June 4 is coming out left, right, and center. I'm just going to quickly run through these intro slides, and then we'll get straight into it with our first presenter. For anybody who's joining us for the first time, my name is Mark Tobin. I'm the founder of Coffee Microcaps. You're very welcome. For all our regular attendees, welcome back to this morning's webinar. I do want to give a special mention to RaaS Research Service, who is our virtual event sponsor here. If you are looking for some coverage of stocks in the smaller micro cap space, please do check out their website. They've got a free version, and they've also launched a subscription version now that you can join up to for some broader coverage and insights.
A quick compliance and disclaimer side, and as always, a very warm welcome to our friends from ASIC if they're joining us this morning. For anybody who is joining us for the first time, stocks we tend to have on here are capped under $300 million. That's our definition of a micro cap. Tend to be in revenue, approaching cash flow breakeven, or indeed already profitable. We tend not to have resources and biotechs on here. They don't kind of meet that second box. That's what I like to call industry micro caps, which kind of covers anything else from financial services, healthcare, technology, and industrial businesses. This morning, we've got two companies presenting over the next hour, 30 minutes each. We'll try and break that down into a roughly 20-minute present and 10 minutes of Q&A.
If you do have any questions for our presenters, please type them in the Q&A box. It might be under the more drop-down menu on your screen. Please note the webinar is being recorded, and it'll be posted on the Coffee Microcaps YouTube channel on Monday morning. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm still calling it that. I'm too old school to call it X. YouTube for this recording and all our previous ones. We've had a couple of interviews with fund managers of late leading into reporting season. If you're looking for some stocks to keep an eye on as we move through the back end of July and into August, please check those out. We'll have a few more companies presenting next week. LinkedIn, you can guess, and there's also a monthly newsletter that generally goes out the first week of the month.
Our first presenter this morning, I'm delighted to say we're welcoming back Dennison Hambling from Intelligent Monitoring Group. We will be welcoming back another regular presenter, Steven Lynam. He's going to be joining us from Melbourne from Immuron. For anybody who happened to notice, we did somehow manage to get two tickers right next to each other on the ASX, IMB and IMC. Funnily enough, out of 2,000, we managed to line that up. I will line up our first presenter here now, Dennison Hambling from Intelligent Monitoring Group. Dennison, good morning.
Yeah, morning, Mark. Thanks, everyone.
I am going to stop sharing my screen, Dennison. If you just want to pull up your presentation deck, I'll let you know once I can see it. Yeah, it's just loading now, Dennison. Yeah, I can see the cover slide now, mate.
Right. Thank you, Mark. I'll just kick off. Thank you, everyone, for your time. The goal today is just to move pretty quickly through a pre-zone, go to the cash flows, a little update on the business, and then just go to questions. Obviously, our results have been released this morning. Before we kick in, just to remind everyone, what is Intelligent Monitoring Group? IMB, the ticker. We are now the leading security monitoring and services company in Australasia. We've got a footprint that we've been building out rapidly, primarily under our ADT brand around all of Australasia, from the top of Cape York to the bottom of Stewart Island. That gives us an incredible strategic reach and advantage as we look to penetrate both commercial enterprise security customers and also work independently with our security partners in the industry.
Lots of businesses around the country looking to utilize our leading now technology. Over 200,000 customers, very recurring revenue business. I think over the course of this next season, the full year results season, etc., we will start to really push into that and highlight the full nature of the recurring features of our business. About 599 employees with a really good balance and a great and supportive register, which I'm very thankful for. Thank you, everyone, again for their time today. In terms of how we present, we're very clear. We've worked and thought a lot about the way our business works. You'll know the ADT brand. ADT is our direct-to-customer business. If you call me or our team, you want to be helped as a customer, be that a business, enterprise, family, individual, you'll be referred to the ADT brand.
If you're a security industry player, you'll either deal with us in one of two ways. We'll either just be a provider of monitoring services, where we now have the leading monitoring platform in Australasia. We went A1R1 officially last week, which puts us, as far as we're concerned, as the number one player, being that there are two rooms, both A1R1 operating for the same business, or you will interact with us actually as a close partner, where we will offer some of our relative scale to you to help improve your profitability, to help us all grow our recurring revenue. A very simple go-to-market strategy. ADT is obviously also in New Zealand, so Australia and New Zealand. Bound together by some really clear values. We are here to be the leading player in security services.
We're going to achieve that by a set of values which are not trivial nor immaterial to me or the team. Our business is about transparency. It's about being able to work together in a team environment, and it's about aiming for excellence. We don't make any bones about it, and that is the bond that binds us all through the business, to which you're seeing the results of, hopefully, today, which we'll get into. The 4C results Prezo. I think the big feature of this result, and there's probably three, is the fact that it's very clean. We recognize that this journey we have had, as we've been putting together the business and the platform and the investments and the migrations from JCI, have lent to what I've often been told are messy accounts, understood. It's taken us to this time for those to be fully clean.
That started a year ago. We knocked all the capitalization out. This year is a completely clear P&L year for that. It's now ceased with all the one-off costs, be they related to the refinance, the JCI transition, or the M&A costs. You're seeing the result of that in this quarter with an operating cash flow of $17 million, which I think most would agree is an incredibly strong result. Underlying cash flow, therefore, if you're prepared to look through those prior quarter expenses of $32.4 million up against an underlying EBITDA of $38.6 million, I think that'll be the one thing that people will look at and I suppose whether disappointment is the right word or interest will be. The reality is we're pursuing and have attracted a lot of increasingly larger scale work to us.
