Good afternoon and welcome to the Venture Life Group PLC 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. Just 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 Jerry Randall. Good afternoon to you.
Good afternoon. Welcome everybody to our presentation of our results for the 12 months to December 2025. I'm Jerry Randall, Founder and CEO of the Venture Life business. I'm joined today by Danny Wells, CFO, and Kate Bache, who's Head of our Marketing and Innovation. Kate was a Co-founder of Health & Her business that we bought in 2024, and Danny joined us in 2021 as part of the BBI acquisition. We're gonna take you through some slides today. I'll give some details on general sort of update and corporate update. Danny will have some more details on the financials, and then Kate's gonna deep dive a bit more into the brands and what's been going on there.
As we said at the opening, obviously post any questions that you'd like in the forum, and we'll attempt to answer those at the end. Just a summary on highlights really. 2025 has been quite a year of change for us. We've divested of our CDMO operations, which happened in July of 2025. We divested of those and some other smaller products to the Healthea Group, an Italian industrial group that now is one of our major suppliers. Those businesses that we sold still supply us. We're you know got a good strategic partnership with Healthea. We're accessing a number of their other manufacturing capabilities. They're helping us a lot in innovation and development as you'll see later. Building a strong partnership with them.
We also disposed of some of our oral care brands to a different buyer at the end of the year. Through those disposals, we've generated a significant amount of cash. We paid down. We had about GBP 20 million in net debt at the time. We paid that off, and we now, at the end of December 2025, sat on about GBP 34 million of net cash with no debt. Although we do retain the RCF facility that we had, which is GBP 30 million committed and GBP 20 million accordion. We integrated the acquisition of Health & Her during 2025.
We acquired that business towards the end of 2024 and, Kate will talk you more through that business and the products and the developments, as we go forward, but delivered a fantastic revenue growth during 2025. We've been buying back some shares. We've to date, acquired just over 5% of our own shares through a buyback program. We have authority to go up to 10%. We believe that's been a good use of some of the funds that we've had because we think the company is significantly undervalued, and we've been able to buy back shares at an interesting price. We implemented the Microsoft Dynamics ERP, our new financial systems that went live in December and has substantially improved our reporting function, our financial systems.
We'll be linking in more with our digital integrations and our integrated digital capabilities that we'll talk about a bit later. Finally on the sort of overall highlights, we've improved and increased the leadership within our team. We appointed a new appointee to the board, Peter Jackson, who's coming as head of digital and technology. Peter's very experienced throughout the industry, and he's helping us to implement our integrated digital strategy. That's taking the ERP system, linking that with many other parts of our business, looking at how we use AI, looking at how we get insight, and how we target the sale and growth of our products and business. Through all those operational changes, we've simplified the business quite significantly. We're now a pure brand-focused consumer healthcare business.
We have four core power brands, which we'll talk about later in the presentation. We're focusing on those. I think what you'll see, what you have seen in 2025 is an increase in our advertising promotion spending. Danny will go through that slightly later. What that's done is generate good, strong, double-digit organic growth across the business. Eleven percent across the whole business up to GBP 35 million for the period. That's like-for-like comparable, so not taking into account any of disposed businesses and assuming like-for-like growth across all of the businesses if we owned them in the previous period. The power brands, the main brands actually grew 15%. In the U.K., which is about two-thirds of our business, the whole business there grew by 17%.
That's really good organic growth. It's virtually all volume. There's not much price growth in there. A key feature of 2025 was that we derived GBP 2.7 million of our revenues from new products that we launched in the previous twelve months. You'll see that increasing in the business as we go forward. With Kate's new role recently joined, she's created a strong pipeline that we're bringing new products through across all of our brands. We see that will continue to grow. You'll see, again, much more revenue in 2026 coming from new product development launches too. As I mentioned, the cash position at the end of the period of GBP 34 million.
I'll pass over to Danny now, who will talk about some of the key financial headlines.
Thanks, Jerry. Jerry's talked about the pro forma.
