after the break. I will take the second one. Pro forma growth of Health & Her. In 2023, that business did about GBP 6 million of revenues. It has done GBP 5.9 million in 2024 on a like-for-like basis. I think the previous owners had made a lot of investments in order to establish the brands, develop the apps, build the team, and really required more financing capability in order to deliver the growth opportunity in front of them. I think I said earlier, we expect those brands to deliver over GBP 9 million of revenue in 2025.
We feel we required that business at an optimal time as it turned the corner for growth again. I think important to note is, I do not think we said it earlier, these brands are significantly more accretive to the gross marginality of the group. We are about 46% blended today. These brands generate margins of over 60%. As we go forward and drive the growth from those Health & Her brands, we expect that to clearly push up the gross margin on the P&L. Next one for me as well, inventory. You will have already seen in the results that the inventory excludes the inventory associated with the CDMO business. That is transferred to assets held for sale as part of the discontinued operation. In 2023, inventory would have been about GBP 10.3 million.
On the balance sheet, it's about GBP 5.1 million at the end of 2024. I think important to note there is that the way the non-current assets held for sale accounted for the CDMO operations, the share purchase deal, everything's removed from the balance sheet for 2024, all put into the non-current assets held for sale line. On the oral care brands, as these are an asset-based deal, still the potential to be a share purchase deal, subject to completion of that transaction in 2025. It's accounted for as an asset-based deal on the balance sheet. You'll see the inventory associated with oral care is actually still in our 2024 inventory line. Where we've got GBP 5.1 million of inventory, there'd be about GBP 750,000 of inventory associated with the oral care brands in that.
Really, it's moving from about GBP 10.3 million last year on a combined basis to about GBP 4.5 million-GBP 4.3 million on an ongoing basis. Inventory as a percentage of revenue pro forma for 2025 would be around 12%-13%. Previously, the group operated around a 20% inventory to revenue ratio. Of course, we had all the raw materials and packaging as well on the balance sheet then as a CDMO, which we no longer have.
Thanks for that break. We've got quite a long question. It's coming from somebody else here. Sorry, I just got my phone.
The question is, how do you ensure in pursuing non-competitive deals, especially in accelerated timeframes facilitated by new cash resources, that you are conducting sufficiently robust due diligence to uncover all the material risk, financial, operational, legal, and especially cultural, and are not inadvertently overpaying or acquiring hidden liabilities that a competitive process might have brought to light? Yeah, I think, Ben, if you follow the business since its inception, you'll see we have a reasonable track record of making acquisitions, not overpaying and delivering growth out of those. We have a very thorough due diligence process. Our preference is always not to enter a competitive process because we have very clear objectives on the price we're prepared to pay for businesses. A competitive process is done for exactly the reason of increasing the price and maximizing the price themselves.
Our preference is to look for those assets that sit complementary to what we're doing. They sit in the categories of what we want, and they sit in the places that we want. That is all about broadening out, filling out spaces in our existing portfolio. That could be filling out spaces in terms of therapy, in terms of broadening the category, in terms of distribution, in terms of geography. There are lots of complementarities that can be considered and adjacencies that can be considered. The second point really is how do we make sure we've done our due diligence properly? We have a very thorough due diligence process. We do a lot of due diligence ourselves internally, but we also rely on external due diligence people, particularly for the material areas of risk.
As you said, financial, legal, we always use external providers to undertake external financial and legal due diligence. Cultural, that's important for us. We get in to understand the people, the business, the mentality, and the fit. Also, when you look at the market, the marketing, the distribution, the customers, what will they think? We do a lot of that ourselves with our team because the important thing is when we do an acquisition is our team has to deliver the upside and the integrated business afterwards. It is really important they're all involved in the process of undertaking the due diligence, the assessment of the business. We have a number of stages, initial stage, early stage, helicopter view, first look, second look, detailed DD.
When it comes to commercial regulatory manufacturing, we have a lot of that done ourselves internally, all with our CDMO partners because they're the people who have to deliver that business integrated on the far side. Yeah, and be assured there's never in our mind a risk of trying to do a deal quickly and therefore missing something. We do the diligence as needed. We do it well. We do it thoroughly. If a process wants to run ahead of that, then we're either out of the process or that has to wait because we won't undertake an acquisition risk. Next question, which I'll pass over to Danny, if that's all right.
Yeah, sure. This is how extensively are you using AI in the business? We have big ambitions to drive AI in the business going forward.
We are part of our five-play new strategy that Jerry relayed earlier as we are working towards that. The start of that is implementing the new ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics 365, which has the finance and supply chain modules within it. Key to getting our AI to be effective for us is to have our data in the business right to begin with. To do that, we want all of our systems talking to one another.