We had two pieces of work in particular that were affected at the customer level by staff changes at a senior level, which deferred them, which was disappointing. We had built a buffer in, but that sort of kicked it out, which just meant it hasn't fallen in this period. In our opinion, all this means is that the 2026 year is now looking stronger again from a growth point of view, but will actually pull us up to where we expect it to be. Whilst we're sorry for it, it was outside our control, and we don't think it reflects anything other than just building a pipeline of new customers and strong value.
What I am really happy to point to, though, is that the underlying earnings growth, when you take out the acquisitions, you look at the business we had on a like-for-like basis, 2024 to 2025, it's grown 8.2%. I would make a comment that I think that is a conservative view of organic earnings growth. The reality is the businesses we acquired, in particular, I'm calling out Kobe and DVL being this year, have benefited from our ownership in that they've been able to win work that they may not have been otherwise able to win. You could argue that's also organic, but we've exited that from this conversation, leaving us in very rude health. We finished the period with $24 million in cash and growing.
We do have the acquisition facility available from NAB and terrific support from NAB in the last year and really thankful to have them on board with us as a key partner in our story and moving forward, which has put the board in the position of starting the process of considering capital management and what comes next. To facilitate that, we're announcing today that we are putting in place a buyback mechanism. We've appointed Morgan Stanley as the manager to that. That is such that it will give us full flexibility as the cash builds to exercise the reasonable use of that cash sensibly. I think one of the things I've always said, I should note this is about the three-year anniversary for me of being MD, is that the business is actually at a decision-making board level run by investors or investor mentality people.
Capital use, return on capital, value of capital is highly regarded, understood in this business. We just want to start the process of, as we get increasingly into rude health, to have the flexibility to put together some processes and plans and strategies around it. That's really what that's about. Digging into the results a little more carefully here, I think the point of this chart, as you said, is operating cash flow in June of 2017. It goes almost right the way down. Reported and underlying are basically the same, less than $100,000 of M&A related sort of legal costs that fell in the period versus the $20 million of essentially non-recurring costs of the three quarters difference. If you accept those non-recurring, as I say, you get to a $32.4 million actual underlying operating cash for the year.
I guess the read is that as you look forward, this business is going to generate, as it has done this quarter, very strong cash flows. In terms of the actual quarter itself and calling out the lines of costs, probably only a couple of things to notice here. We did have a little bit of inventory draws, about $0.5 million of inventory, I guess, down in this period. The three quarters prior, we'd made the point we are investing in the business and we were building inventory. We have bought in new systems, sorry, to sell letters, new product as part of a service. This quarter had the benefit of a little bit going the other way. We're lifting marketing. We really are focused on growth.
We've spent a lot of time this quarter on our operational structure, our go-to-markets, hence the way I laid the brands out at the start of the prezo. Marketing lifted, staff, admin, all pretty much in keeping with the scale of the business. Obviously, the net interest line where you now see the benefit of the refinance really come through the business. Ultimately, you know what I would call out is the cash in the bank. That grew $11.1 million on the quarter. Difference, of course, being CapEx. The momentary comment on CapEx is at about $4 million. 75% of that relates to the 3G CapEx in New Zealand. Just to call it out and remind everyone, that is a different issue to what we dealt with a year ago when we talked about capitalization, CapEx, and 3G.
In Australia, we were capitalizing under accounting policies inherited from JCI and go-to-market. In the New Zealand case, and now with our accounts, we don't capitalize the expenditure. This is CapEx into systems that we own, that we are effectively leasing back, which are largely medical systems. It will abate. This is about the peak and roll off into next year. I've called out there a number that will refine further as we get into the financial year around the full year result. It's an AGM that that CapEx is going to be less for this business than $10 million. Between the operating cash flow to the cash in bank really is that CapEx piece of four. Underlying business CapEx for Intelligent Monitoring Group is really the same as the underlying depreciation, which is a $2 million- $3 million number.
You just have to add that medical business in New Zealand on top, which on a normalized basis outside the 3G rollover, the fleet sort of stay in business capital is about $4 million a year. Ultimately, we see CapEx once we come out the 3G period for the wider business falling to that sort of $7, $8, $7 million number. Any investment we need to make will only be in around building systems or IT or comparative advantage outside, obviously, of M&A. Good story there. In terms of the EBITDA, we've pre-released that. I've made comment on it. We've broken it down. Effectively, this is just the bridge to show the underlying business growth. As I said, the reality is the acquisitions relatively outperformed and the underlying growth relatively underperformed vis-à-vis what we thought would happen in our guidance.
The relative underperformance, and it's a hard word to use because the underlying business is growing really strongly and feeling very confident, was just simply a timing issue. We feel very confident. I'd just probably pause and make the comment because this has been a sort of quarter-on-quarter story. As we exit this year, it puts us on a very strong basis looking into 2026 for another big step up in EBITDA and therefore cash flow as we get into 2026, just sort of sitting where we are today with the business. To wrap up the 4C comments, this is the culmination of looking backwards over the last three years and actually being able to now start to truly validate what we have been saying.