Growth of the business last year, 11.4% like-for-like. That was driven by volume, about 10.5% of that was from volume, 1% from price. On a reported basis, that was a 32% growth last year, up to GBP 35 million in revenue. Gross profit in absolute terms grew proportionally with revenue up to GBP 15.8 million relative to the GBP 12.2 million in the comparative period. Gross margins were about stable year-on-year. The 45.0% we presented in 2025 actually includes some non-cash impact of about 0.6 percentage points from fair value of inventory uplifts on acquisition of Health & Her.
appreciate it's quite a technical accounting point to raise early on in this update, but I think it's a key point to understand is that there's a non-cash impact from business combinations accounting, which is fully unwound by the end of 2025. On a true like -for -like basis, cash gross margins were broadly in line with the previous year. As we move forward into 2026, and you'll note that we've repeatedly talked of late about our increase in marketing spend behind our power brands. We've increased our marketing spend from around 7% of revenues in 2024 to just short of 10% in 2025. What that's doing is allowing us to grow our brands more profitably with our retailers and driving strong double-digit growth across our power brands.
You'll have noted post-period end, we've been delivering 18% revenue growth year-on-year versus the same time last year. Importantly, that growth is coming through at a stronger gross margin than we're reporting for 2025. And that's really coming from largely new product launches and cost price increases we've been able to land through the strength of the product range we have now and their positioning in the market. It's enabling us to put through initiatives at greater levels of gross margin. To give an example of that, our new product launches are capped at a minimum 60% gross margin on launch. Significantly accretive from the overall reported gross margins you're seeing in the P&L for 2025. We'll expect to see greater gross margin improvement arising from that as we move through 2026.
EBITDA margins, although EBITDA in absolute terms was about in line with the previous year at GBP 6 million versus GBP 6.2 million in the prior year, the EBITDA margin from that was suppressed to 17% in 2025 versus the 23% we did in the previous year. Key to note here, Jerry's already talked about the divestments made in 2025. It was a busy year to say the least. Sold off around half of the business. Actually, instead of reducing the operating cost base to reflect a lower level of revenue in the business, what we've done is strategically reinvest that cost base into areas where we needed to upskill and bring in new talent and skills to the business that were not in the organization before that are going to enable us to deliver on our growth strategy as we move forward.
Particularly, we're talking about in the areas of digital marketing, healthcare practitioner marketing, also, in Chief Digital Officer brought into the group as well. We've strengthened our capabilities across the organization, and that's enabling us to leverage our cost base moving forward as we do our M&A. As you've seen, and Jerry's highlighted already, we've ended the year in a strong cash position of GBP 34 million, having paid off from a net debt position of GBP 20 million at the end of the previous year. With that significant cash available to us to put into our M&A, and we'll talk to M&A later, it's allowing us to leverage our cost base in a significant way and drive our EBITDA marginality up significantly through acquisitions as we move forward.
There's a temporary suppression of the EBITDA margin that we're reporting for 2025. During the period, we received GBP 56 million of cash from the divestments and delivered strong cash flow generation. Free cash flow, although it decreased GBP 3.3 million versus the GBP 3.7 million in the previous year, there were significant cash exceptional costs in 2025. We implemented a new ERP system across the organization, Microsoft Dynamics 365. That went live at the end of December last year. Cost us around GBP 2 million to implement that system, the finance and supply chain modules of it. That of course had an impact on our free cash flow.
If we look at the underlying free cash flow generation of the group last year, excluding the impact of that investment in the ERP system, our free cash flow was about GBP 5.1 million at a cash conversion, a free cash flow conversion of about 86% to EBITDA. That's broadly what we would expect to see as we move forward because we have got an asset-light infrastructure in the business nowadays, simplified business model. A lot of that EBITDA is flowing right through to free cash flow. That's a sort of a normalized level of what we'd expect to see going forwards. Last point on this page is to highlight that through the sale of the manufacturing facilities and oral care brands, we generated a profit on those disposals of GBP 11.4 million in 2025.
Profit after tax from the discontinued operations, that manufacturing business and the oral care brands, was GBP 8 million reported after allowing for exceptional costs and fees associated with bringing that GBP 56 million of cash into the business. Overall profit for the period to shareholders was GBP 6 million for 2025. Now on this page we'll just give an overview of the brands here and what the portfolio looks like today. Later in this presentation, Kate will talk to the brands in more detail and the drivers in the U.K. and internationally supporting these figures and our marketing and how that strategy's evolved. As a headline, just to recap firstly, 11% pro forma growth year-on-year for 2025, and the power brands growing by 15%.