Our plan is to reinvest some of the proceeds from the divestment to grow out the number of modules we implement on D365, so commercial modules, HR, marketing, e-commerce, so that we can get insight from the data and put this all into a data lake that enables us to train the AI to give us quick insights that we can give to our field sales teams and our commercial teams to go and generate leads and execute on those and also help us identify trends in innovation and opportunities in the market. We are on that path. It's going to take us a bit of time to get the full benefit of that, but we will go live on the ERP at the beginning of next year, end of this year, and roll out those additional modules.
In tandem with that, we've been bringing in new skill sets and capability into the business in the areas of data analytics and digital capability to ensure that we've got the know-how and the expertise to drive the results and also ensure that our data has the integrity to rely upon it and deliver clear objectives to our teams.
Great. Thank you. Do you want to cover the next one? There's not sure what it means.
Moat. What does Moat does Health & Her have? I presume that means mission objectives. I'm not sure.
No, no. Or it could be what Moat is protecting.
Oh, I see. I've got you.
So it's a question which says, what Moat does Health & Her have?
If the question is around what protection does Health & Her have around the business, the significant protection it has is the high level of clinical data and support it has behind its products, the clinical research that is undertaken, the studies it's undertaken, the building of the products, matching them with the research, not only in our own studies, but in other studies that are available to us, and making sure they properly react to the right conditions for the customer. Secondly, the app and the engagement with the app. There's a lot of work and scientific evidence behind the products and how they're built and how they're developed, along with a strong marketing message and targeting the right customers in the right way. I hope that answers your question, but if that's not clear, ask another one.
I'll hand over to Danny for the next question on the impact of the sale on the comms.
The question is, what impact does the sale of the manufacturing operation have on cost of goods and sold and gross margins? Just to answer the latter part of that question first, I think you can see at the start of the deck on the financial highlights that we separated out the marginality of the discontinued and continued business. The discontinued operation generated 38% gross margin. The ongoing business generates 46%, and we expect that to increment quickly over the next few years through growth of high-margin products. I think what's important to note here is that the supply price in our long-term manufacturing agreement with Biokosmes is based on the existing prices we already had on an intercompany basis from our facilities in Sweden and Italy.
That was a key part of the deal. Those prices form the basis of the EBITDA multiple that Riverside paid for the business. We have already got stability on that pricing, protection over the next 10 years under that long-term agreement. The agreement allows for a mechanism on an annual basis for the prices to move up or down 3%. Each party would meet in good faith to review those prices and review whether there is an opportunity to reduce them or if there is fair justification for those prices to be increased if there were certain key input costs going up, for example, so that we would have enough time to pass through any cost increases to our retailers as well, of course, and pass on the pricing.
With the brands we've got left in the portfolio and the pricing power we have on those brands and the marginality improvement we've been able to generate over the last few years, we're confident in our ability to execute CPI if we need to. We've shown that on Balance Activ over the last couple of years.
Do you want to take—I think you've covered the top two.
Yeah, thanks.
Do you want to take the next one on the corporate costs?
Yeah. The next question is, are all of the corporate costs included in the GBP 6.2 million EBITDA of the ongoing business? The short answer is yes. As a point of clarity to that, the only corporate cost that is not in the GBP 6.2 million would be the cost of our Chief Manufacturing Officer that sits with the divested operations.
As you will have seen us announce, Gianluca will sadly be standing down from Venture Life on completion of the deal. Within the GBP 6.2 million, I think what is important to note is that with any divestment we do, pre-divestment, we would have shared costs across our group. We would have done recharges of management, finance, operational functions. Some of the corporate costs as well would have been recharged out. When we account for the divested operations, because you do not lose those costs incrementally from the business, they are retained in the ongoing P&L. The GBP 6.2 million already suffers or absorbs the cost of all of that overhead in the ongoing business. We lose temporary leverage benefit from t he sharing of costs.
As we move forward, we'll expect that we'll regain that leverage benefit from those corporate costs that are in the ongoing business as we continue to grow organically and do more M&A.
Thanks, Danny. The next question is, how is Hervitality differentiated from Health & Her? There's a very clear differentiation there. Health & Her is a supplement-only brand. It only has food supplements in it, and we will keep a brand that way. Hervitality is a topical brand, which means it's products applied to the skin or to the mucosal surfaces. Within that range, for example, we have products that deal with some of the other symptoms and effects of the menopause. For example, we have boosting face masks, collagen-boosting face masks, which is to help with dryness of skin and the aging process that comes through menopause.