For those that have supported us for that time, we're incredibly grateful and hopefully you feel validated yourselves and having backed us into what is a really strong business. As I've been saying for a while now, what we've really been focusing on in the last six months and plus is how do we accelerate this and build a truly outstanding and enduring service business. The buyback I called out is really around options. Being in a position like this is great and we want to make sure that we weigh all our options and make sure we really do continue to drive strong shareholder growth. I had made a comment about the earnings. The reality is the earnings stepped up through the second half of the year as it did through the first half.
We're just saying clearly if you just look at the base of the second half, which is a conservative view of the actual probably run rate, you would expect to see really good growth into 2026. Our intention is to provide, we're going through internal budgeting, we really want to make sure we do the work well and plan this business well, not just for this year, but for the next three years at this stage. Our plan is to go through an internal round, which we'll shape out during September with a view of providing full guidance for FY 2026 at the AGM in October.
We'll spend a lot of time, our plan at the result in August, targeted for the 26th of August, talking about our pipeline and showing you why we're confident and what we're looking at both currently and sitting with us and then in future for the business. The last point I make is with the balance sheet also in this shape, we've shown a, we feel a strong credentialed path to use M&A strategically around growing value, not just in the price we've paid, but the way we've integrated and the way we've brought this business together. I feel really great about that. That's always been my high watermark in terms of being very careful, selective, but prepared to make moves when they make sense for us on a medium-term basis. We're in a great shape to continue that journey.
We would not need equity to pursue anything that we might be looking at at the current time. You should expect us selectively to continue to build this business with our capital or shareholders' capital over time. When you think about us, what really has come home to roost, I think the A1R1 certification, I think the conversations going around at the moment around the childcare sector and privacy and access to video and surveillance have highlighted both the advantage that we have developed by investing in the platform that we have today, but also the opportunity for us to widen that advantage over time.
The best way I could really articulate what I think's happened in our journey and hope that you can see what we're doing and build it out is that by investing, as we did do three years ago in a very tough situation when we were over-geared, under-capitalized and asked shareholders to help to support us invest in our platform that has given us the leading platform. We've been able to invest in now in building scale and reach, which is attracting large customers. It has put us at the forefront, I believe, of the industry, which is improving our business, which is the result you see today, which is now giving us the chance to continue to invest and build a comparative scale and advantage, which I think is going to create and continue to create a fabulous company.
I certainly feel that that's the environment internally in the business and understanding to which we have. Hopefully that makes sense to people and happy to chat about that. I'll just finish. Again, what is IMG about? Really, this is a good showcase of what we can do on a purely physical level. I'll just tell you the story here. This is actually a Storage King. I won't note the location for customer privacy. We also won't be releasing this video publicly. This is for this forum only. Effectively, what you have here, there's a couple of people, which you can see on the screen, trying to get into the building. At this stage, they've already been seen by our live monitoring team. In this case, the team was based out of Port Lincoln. They did a threat assessment.
There are a couple of options for the team at this point for the operator. I'd like to thank Ben, Batman Ben, as we'll call him. Our operators that are successful become Batman or Bat people. The assessment was, do I scare them away, which we have the ability to do with our technology now, or at least try to frighten them away and distract them, or do I think that we can actually get to get them with the police before they're done or enact? In this case, the view was let's just let them run and let's see if we can get the police there. The police had already been alerted. I'll play you the quick video. You probably can't hear it, though. It's allowed some loud shouting. You won't have probably been able to hear that, but that's the police running after the guys shouting at them.
They caught them off camera. What I'm told is a suburb state of origin like tackle and apprehended both of them. For us, since we started using this technology, since the start of the year, we've apprehended. We've had 21 events when we've apprehended over 30 people with the police. Average police response time from somebody trying to get in to them getting there has been around nine minutes. That's the difference. Anybody that questions why would I have monitored security, you're correct. If you're looking in the rearview mirror, maybe. I'd still argue there are cases and ways that it can be used to your advantage. This is what we do today. This is the opportunity we have. We think the market, we think we currently are the leaders for sure.
We think this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity to apply across Australia as one of several segments of what we can now do with technology, which sort of validates the investment we made. I'll draw a line there. I hope I haven't overtalked. Sorry. I'll finish on the slide, which is the market stats, which I'll talk to another time. I'll leave it in the background. Throw any questions, Mark.
Cheers. Thanks, Dennison. Yeah, we've got a plethora of questions. We're not going to get to them all. I just want to apologize to people now if I don't get to your question. I will send them across to Dennison and Shane. Hopefully.
I'll call that out. Just in terms of, look, you've got our details, our phone numbers. Feel free to reach out to Shane and I or Jason Biddell, our CFO. We're all available to work you through the numbers as you'd like.
Okay, perfect. First, I want to tackle the two deferred big service contracts. How confident are you that you know that is going to come back online once you know those new executive appointments get started on the other side at some stage, let's say in FY 2026?
Yeah, no, look, I guess nothing in life is for sure. We're deeply the one that we've actually been really targeted on. One was a bit opportunistic, but fairly significant. There's been staff change that could take a little while. I think it just takes them kind of coming back to the table, which we've seen before in our journey. Certainly, we saw that with Regic Shop this year where the takeover stopped them. We were just about ready to go and pick them up. Takeover came through. They canned and stopped doing everything. We thought that was gone and dusted. Within a month, they were back. The new owners said, whilst we're changing this business completely and upending it, we do need a proper security supplier across the country to do this for us and bring us up to spec on a global basis.