To be clear, when I say the power brands, I exclude the oncology support range, which is the last line of the table on the screen. The oncology support range, those products, Pomi-T and Gelclair, are partnered only products through distributors. Venture Life do not put any marketing spend behind the growth of those products. When we talk to power brands, it's the other four areas of therapy on the screen. As you can see, you look at women's intimate health, hormone health and energy management. Those three brands or therapy areas combined account for about 78% of the group's revenues in 2025, and they're all growing strongly both in the U.K. and overall. Women's intimate health grew 16.8% in 2025 to GBP 8.8 million in revenue. In the U.K., that was around 12.5% growth.
We'll talk to the drivers behind that later on. Internationally, we grew really strong, 21% internationally in the year just gone, and that was through growth of a new partner in Cooper Consumer Health and health products customer, hormone health first year of acquisition. First year of ownership under Venture Life, so we acquired the business in November 2024. This is where Kate and Gervase came from. The Health & Her and Health & Him brands. The business grew 44% in 2025, up to GBP 8.5 million in revenue. Around 36% of that growth came from the Health & Her brand.
The Health & Him brand, which launched at the end of 2024, that's grown strongly up to around GBP 900,000 in revenue in 2025. That's the balance of growth to get to the 44%. Energy management, that comprises two brands as well, Lift and Glucogel. That was GBP 10 million of revenue last year, up 6.4% overall. That broadly splits as growth from Lift of about 7% and growth from Glucogel of 4% flat.
On the Lift point for a second, at the start of the year, you may have remember us talking about at our interim results or the first round of interim results, that we had a glitch on the NHS ordering platform at the beginning of 2025, where the product for Lift temporarily fell off that platform and we lost some sales at the beginning of 2025. Lift really recovered strongly in the second half of the year to end up in 7% growth from a decline of 5% in the first half, which was driven by that glitch on the NHS ordering platform. The Glucogel brand has come through at GBP 2.5 million. It's a very much a cash cow for the business. It's a well-protected business through equalization deals with the pharmacies across the U.K.
Generates a good 80% gross margin as well. A real fuel for reinvestment for other brands. Finally on this page, ENT, ear, nose and throat. This is sold across the U.K. under the ENT brand and internationally through Scandinavia under the Vaxol brand. Around GBP 2.5 million of the GBP 5.8 million of revenue comes from international. In the U.K. business, that's grown strongly by 11.5% last year. Internationally, under that Vaxol brand I just mentioned, that partner went through a change of ownership at the end of 2025, and there was some disruption to the marketing plans that were in place with that partner that meant there was high stock levels in the market that didn't sell out at the end of the year.
We can see the sellout activity post-period is going really strongly, and we've had those orders recovered at the beginning of 2026. On an underlying basis, that international business would have been in growth if not for the temporary disruption through the change of ownership from our partner. I did say finally, but I forgot to say oncology support. Oncology support was GBP 2 million last year. That's our Pomi-T and Gelclair brands. That broadly splits GBP 1 million on Pomi-T, GBP 1 million on Gelclair. The Gelclair brand has a significant partner that takes a large order on a sort of a 15-month cycle. That order was planned for December last year. That partner also went through a change of ownership at the end of the year on the Gelclair brand. We fulfilled that order in January this year, post period end.
If not for the timing of that order moving, the Gelclair brand would have been broadly flat for the year. We'll come on to more detail later on.
Oh, great. Thanks very much, Danny. M&A is featured in our growth and our development in recent years as well, and we intend to continue that strategy. If you look back over the last 10 years, we've grown as a group consistently at around 20% compound annual growth. That's been a combination of acquired growth and also organic growth. Important for us to drive the organic growth, and you've seen that in the results. You've seen that we're delivering that already. You would have seen also in the RNS and from what Danny said, that we're seeing good double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2026 as well, 18% year to date. However, we're keen to deploy that capital that we've got.
As I said, we have GBP 34 million of cash at the end of December 2025. We also have our up to GBP 50 million revolving credit facility. We're keen to acquire some additional assets, complementary to the categories that we're in at the moment. Women's health, men's health are big areas of focus for us at the moment, and so we're looking in that area. We're also starting to spend more time in the area of longevity, and Kate will talk a bit about that as we get further on through. We've been looking at assets and opportunities.