We have a cooling mist to help with hot flushes. We have a vaginal dryness gel to help with, again, vaginal dryness, which is one of the symptoms and issues with menopause. We have an anti-aging face serum as well. It is those sort of things. They are topical products applied either to the skin or the mucosal surfaces inside the vagina to help with some of those other issues of menopause, as well as obviously being supported with the Health & Her products on a supplementation basis. Next question is, what is the date of the next update? We will put out a first-half trading update towards the end of July. We will give you an update then on how the first half has gone. Next question is, what makes the manufacturing assets attractive to the buyer at the price paid?
I think you'd have to ask the buyer to get the answer for them. I think the reason that they bought it is because the manufacturing businesses we have are very high-quality, specialized in medical devices, really good technical team, really good production setup, well-built business. The buyer is building an industrial group covering all areas of manufacturing. They have food supplements, and they have, I think, four other facilities across Italy covering food supplements and cosmetics, a small bit of medical devices. I think with the acquisition of our manufacturing businesses, they see a food step of a very high-quality business in the medical device area. Again, they're investing in that industrial group, and they'll look to grow it and develop it and build more revenues. They're very keen for us to do more business with them, not just across medical devices, but across others.
Obviously, as we buy products and assets, we'll look at making use of those facilities where we can. The next question is, are there any safeguards to prevent the buyer of the manufacturing assets from supplying similar products to VLG competitors? Absolutely. It's in the agreements. How is trading going today in 2025? As we said already in the release in the RNS, how we feel 2025 is going, and we'll give a trading update at the end of July. I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that, Danny.
I don't think it's appropriate for us to give too much detail, but we're positive and pleased with the performance of the business, and we'll provide good detail around that later in July.
Thank you. Next question is, do you foresee the founders of Health & Her staying with the business? Yes, we do.
The next question is, having seen that as well as offering Health & Her/ Him products via Holland & Barrett, you often direct to customers via your own subscription service. I wonder whether you could comment on the retailer's view of this possible conflict of interest. We do not give retailers exclusivity across our products. It is important, as you said before, shoppers. We need to be where shoppers shop. No retailer expects an exclusive arrangement on our products. They might have an advanced arrangement where perhaps they get to launch it first, but we always look to put all our products in all the retailers. That includes Amazon across our own platform. They do not consider it at all as a conflict of interest. They consider it a natural part of the retail landscape. Oh, yes.
I think, yeah, someone's clarified that question earlier about moats, disparities to entry, which I think.
Thanks, Melvin.
I've answered. Final question we've got here is, will you multi-source in the future to mitigate risk? Yeah, there's a couple of things to cover there. I think what the question is aimed at is our manufacturing. So whilst the Biokosmes facility and the Gnesta facility make a lot of our products, we have 15 other CDMOs across the business currently. That will go down a bit with some of the divested smaller products. Yes, we do have other CDMOs. We will look to maintain that. We have an arrangement within the agreement with the buyer of the Biokosmes and Gnesta that they have a first right of offer on new manufacturing to see if they can give us equal terms in terms of price, quality, volume, all of the areas.
They do have a right to that. We also have a right within the agreement to have a backup manufacturer for all of the products we make with Biokosmes and Gnesta. We will not look to overtly expand our CDMO portfolio because the more you have, the more risk to manage. We will make sure it is balanced and risk is appropriately measured with CDMOs and appropriate backups.
Jerry, Daniel, thank you for answering all those questions you can from investors. Of course, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Jerry, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Yeah, sure. Thank you. We have answered all the questions that were submitted.
I hope that's been to your satisfaction. Thank you, everybody, for listening in. We get a lot of positive feedback from the Investor Meet platform that it gives, obviously, private investors an opportunity to hear directly from us as the management team. Always happy to answer questions, always happy to meet and talk about those. I hope it's been informative. It's a very exciting time for the business. As I said earlier, we're sad that a number of our colleagues who've been on the journey a long time from Biokosmes and Gnesta are moving out to be owned externally, but we think that's a great thing for them and the business and for our business. We'll be working with them going forward. We'll continue those same discussions, relationships, working together as before.
I think going forward, Venture Life, exciting time, lots of resources to deploy, great market segments that we're in, products, existing power brands going very well. Now we've got cash to drive them, drive market share, drive NPD, and to get some nice complementary assets in. A very exciting time for business, trading well, very happy with how the business is. Yeah, we look forward to the future. Thank you for joining us. We look forward to keeping you updated on our next update on the investors.
Jerry, Daniel, thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the 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 may only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Venture Life Group, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Good morning to you all.