We want you to push forward even though we're not doing anything else. It came back to table. I think one of them is probably in that camp. The other one we're very live on. I'd certainly look forward to updating people in August about where that is. It's absolutely a meaningful contract, but it'll also be a real leading contract for the industry. For those in the industry that understand it and know that contract, it'll really cement us as a leader, the leader in enterprise security, I believe.
Question on momentum in the video guarding services as we had in FY 2026. Maybe just touch on the pipeline, Dennison, and any investment needed to meet demand for the rollout of that.
Yeah, look, the investment at the moment is twofold. One is marketing. You will note you'll start to see the ADT brand pop up a lot more than you've seen it. Certainly in newspapers, banner ads, you'll see some editorial sort of content around the place. You'll probably see me a little bit pop up around it too. I think that's all about starting to get the message out and for people to actually see. When people see what we can do, invariably they buy it. We've had an incredibly high uptake rate, but we have not gone wide with it. That process now is starting. The other side of it is we're very cognizant that notwithstanding our unique reach and scale on the technical base, we'll never be able to service what we think the demand is ourselves.
What I'm trying to avoid is coming back to the market and saying, wow, I've got a $50 million, $100 million pipeline in guarding I've put together in the last two months, and then coming back six months later and go, well, you delivered $5 million of revenue. What happened? Go, well, we just can't get around the work fast enough. That's where our signature partner strategy is actually very, very important. For anyone based in Sydney, Azure Conference is on back end of Sydney. It's the industry conference. We'll be launching our signature partnership brand with 20 trusted partners. That's all about giving us low capital reach to drive guarding. There's an investment in signature, to answer the question, and there's an investment in marketing. There's no CapEx required, though. It's all about operational investment to grow capacity and capability.
Okay. I've got another one here, just clarifying some of the cash flow components. Operating cash flow benefit from a $500,000 inventory drawdown is one.
Good question. I can answer it because I know where it's going. There were four components, three components, sorry, of probably just slightly positively abnormal. Whilst it's a clean result, there's business movement in the quarter. $1.3 million of income in advance from a government, essentially a government contractor, or the New Zealand government, if I'm being blunt, paying up to June. It's a process they do. There was $0.5 million of inventory, which I've called out already, benefit. There's also the AASB card leasing benefit where you moved the cost of that out of the operating cash to the financing cash line, which you'll see. That had a $0.5 million benefit in this result. That $17 million operating cash flow is probably $2.3 million positive from what you might call one-off factors that will normalize. Outside that, though, it's clean. It's clean in terms of its business as usual.
No one-off costs other than we've called out. It's what we would expect to reflect the business as it is on a steady state basis.
Okay. The second part to that question, NZ4G, but I think they mean 3G. Are you basically saying investment having kind of wrapped up ceased in relation to that by kind of the end of second half 2026, basically by the end of FY 2026?
Yeah, that's right. Profiles down. The challenge there is that it will go for as long as, well, it could go for as long as the networks keep the 3G network open, which is what we saw in Australia. We don't control that. In our estimation of it, you should see that number dropping period on period and being gone. I think end of 2026 is most likely. I could imagine a little tail, but I'm talking $0.5 million maybe into the, sorry, into the second half of 2026. Definitely gone in 2026. First half coming down, probably gone in the second half, might be a tail is the way I'd put it.
Okay. We've got three or four questions around capital allocation. I'm just going to consolidate them all into one, including one from an excited shareholder, it says here, from Canada. I think one of our first Canadian attendees. Yeah, determining capital allocation, basically, I presume it's going to be on the board table when it comes to August. You're getting actually the final results in August, budgeting, but lots of questions around share buybacks, dividends versus acquisitions versus investing in the existing business. Maybe just expand on that slightly if we can. We might wrap up there. That covers about four questions.
That's okay. I'd probably refer everyone back to the equity raise slide that we did in, I think it was about September last year. We actually put up our track record of acquisition and price and what we've paid and value essentially created. We seem to still be able to buy high-quality businesses. These are high-quality, but long-standing customer bases that endure, high-quality staff that continue to grow. In fact, grow faster in our hands probably than priorly, for, you know, three and a half times EBITDA. I've been very clear, I don't want to see creep. We're very disciplined around that when we discuss M&A. It's not a conversation around value for us on M&A, typically. Whilst that's the case and it makes sense for us, as a shareholder myself, I still would preference us growing and building scale. We're seeing the benefit of it.
We're seeing customers come to us because of it, and it's giving us access to, increasingly, more and more equally good people and build this leadership. I think capital allocation still at this stage has to be weighed up against our ability to deploy capital well. That's not, whilst we have lots of opportunity, we've also got a high bar and it's not just value. It's sustainability, it's executability. As I've said, I'm very, very clear. I'm not too worried if I'm never remembered, but I don't want to be remembered for blowing up a business because we've over-acquired. It's all sort of weighed up against each other. I think the bigger point is, what we've felt now in this period is we might start generating way more cash than we can deploy, actually. That period might come sooner than we thought.
I think also I'm old enough to remember the 1987 crash. There are periods where you can wake up and all of a sudden, notwithstanding you run loving what you do and all that sort of stuff. I personally remember buying a company in the GFC for a 7.5% dividend yield and it grew year on year, but the major shareholder had to exit because they just needed liquidity. I'd like the board and ourselves to be in the position to not have to wait a week, get advisors, try and put a buyback in place to be able to benefit. Should something like that happen, I'm not predicting it. I'm just saying, you know, life's unpredictable.