We employed an M&A manager who started with us in the summer last year, and he has been going through searching for the right opportunities for us, the right things to buy, to bring in. We want products that will enhance our P&L, so that'll be improved gross margins, improved EBITDA margins. Sensibly priced as well. We've always been careful about what we spend on the assets you buy, and so we will be purchasing things at a sensible price and won't be driven up on unrealistic prices. We're looking predominantly to buy assets, so as in a brand or suite of products as opposed to a company. We are currently interacting with some interesting targets.
I can't say any more than that at the moment, but it's core to our strategy, and we expect to be able to add some really nice profit margin, profitability-enhancing products into our portfolio using the resources we've got to, again, accelerate the growth of the business. I mentioned earlier that we'd appointed a Chief Technology Officer onto the board. Peter Jackson joined us back end of last year. And we've set out in our strategy that we want to have an integrated digital strategy for our business. A first step on that was obviously the ERP system that we put in in December 2025, working very well, starting to deliver real results, speeding up when we get data, the quality of the data, the analysis we can undertake.
At the moment, Peter's going through an activity of building a data lakehouse. It's an analytics platform to give us real-time commercial insights, linking EPOS with sell-out data and all the other data feeds that we have in the business and then looking towards implementing demand planning and forecasting processes and systems. The strategy really is, you know, building a digital and data strategy for the business, establishing data ownership, governance processes, building AI and digital IQ with teams then able to use it. And we can use that for decision-making, insight, and how we grow and develop the business.
Ultimately, we expect to be more digitally focused, understanding the trends, being able to predict the future, understand for our customers where we should go, what we should be selling to them, how we should be selling, and deploying resources around the business, to improve our efficiency and performance. That's been a big step in our five-pillar strategy, and I'm really pleased with the progress we've had on that. Now I'm gonna hand over to Kate, who's gonna tell you all the interesting stuff about how our brand's been progressing and innovation and marketing, et cetera. Over to you, Kate.
Thanks, Jerry. Yeah, kicking off with Health & Her and Health & Him on our hormonal health therapeutic area. Some really pleasing growth from these brands as they've been integrated into the Venture Life Group. 44% growth year-on-year. Partly this has come through distribution points, extending our corporate range, which exists in menopause and andropause. Also adding some really exciting new innovation. We have a new range of multivitamin supplements, and these are built on an insight which is that hormone levels directly impact your nutrient levels. Some really nice breakthrough innovation for the category on this range, which is the top range there on the right-hand side. We've also launched into fertility, pregnancy, and new mum across both brands, and this range is going really well.
It's been launched into Holland & Barrett and we're seeing some really positive results. We expect that distribution to roll out further into Boots in the coming weeks. We've also seen some great marketing highlights, so as many of you have probably seen before, we focus very heavily on these educational touchpoints, especially around menopause and hormonal health. We've very successfully advertised next to documentaries in the U.K. before, specifically the Davina McCall menopause documentary, which grew the brand significantly in that time. We've emulated that in the U.S. market by advertising next to the Oprah Winfrey menopause documentary in March 2025, and this gave us a really nice uplift on the brand in that market.
We continue to do this across other channels as well, so where we see that there's education really improving and expanding on menopause in particular into YouTube and podcasts, we're advertising next to these key moments, to really take advantage of these kind of large societal shifts, in education. For 2026, we're focusing very much more on new innovation. Again, looking at category expansion, we're looking to launch a range of longevity supplements later on in the year. And really this is a fantastic opportunity for us to, again, add some new insight into gender longevity especially. Really focusing our energy on how men and women age differently. Very excited to see that range hit the stores hopefully later on in this year.
We're also looking to expand our single ingredient supplement range. In the supplement world, this is quite a common behavior. As people enter the category, maybe one supplement they then look to add into their their portfolio of products they're using on a daily basis. We have a creatine supplement just about to go into market. This will be the first creatine supplement on the menopause fixture. We also have a range of omegas and we're developing some products which are specifically there to support with heart health.
From a marketing perspective, we have a fantastic new campaign going live, which is tackling or tapping into the opportunity on this brand to support women at every stage of their female health, which is quite unique to the Health & Her brand in the UK. The beauty of this campaign is it will go into some of these mainstream channels, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5, and we're very excited about the fact that it will give us that breadth of brand equity and saliency across all of these key demographics.
Looking forward to seeing the results from that one. We're also sponsoring a menopause documentary series, which will be going onto a mainstream streaming network at the end of quarter two, and we are the lead sponsor on this program, which again is utilizing the strategy of really focusing in on these key educational moments. The final thing just to mention on this brand, so we've just recently found out, as Holland & Barrett for the first time are selling their data in the market, so we can have a really good view of the total category, that the Health & Her brand is now the number one menopause brand in the U.K. and has been since 2023. Really excited to see that number one position and leveraging that as we go forward.
Moving on to Balance Activ then. We have seen another great year of growth on this brand after some really consistent growth over the last few years. This is thanks to the thrush cream and the intimate soothing cream really adding some good incremental growth to this brand, giving us two new need states over the last few years and really adding some extra breadth to our offering to women and consumers. The thrush product in particular, which is the pink pack there, is growing at 20%. We know that there is a trend in this category as there is in broader categories in this area, that women are looking for more natural, non-medicated products.
The brand has also launched into Holland & Barrett for the first time, thanks to the strong relationship that Health & Her has had in the past. We've also launched a new website with a checkout, which is capitalizing on the very high volumes of organic traffic to this brand, which we collect through our symptom tool. We're also making sure that insights are collected, and also really it gives us the opportunity to really optimize our creative digital marketing to purchase rather than just getting impressions. That's growing really strongly in the last three months since it's been launched.
On this therapeutic area, we also have a new customer, an international customer rather in Cooper, and they have the Saugella brand, which has launched our proprietary bacterial vaginosis range into Italy, Germany and France. Some really strong growth here from our international partners, and we're excited to see where this customer can go over the next couple of years. To 2026, we have some exciting innovation coming on this brand too. The product on the left-hand side there is our first vaginal test kit, and this is really tapping into this insight that women are generally quite uneducated and find it very difficult to identify the infections that they're experiencing. This will be the first product within our range that supports women in doing this.
The third product in the range, pink and green, is a completely new product for us, which tackles and treats the symptoms of thrush and BV. We again tap into this very interesting insight to support women not 100% sure what symptoms or what infection is related to the symptoms. There is quite a lot of complexity over the symptoms between those two conditions. Yeah, the really interested retailer base is excited to have this innovation in their hands, and this will be launching in the summer.
It's also gonna be the first time that we take the brand onto TV, and we're also running a media campaign in bathrooms to, again, really tapping into that moment of truth for women and trying to educate them on the symptoms, particularly of bacterial vaginosis. It's a very unknown area for women. Thrush is generally much better understood, but that also means that there's a big opportunity for us to educate women on what the symptoms are, but also what the risks are around bacterial vaginosis, which there's a lot of research over the last kind of 5-10 years that show that BV is directly related to risks around fertility and miscarriage.
Really keen to get this education out to women so that they can identify this is something that they need to treat. We're also continuing the distribution increases in our new successful therapeutic areas of thrush and intimate soothing cream, and we're going through some cost price increases at the moment across the brand, and also looking at efficiencies in our promotional strategy. From an international perspective, the brand I mentioned earlier, Saugella, under the Cooper business, is also looking to expand their portfolio specifically in and around some of the products around moisture. Excited to see what will come with that customer. Next on to Lift. After a bit of a tricky start early in 2025, we had a really strong recovery on this brand.
The two digital channels, which is our own website and Amazon, have been growing fantastically well on this brand over the course of 2025. This is partly because this brand, which is focused very much on type 1 diabetics, is a high volume product for individuals. They need to have these products in and around them on a daily basis. But also they tend to be quite bulky, so they kind of lend themselves very well to these two channels. In addition to that, Glucogel, which has been historically a heavily prescribed product, for the first time we made it available to our customer base on Amazon.
Obviously just makes it a little bit more convenient than having to go through a prescription pathway, and we're seeing some lovely incremental sales that have come out of that brand. On a marketing side of things, we're seeing that the Lift brand in particular is responding really well to digital marketing, again driving that online growth. We're excited to see that we're investing a little bit more on that this year as well and excited to see the growth that can come from that. Finally, from a bricks and mortar perspective, we've been doing some placement tests into the supplement fixture in some of our retailers, and that seems to be working really well.
We're looking to roll that out across some of our other customers in the next year or so onto 2026. We've got, again, some lovely innovation coming on this brand. We have on the top right-hand side of the white section, you can see we have 2 flavors of Lift gels coming to the market. The nice things about these products is that they are easy to carry by the consumer, they have very fast-acting glucose in them. But also from a tactical perspective, we're able to, because they're quite light, position them on clip strips next to some adjacent diabetic categories like continuous glucose monitors.