I see it as costless insurance that we can use as shareholders, and I include myself in that, all of the people on this call who are shareholders, money, you know, to maximize the opportunities that sit in front of us, and our intention is to do that firmly.
Again, apologies. We didn't get to all the questions, but I will send a copy of the questions to Dennison Hambling, and he can tackle them. You know, the full year result is going to be out in a couple of weeks, so maybe in the updated present, I can weave some of those answers into that. As he said, please reach out to the team directly. Dennison, thank you very much for joining us this morning.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, everyone, for your support and trust. I'd reflect, three years ago, I took over the company. We had an $11 million market cap, and we were geared over six times EBITDA. This quarter, it's really satisfying to have generated the amount of cash in the bank as our market cap was when this team started. This is an outwork of decisions made in the past. What we're focused on is actually the inputs into what comes in front of us. That's what our excitement is, we genuinely feel like we're in a good space to hopefully build an enduring, really high-quality Australasia leader in our service and our space. I appreciate the support and interest, and happy to follow up with people over the course of the next little while.
Thanks, Dennison. I know our second presenter here is waiting patiently in the wings, Mr. Steven Lydeamore. Steven, good morning.
Yeah, good morning. How are you?
Very well. Steven, if you want to start sharing your presentation deck, I'll let you know once I can see it.
Let me do that.
If that comes, I can see that. If you want to just go to full screen mode on the hers, slideshow mode. There we go. That looks perfect, Steven. You can take it away whenever you're ready.
Yeah, very good. Thank you, everybody. It's been a little while since I've spoken on Coffee Microcaps. I think the last time was back in March. We've had a very, very busy period of time and just reported annual sales, which was quite exciting for us, being able to deliver on that projection that we put out there for the first time of the $7 million in revenue. We exceeded that, hitting the $7.3 million. If you recall stories in the past, the product itself was maximum $2.5 million in revenue pre-COVID. It went down to almost $0 during that COVID period. Since I joined three years ago, instead of Travelan being a sideline activity for a drug development company, we've put resources and effort into marketing what is quite a unique product for prevention of travelers' diarrhea. The results are starting to show for themselves.
This is just the beginning. Let's quickly get into this. Our FY 2025 results have not yet been completed auditing. Just a safe harbor statement there. A quick update on the financial snapshot of the company. Travelan is not the only product we have. We also sell Protectin in Australia. We are a drug development company, and we have a number of clinical programs. With Travelan itself, it's in two, a large study of 866 subjects being run by and funded by the U.S. military. That has now been completed. All of the U.S. and UK military personnel have been randomized, deployed, and taken the drug. They're currently in the process of doing data analysis. We anticipate top line data from that study in October of this year. That's quite exciting for us. You'll recall that we have Travelan Phase Two. That was a controlled human infection model study completed.
We have not yet requested the end of Phase Two meeting with the FDA. We're waiting on the results of the Uniformed Services University study, which is quite informative for the clinical trial protocol before requesting that meeting with the FDA. We do anticipate doing that following those results. IMM529, which is for Clostridioides difficile infection, or CDI or CDIF for short, we have a protocol ready to go. We're doing the last steps of preparing the IND. That's the investigational new drug filing, which we plan to submit hopefully with the FDA by the end of September. You can see there's a lot of near-term milestones on the clinical pipeline. There'll be an update on the first quarter of the new financial year, FY 2026, in around mid-October for those September sales results.
Just repeating that there, you can see down there below we completed the financial year at the end of June with $7.3 million in revenue, up 49% on the prior year. Not all of that growth is coming from Australia. Importantly for us, North America, so that's U.S. and Canada, we had sales of $2 million, up 76% on the prior year. Given the larger population of people, we're seeing that as a great growth driver for the company moving forward. We continue to evaluate new international markets and also to add additional products to our portfolio. You may have read that we have secured one such asset with a license from a company in Sweden, a product called Pro-IBS for irritable bowel syndrome. We're working very hard on getting ready for launch of that. The order for opening stock has been placed.
We anticipate receiving that in the near term. We're planning on launching the first quarter of next calendar year. If possible, we will try to launch it for the Christmas period here in Australia. I thought this might be useful. Last time I presented at Coffee Microcaps was back in March 2025. This is a comparison of what was the status back then to now. Back then, I was reporting record sales for the half year of $4 million. I've just told you that we've continued that growth and achieved record sales for the financial year just ending, $7.3 million, up 49%. We had submitted the Phase Two clinical study report to the FDA. I'll just inform you that we're waiting on the Uniformed Services University trial results before requesting the end of Phase Two meeting. I had reported that we'd finished recruitment.
Just now, we're reporting that all of those people have been randomized, deployed, and the quality review of the study data is initiated. Top line results are anticipated in October. Back then, we had IMM529. We had that successful pre-IND meeting with the FDA. Updated dates for the milestones for this program are submission by the end of September. We're hopeful that we could get FDA approval of that IND, which would allow us to start Phase Two studies by the end of this calendar year. We reported we started a new program in collaboration with Monash University, IMM986, for vancomycin-resistant enterococci. This is quite a big problem for antimicrobial resistance in Australia. Hospitals in Australia are finding it difficult to treat patients to get this. We've manufactured colostrum using vaccines specifically developed targeting VRE. At the moment, we're in in vitro method development before we commence preclinical studies.