We're also launching a kids product, which allows kind of parents of children with type 1 diabetes to give a really clear measured dose to their children. I'm excited to see that this is a new innovation coming to the market later on in the year. We're also focusing a lot of energy this year on educating our healthcare professionals and continuing to really build on this fantastic recommendation that we see from healthcare professionals. We now know that the total brand, even though about a third of the brand sales come from prescription, almost 70% of the brand sales have come from a recommendation from a healthcare professional at some point, even if the consumer is now buying it direct.
We see this as a great way to really continue to establish the brand as the forefront of type 1 diabetes and getting those healthcare professionals to recommend the brand to those individuals. We're also exploring formulary expansion. At the moment, we're in about one-eighth of the formularies in the U.K., and we see again a great opportunity to expand that out, which would really enhance our prescription sales. We are leveraging our new in-house digital team, so we've moved all of our digital activities in-house now. We've got real focus on this area, and we're seeing some fantastic growth year to date on top of the growth that we saw in 2025. Finally, onto Earol, our final power brand.
As Danny mentioned up front, there is a small decline on this, but the U.K. revenue is growing really strongly at 11.5%, and this is thanks to some great distribution expansions into Sainsbury's, Morrisons, and WHSmith. We've also launched the brand into Holland & Barrett later on in 2025, and this has generated some great incremental growth, a lovely fit with that retailer, this brand. We'll also continue to work on our bricks and mortar strategy. We can see that the placement of this product within the store is really critical, so moving out of that kind of pharmacy channel, but into those mainstream aisles within the grocery sector is really important. We're also seeing this brand respond really well to education, especially across the digital channels there, Meta, YouTube and Google.
Again, trying to educate consumers about things like hearing loss and how that can be connected to wax buildup. Internationally, I think Danny mentioned it already, but the Vaxol brand is growing nicely, but because of the change in ownership, there was some phasing and inventory challenges that we felt on that brand, which is contributing to the overall slight decline. In 2026, we have a couple of really exciting opportunities to leverage a couple of the products in the range and expand their usage occasions. The first one being the swim product. This product is for swimmer's ear, otitis externa, which is a very seasonal product, as you can imagine at the moment, people using it on holiday and going swimming in the summer.
There's an interesting insight around this swimmer's ear can happen when you're simply bathing or having showers, so we're extending the usage occasion, the technical file to accommodate those new claims. Similarly on Baby Earol, we have a good opportunity to expand that into junior. The product itself is actually can be used up to age six years old. Just two very simple things to expand the usage occasions for those two products. We're also for the first time, going above the line on this brand as well.
We've got a new radio campaign, which is going live in the summer, and this is again to tap into that slightly older demographic where it's difficult for us to reach through digital, and to again educate the customer on really identifying areas where there might be wax buildup and talking about the benefits of the brand. We're also focusing on how the product looks on shelf, making sure that we really enhance the ability for our shoppers to find the product through packaging changes and also some shelf education. We've got a lovely strategic co-collaboration going on with our partner brand in Scandinavia, which we'll see some new market expansion in 2026. Handing that back over to Jerry then.
Yeah, great. Thanks very much, Kate. As I said earlier, about two-thirds of our business is within the U.K., including a little bit that we've now started to sell in the U.S., and that's the side of the business where we provide marketing support behind the brands. Outside of those territories, so across mainland Europe and other international territories, we use a distributor model where we don't support the marketing of those brands, but we do supply the IP, the products and everything within.
We've been working on that model on the distribution basis to try and focus and concentrate more on the sort of bigger, higher value customers where we think we can form a bit more of a strategic partnership and help them with innovation development, use some of our technologies and products to help build out their brands, which ultimately give us good volume and good revenues. Also, these international partners, particularly across Europe, are very strong in the pharmacy channel. The pharmacy channel in Europe is very disparate. Lots and lots of independent pharmacies. Not so much in the U.K. and U.S., but certainly in Europe. You need a big sales force to be able to access those pharmacies.
These customers give us that capability, something that we're not big enough to do ourselves yet. Three of our sort of main strategic customers here on the international side, which some have been alluded to already, is Cooper Consumer Health, Bayer, and Pharma Nord, based up in Scandinavia. With Cooper, we have a partnership with them. We've put a couple of our products into their Saugella brand. Saugella is one of the biggest female cleansing products in Italy. It was acquired by Cooper a few years ago from Viatris. We've now got a partnership with Cooper where they're gonna take some of our Balance Activ products into that brand and begin to extend that cleansing brand into treatment medication.
We did GBP 1.5 million of revenues with that customer during 2025, and we've had some strategic workshops to look at bringing more products into that range and growing out that partnership. We've been partnered with Bayer for many years now. They sell our Balance Activ product, but under their Canesten label, so the CanesBalance product that you can see there. That customer grows nicely. We do about 10% a year growth with them. Again, we're working to see what innovation we can bring into their pipeline and grow revenues for them and us. We have an agreement with Bayer which covers 54 countries, and only about 30 of those have so far been launched.
In each of those countries, we can also have our own brand in that market or another brand. Again, working with Bayer, working to increase the products that go out through them. Finally, Pharma Nord, as I think Danny and Kate mentioned, that's our partner for Earol outside of the UK. They, through change of distribution partner for them, had some stock in the market which had to be dealt with. That's been dealt with now. In 2026, we're already seeing orders growing, business developing. They'll be entering more markets and utilizing some of the innovation we've got around there.
You know, just three of our sort of bigger strategic partners that are all, you know, in growth and developing and helping us to access that pharmacy market outside of the U.K. Really just to sum up where we are at the end of our presentation. Post-period end, we've had some great trading in the first quarter. That investment in A&P is continuing to develop a good revenue growth 18% ahead of the previous year with good margin improvement. As we were saying, that new product development that comes through is coming through at higher margins, higher gross margins and higher EBITDA margins. As Kate's already mentioned, Health & Her has become the number one menopause supplement in the U.K. I say become, it's been that for a few years now, but the data's allowed us just to verify that.
I think also, what's important to say is we have an app with a Health & Her menopause product, and that's now been recognized as the number one app by an independent organization called ORCA. Very pleased with that sort of award there. I'll just pick up on the Middle East as well, because obviously that's very topical for everybody and the sort of concerns around supply chain and costs. Obviously the main impact there at the moment for us is around sort of energy and increasing energy prices. That knocks onto packaging, particularly glass, which is quite energy intensive in its manufacture and also in plastic.
What we've done is we've extended our order pattern with our suppliers further out to allow them to secure all the things they need to make the product at the existing prices and avoid as much as possible those increases. I mean, obviously, increases have been signaled that they will be coming. We haven't seen them in our numbers yet, and not in the short term. We're also confident that it's, you know, it's of a minimal amount. It won't be a significant impact to us, and we're already in discussion with customers who want to know what the impacts will be and how that will impact on their prices. We're comfortable we'll be able to, you know, pass on any increases.
As I say, we don't expect them to be too significant as we go forward. We've been undertaking a share buyback program. That's still on our agenda. We've acquired about 5.5% of our share capital through that program, as again, we believe the shares are significantly undervalued at this time. We're allowed to go up to 10%. That's still something that we have on our radar. In terms of outlook, we've got a simplified structure. We don't have our own manufacturing business now, so we don't have to invest in that.
We do have great strategic partnerships, particularly with the Healthea Group who acquired our manufacturing facilities, and that's really generating fantastic results in partnership as regards innovation, as regards production and looking at the cost base and making sure we manufacture at the most efficient price. We're now a focused higher margin pure consumer healthcare business with some real good power brands. Double-digit growth last year, increasing double-digit growth this year. The sector multiples for transactions are much, much higher than the company's valued now, and that sort of goes back to our core thesis that the company is significantly undervalued at the moment.
Strong net cash position, which we can use for M&A, and we've you know been working on that and you know M&A activities continue and are progressing and you know while we can't say any more, obviously we'll keep you informed as things go. What we've really seen is that simplification of the business, that cash we generated, the in-house team working fantastically. We've now created good new verticals in there, sort of across all the areas of the business. We've invested in a team to make it ready to be able to absorb further asset acquisitions. Brought a lot of our digital capabilities in-house, particularly as regards marketing. Fantastic new members in the senior management team and on the board. Yeah, we're really pleased with the progress. Brands are growing nicely.
We have some great white space to look at. We've got some great innovation coming through in 2026. I'm very pleased to be able to report all these results to you and tell you about our progress. That does bring us to the end of our presentation here. We do have a few questions in the Q&A, and I'm very happy to sort of move on to those already. The first question we had was regarding the share buybacks and where we are on that, but I think we already clarified that through the presentation. The next question was. Which of the power brands do you think will contribute most to growth in the coming year?