That new distribution agreement for Pro-IBS, just reiterating the dates there, anticipated delivery of the stock in the third quarter of this calendar year with a launch in the first quarter of 2026. We are hopeful we may be able to launch late this calendar year. For those that are new to the Immuron story, let me just tell you a little bit about Travelan. This is a billion-dollar market. Just to be clear, that billion-dollar market is at the moment primarily products which are used in treating travelers' diarrhea once somebody gets it. Think of products like Imodium or Gastrostop in Australia. That's Loperamide, the generic drug name, and also rehydration salts and things like that. That is a very large market.
What we're trying to do is to convert the market from treatment to prevention because we offer the ability to prevent you getting that in the first place, which when the frequency of getting travelers' diarrhea is anywhere from 30% to 70% according to the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S., it's clear that if you're traveling, an Australian is traveling to Bali or let's say Americans traveling to Mexico, the chances of you getting travelers' diarrhea are very high. That would ruin your holiday. It's a small price to pay to invest in taking Travelan before, during your trip. It's a product that's based on a proprietary vaccine. We have two vaccines, a multi-strain and a single strain that we inoculate cows. They produce polyclonal antibodies, which are targeted specifically towards ETEC, that's Enterotoxigenic E. coli, which is the largest contributor to travelers' diarrhea.
It also has the ability to impact on other bacteria, which are similar to E. coli in nature. We've done numerous studies with different parts of the U.S. military showing this is the effect. It has a strong capability of preventing travelers' diarrhea. In clinical studies, we've shown up to 90% preventative effect. How does it work? We have the ability to bind and neutralize to prevent. I won't go through all the details there, but the slide deck will be available on our website. You can read more about how it works. It's quite a unique technology that no one else is using to create a product like Travelan at the moment. I like this graph. I've talked to the numbers already, but in graphical form, you can see that FY 2024, the preceding financial year, was a great year for growth.
We reported record growth in sales during that year. In the current year, not only have we increased sales, you can see the trajectory of the line there. It's at an increasing rate. We're starting to get good traction. We continue to grow in Australia, which is our core market and largest contributor to revenue. The large population markets in North America are also starting to contribute significantly. Up to $2 million in revenue now for the financial year just completed and a higher growth rate. That's on the back of strong sales growth on amazon.com in the U.S. In Canada, we've secured distribution in 10 pharmacy and grocery retailers. There's still plenty more to go in the Quebec regions and also the Atlantic provinces. We're working on that during this financial year. Just giving you a picture, a snapshot of where we are.
In Australia, we're in essentially all pharmacy banner groups. During FY 2024, we managed to get primary listings with multiple pharmacy chains. In Canada, the system operates similarly to Australia. We have large banner groups. Shoppers Drug Mart is the equivalent, if you like, of the Chemist Warehouse in Australia, the largest banner group. We have listings there. You can see a number of the other groups as well. Unlike Australia, we're also in grocery. Loblaws and Sobeys are grocery chains within Canada. In Canada, unlike Australia, they also have pharmacies within these grocery chains. Good opportunity to take the knowledge and success that we've had in Australia and translate that into the Canadian market. The U.S. market's a little bit different in that, unlike Australia and Canada, that allow health claims on label. Speaking about prevention of travelers' diarrhea, we're limited in what we can say in the U.S.
We do more of your social media marketing and targeting products in a different way. We're doing that mostly through now amazon.com and walmart.com. We do continue to sell product through Passport Health, which is the largest chain of travel clinics within America. We're quite pleased with the growth rates in both of those North American countries and also pleased with the ability to continue to grow in double digits in Australia. How are we doing that? This is a range of activities that we're going through. You'd imagine in Australia and Canada, we have your typical retail-focused promotion. We also do a lot of in-store positioning and promotion. We work with pharmacists and pharmacy assistants to make sure that they understand Travelan, how it works, what it's useful for, how to sell that to customers because they're our, if you like, salespeople within the store.
It's not difficult to sell because there is no product like Travelan that has that ability to prevent travelers' diarrhea up to that 90% preventative effect that I talked about before. In the U.S., we do this for Australia and Canada as well. We do a lot of social media marketing and targeting of advertisements. If you happen to be Googling about travel to exotic locations or travelers' diarrhea or something like that, no doubt a Travelan advertisement will pop up on your screen talking about the benefits of taking it. Let's get back to our pipeline here. I mentioned before that we have multiple assets in multiple clinical programs. The travelers' diarrhea market. We're targeting to get Travelan, which is available over the counter now, approved as a medicine within the U.S. market.
The potential market size for that, as estimated by Lumanity, a leading market evaluation firm in the U.S., is some $100 million in the U.S. market alone. The same company, Lumanity, has estimated a U.S. market for Clostridioides difficile infection of IMM529 of $400 million. This was revised up during the last financial year because we changed focus from a second line therapy to primary therapy. That successful pre-IND meeting that we had with the FDA was focused on a clinical trial protocol, which will be standard of care. The antibiotic used for treating C. difficile versus standard of care plus IMM529. That's first line primary therapy and a much larger opportunity. This is one of our near-term milestones coming up.