Well, I think where we see a lot of white space is obviously across the women's health and men's health space. There's been great growth, particularly in the Health & Her and Health & Him brands, also in the Balance Activ of the women's intimate health, and we still see lots of opportunity there. It's a very significant growing market. If you look even at something like bacterial vaginosis, where we are dominant in the U.K., we have the leading brand in the U.K. We're now beginning to enter into the thrush market, which by value is a much bigger market. We have a number of products going into there.
We also believe that with the sort of later life impacts of bacterial vaginosis, we're very keen on the education surrounding bacterial vaginosis and improving outcomes for women going forward. We see that as a big white space as well. Next question is. Are there any significant changes to the competitive landscape for the Health & Her supplements? I'll let Kate answer this because this is her baby.
Yeah. I suppose there has certainly been a number of new entrants into the menopause category, which is our core category. I think what's really pleasing is even though we've only just recently got the data, our number one position in value has significantly improved in the last two or three years. Even though there is more fragmentation in the overall category, we've continued to dominate that category and extended our number one position. I think for the brand, what's really exciting is it has the potential to stretch into these new areas like pregnancy, fertility, but also multivitamins. We see that could go further in the future as well for both Health & Her and Health & Him.
I think what we really focus a lot of our energy on is working very collaboratively with our key customers. We have a huge amount of data and insight, and we see that data and insight that we can give to our partners significantly improves our innovation pipeline and keeps us ahead of other competitors in the space. We will continue to do that and hopefully we can see that will impact the success of these new categories as we enter them.
Yeah. Thanks, Kate. I think also just to add on that, you know, we think the Health & Her range is the only range that can support, you know, women through all of their life stages or hormonal variation. You know, we're bringing great innovation to that. I think the app adds significantly as well because the number of downloads we have on the app and the data we collect from that gives us real insight into innovation and how we can drive that forward. I think it pulls on to the next question, which was: What gives you confidence Health & Her can remain number one as competition intensifies? I think Kate's, you know, picked that up. I think it's being agile. It's listening to the users of our products.
It's listening to what they tell us through all the insight that we have. I think really importantly as well, that all of the products within our business are backed by science. You know, we make sure we have good innovation, good science, and good support behind it. Another question was. In our opinion, which brand has the most untapped upside and why? Again, it's a difficult question to answer, but I'll give you some examples. I mean, Kate's already spoken about Health & Her. Health & Him, obviously has only just got off the ground. We did nearly GBP 1 million of revenue last year, but, you know, the Andropause product that was launched is growing rapidly, and we see lots more innovation in that space. Another really good example is Lift.
Lift is for Type 1 diabetics. It's glucose shots, chewables and a gel. At the moment, we think we have about 17% of the hypoglycemic episodes as in our Lift product is used in those episodes. If we can double that and only go up to 35% of those episodes, that doubles the Lift product over that timescale. One of the investments we made. Well, I think it was early 2026, we recruited a healthcare practitioner sales and marketing lady whose job is to make sure we get into more of those formularies. We're only in an eighth of the formulary, so there's a lot to go.
Actually pushing that marketing to the healthcare practitioners of the benefits around a pure glucose product with a metered dose like Lift. I think Kate has mentioned earlier, you know, if you're having fructose and other things within the energy sector, that's not so good for a Type 1 diabetic. We feel there's a lot of upside even in Lift, which has been growing fantastically over the last 2 or 3 years. We see strong upside, particularly, as I say, in the women's health and the men's health, in the Lift side. We don't have any more questions. We've either done a fantastic presentation, or people can't think of questions to ask. It's been a pleasure to talk to you all.
Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks to Danny, thanks to Kate, for being here. It's been an incredible year, 2025, and a lot of structural change. What we're seeing now is the real fruits of those labors, and particularly when we see that organic growth and you know the impact of that improved A&P, the new team that we've been building, the innovation, the support from our partners, from our shareholders and from the board, who are you know always you know fantastically supportive, but also challenging to make sure that we're doing the right thing.
Thank you to all of you listening, shareholders and non-shareholders alike, and I hope that's been a great presentation, and we look forward to updating you for more progress in the future.
Fantastic. Jerry, Daniel, Kate, thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.