I mentioned before that we're preparing for that IND submission by the end of September is our best estimate at the moment, with a target to have that approved by the end of this calendar year, allowing us to go into phase two clinical studies next calendar year. The IMM986 for vancomycin-resistant enterococci is in preclinical activities. The first half of next calendar year is when we're anticipating the preclinical results. That is in vitro, so that's in test tube, and in vivo, so in animals data, hopefully demonstrating that our vaccines and the colostrum that we've used from it has resulted in a therapeutic asset that we can take forward into clinical studies. This is some details behind those numbers I just gave you for the $100 million for IMM124E, the active drug substance in Travelan, and $400 million for IMM529 for C. difficile infection.
I won't labor upon these, but it gives you some data as to how those forecasts were derived. Down the bottom there, you can see where we're at. IMM124E completed phase two, preparing for phase three, and IMM529 for CDI. We are anticipating IND approval, which will allow us to move into phase two in 2026. A little bit on IMM529, and why we're so excited about it. This is a non-antibiotic, so it doesn't have that problem of antimicrobial resistance. First line therapy is the target. Why do we think we should be successful? We have done animal studies, and the efficacy, the results from those studies are shown here below. We've shown that we can not only prevent, we can protect recurrence. That's stopping it coming back.
Just to be clear what that's about, when you treat with current primary care, which is antibiotics at the moment, quite often people get recurrence, which means it comes back. That happens more than one time. With our product, non-antibiotic, it doesn't have that problem and also has the ability to treat those recurrent patients. We can also treat primary disease. If our product was not used for prevention and someone happens to get C. difficile infection, our product would be able to use to be treated. These are animal studies, and we need to do human clinical studies to show that that translates in humans. Certainly in animals at this point, you can see statistically significant results showing prevention, protection, and treatment of primary disease for C. difficile infection. This is achieved through a product which we believe is the first product which has multiple mechanisms of action.
It targets not only toxin B, which is the toxin that C. difficile uses to infect a host, but also spores and vegetative cells, which are part of how it works. We target all three things, which is probably why we got such great efficacy results in the first clinical trials in animals that you saw here. This is a summary, if you like, of that phase two study for IMM124E, Travelan in the controlled human infection model study. It was interesting that the efficacy was high, but not as high as previous Travelan studies which were done three times daily. This study was once daily. Notwithstanding that, we did have some success in showing statistically significant results in stopping diarrhea of any severity and also less significant events. These results were very pleasing for the military.
They are also, along with us, looking forward to receiving the results of that Uniform Services University study, which was twice daily dosing. This will give us a good idea as to what dose to take into phase three. You recall the original study is three times daily, up to 90% protective effect, once daily, around 40%. We will have twice daily dosing results from the U.S. new study coming out in October, not too far away now. The plan for IMM124E, once we have that dose selection and that end of phase two meeting with the FDA, is to move into phase three trials. Each of those trials will take approximately two years. That will result in a BLA submission and another 12 plus months for approval. Details of what that trial looks like are detailed below here.
We are hopeful that when we get these Uniform Services University study results, which is in a real-world setting, so a phase three-like trial, it may be sufficient to get into the CDC Yellow Book guideline, which is what doctors look at when considering what to prescribe to their patients before they go on vacation to a high-risk region. Even before we get FDA approval, if we can get into these guidelines, so CDC Yellow Book or potentially the International Society of Travel Medicine guidelines, that would open up a large part of the market in the U.S. that we're not currently in. In the U.S. market, because we don't have label claims for prevention of travelers' diarrhea, unlike Australia and Canada, we're limited to those patients that don't go and see a healthcare practitioner that self-diagnose and seek treatments. That's probably less than 25% of the market potential.
That's why we're quite excited about the results of this Uniform Services University study coming out in October. There are three to aim for upcoming milestones going forward. We've got continued revenue growth and the growth drivers that I've mentioned already, and new product launch, hopefully before the end of this calendar year, but certainly in the first quarter of next calendar year. We have clinical milestones coming up near term. We have that September filing of the IND for IMM529. We have the top line results of the Uniformed Services University study, that large 866 patient study, in October as well. We may have some other milestones related to IMM986, the VRE, vancomycin-resistant enterococci program, during the next six months or so as well. I might just pause there and open up for any particular questions.
For those people that are technically minded, I have here on the screen in the back of our deck clickable links to all of the supporting publications. It doesn't include unpublished, of course, but publications where we've had peer-reviewed articles showing how Travelan and IMM529 work.
Thanks, Steve. Now we've got a couple of questions here, so I'm going to jump into them. Travelan revenue in the second half does not appear as good as the first half. What was behind that? Is there seasonality we should be thinking about between the two halves?
There certainly is seasonality, and it does vary by country. There are peak travel periods. In the U.S., for example, spring break is a big travel period. Similar to Australia, winter, when people travel to warmer locales, like Mexico or the Caribbean, but winter, of course, occurs in a different time of year than it does in Australia. The primary reason for the difference in sales is not to do with seasonality. It's to do with what I spoke about before. During the last financial year in Canada, we obtained those listings with retailers, both pharmacy and grocery. In Australia, we also got primary listings with a number of large pharmacy banner groups like Terry White Chemists, for example. When you get new listings, wholesalers then stock up. There's a wholesaler stocking period that occurs that you get a lump of sales in. They're the sales that we record.
We record sales to the wholesalers. Of course, consumers buy from the wholesalers before they use. There's a timing difference there. That's the primary reason for the difference in sales from one period to the next. What we focus on is not so much our sales out to the wholesaler, but sales out of wholesalers to consumers. We use IQVIA data for doing that. What we've seen is a strong period-on-period growth, steady growth in markets, showing Travelan continues to sell very, very well. Not on this slide deck, but I've shown previously that we've either been number one or number two SKU in Australia in that digestive health diarrheal category. We'll continue to aim to stay in that spot.
A question on IMM986, the preclinical results. It says these were previously advised to be out in August 2025. People are just checking in. Is that still on track?
No, it's not on track. Preclinical studies, of course, but there's a reason why it's called research and development. There's risks associated with development. Maybe I can just explain what's involved in developing a new asset such as this. The way our technology works is we develop proprietary vaccines, which are targeted to a specific pathogen. In Travelan, that's ETEC, so Enterotoxigenic E. coli. For VRE, it's vancomycin-resistant enterococci. We have completed the development of those vaccines. We have vaccinated cows. There's a period of time during which, obviously, a cow needs to go through its pregnancy period before it can produce colostrum. We've done that. We've produced that colostrum. There's assays that need to be developed before you can run your preclinical experiments. We've had some challenges in getting the assays to be as robust as what we would like.
That's caused a bit of a delay in the program. There's two types of assays. We have ELISA assays and also Western Blot. We're focusing on ELISA first, and then we'll do Western Blot. We'd like to complete both of those successfully before we move into animal studies. Instead of August for the initial in vitro preclinical data, it's likely to be, I didn't give a target timeline yet because we don't really know because we don't have those assays yet. As soon as I do have an update on what that date is, we'll be providing that to the market. It will be 2026 at some time.
Okay, great. Maybe the full year result comes out. Maybe in August, things will be a bit clearer on that particular study. Question here on funding in terms of, you know, whether that's, you know, further rollout of these studies, you know, moving from one phase to the next phase and, you know, expansion of Travelan. Cash-wise, in terms of, I know a lot of this stuff is already funded by, you know, whether it's Uniform Services or there's other partners kind of helping to fund a lot of this research. Maybe just touch on, and I know the foresee will probably be out in detail sometime next week. Maybe just touch on the need for funding moving forward, if any.
Sure. Let me just touch quickly on the foresee. We're in a fortunate position where we don't have to report foresees, but we will have our annual results coming out, preliminary annual results out at the end of August, which will provide an update on CAS as well as our full profit and loss and cash flow statements and the like. With regard to our cash position, we last reported at the end of December, and we had a bit over $7 million back then. Of course, we're burning a little cash, so we have a little bit less than that at the end of June. With regard to raising capital, we have actually raised capital, and we did that by an ATM facility that we had in the U.S. market. When we reported our sales results, which were a record and significantly high double-digit sales growth, the U.S.
market reacted very positively. Significant volume of trading at prices exceeding those on the Australian market. We took advantage of that to place around US$2 million of stock into NASDAQ, and that's provided us with sufficient funding to commence those IMM529 clinical trials.
Perfect. Question on the top line results for the Travelan trial. Just wondering, why is it taking so long? Is it just, you know, we're in the middle of, you know, U.S. holidays? Is that just kind of, you know, trying to get anything done in December, January in Australia? Is it kind of the flip of that, is trying to get anything done in July, August in the U.S.?
No, it's not really to do with that. The top line results that we're waiting for is not something that we're doing ourselves personally. This trial was conducted by and funded by U.S. military resources. That's the Uniform Services University. It's a large study. There's 866 subjects, U.S. and U.K. military personnel. The protocol for it, which was available on clinicaltrials.gov, when you have a look at it, it's got not only the primary endpoint focusing on diarrhea, there's multiple secondary and also exploratory endpoints. It's a data-rich study. The quality review and the data analysis for that takes a long time, hence the reason for the delay in reporting out that top line data. It's good, though, that this rich data is very, very useful because it will inform us as to how. Followers
on for the phase three studies for Travelan. It's useful information before going into the end of phase two, meeting with the FDA. I mentioned before that we've got two controlled human infection model studies showing different results for three times daily versus one time daily. This study is not a controlled human infection model study. It's in people that have traveled to high-risk regions, a field study, much higher relevance to a phase three study, and it's also twice daily. We'll have dose ranging, and we'll have information on which type of patients it worked on, which types of bacteria it worked on. People in the field don't only get Travelers' diarrhea from ETEC. There's other bacteria, but there's also viruses and parasites and all sorts of reasons that cause the Travelers' diarrhea.
This study will provide us a lot of information about where it works, where it doesn't work, and greatly inform the protocol for taking Travelan forward into phase three.
Hey, Steve, we have gone slightly over time, and I don't want to take up any more of your morning. Thank you very much for coming back and joining us once again. We shall watch out for the portfolio results at the back end of August. As you said, there's a lot of studies coming to an end, results coming out between now and the end of December. Yeah, plenty of milestones for people to keep an eye on over the first half of 2026 here.
Yeah, it's very good. We're quite excited about it, both the increasing revenue potential as well as the clinical milestones showing that that platform technology of ours has got significant value. Thanks again for your time. Viewers, my contact information here, that's my personal email and phone number. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to reach out to me.
Thanks, Steve, and thanks everyone for joining the call this morning. We'll leave it there. We will have another webinar next week, and the details of that should be going out on Monday or Tuesday. It will be Thursday morning next week rather than Friday morning. Hopefully you can join us for that. Just trying to tie down the last one or two presenters and bits and pieces. I wish everybody a good weekend, and we'll talk to you next week. Thank you.