Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday morning. Let me just give you an introductory comment about this. I mean, when these equity raisings are typically done, you know, most of the money is bundled into placements to existing and new fund managers. The rump is bundled into an SPP and it's set and forget, just we'll take what we can get. I think philosophically as a board, we're very keen to make sure that all shareholders get to hear what's being presented to fund managers in particular. You'll see that this presentation this morning really relies on the fund manager investor presentation that we gave last week.
In addition to that, you're going to get something extra because we tried a little experiment at the AGM where we interviewed a couple of our senior managers, and we're going to follow that on today. Just to update you with information in terms of what the funds are going to do in their particular regions, but also just in terms of how business is going in those regions as well. You know, sometime in this presentation, I'm going to talk to Ed from the U.S. about U.S. and Canada, and to Valerie about, well, if she wants to talk about Australia, but more particularly about Hong Kong, where she's just come back from, and Swami about India. Before we get to there, I'll make some introductory comments about how, why we're even going about this.
I'll get Swami and Jan to talk about why we're, and how we're gonna use those funds and when we're gonna use those funds, just briefly. That will rely on the investor presentation that you can get off the ASX as well. We haven't really lodged that. Go back, have a look at it. If you don't get to look at it, they're gonna talk to it today. Just by way of introduction, you know, we've been holding on for some time, not needing to do a capital raising, and frankly, we didn't really need to do it this time.
A couple of things changed our view over the last few months, and one of them was that, you know, the growth that we're seeing, especially out of the U.S., but across the planet, with 70%+ sort of growth year- on- year. It became obvious to us that we really do now have something of a cookie-cutter approach to this. By putting on additional resources, even though many of those are working capital, there's the support services that need to go with that and some clinical trials that need to go with that. Ultimately, you know, if we're successful at that, which we think we obviously will be, then we're gonna need some more infrastructure in terms of factories and so forth.
We thought, well, number one, we've got a cookie-cutter approach, and this is the time to really step on the gas, I suppose. Double down, as the Americans say, more particularly to really, you know, step up, I think, in terms of what the number of people we've got with leather on the street, and the infrastructure that goes to support that. The second thing that's happened, I think, over the last four or five months is, as you know, we've got a new CEO. At his encouragement, you know, we've also thought that we should not only step up the number of people on the ground, but also we should step up our view about where we should go geographically, so e-expanding the geographical footprint. Swami will say more about this in a moment.
Those two things really led us to say, "Look, now is probably the right time to raise some money and put our foot on the pedal, as it were." What you'll see is that, you know, how do we go from not really needing any money to needing AUD 50 million? Jan will explain to you that a big chunk of that AUD 50 million won't be in this financial year, but it'll be to do with building additional factories and so on. A big chunk of it's not really for this financial year, probably half of it in any case, and Jan will talk to that in due course.
Those two things together really made us say, "Well, let's go." At the same time, I was looking at a share price at one stage of AUD 0.85, so that didn't suit us. We knew the company was worth a lot more. We knew we were being shorted, and it was time to just wait and get the market acclimatized with how we're going. We sort of set in our own minds that perhaps if the share price got above AUD 2, somewhere closer to what we thought the real value was, that that might be the appropriate time to do it. You'll know now historically that that's roughly what did happen, and we've done a placement looking for AUD 50 million. There's a bit of science about how the AUD 50 million was allocated.
We put aside about AUD 30 million for financial institutions. We put aside AUD 17 million for the SPP, that was really based on our own sort of guess, I suppose, about what percentage of shareholders would take this thing up and what average price they would bid for. We can look at every other SPP that's been done in recent times, we have our own sort of rough measures about what that would be. For example, you know, maybe 10% of shareholders will take it up 10%-12%, the average bid price might be, say, 8,000 shares, AUD 8,000, when in fact you could take up to AUD 30,000. Some people take one share, some they will take AUD 30,000 of the share.
We know roughly that the AUD 17 million was gonna be good. I emphasize that because we wanted shareholders to be able to participate to the maximum that we thought that they could. We might be swamped or we might get nothing. We don't know yet. The AUD 17 million was, there was a bit of science behind that. We actually drove it the other way, rather than saying how much for fund managers and then the rump to SPP, we said how much for SPP, and we might or might not be right or wrong, depending on what happens to the share price between now and the end. Then there was AUD 3 million, which we wanted to really show that the directors were behind this.
All of the directors are taking stock, except for one who's taking the SPP. They're all, we are behind this raising as well. Just in terms of how that's gone so that you know, you know, we had 10 or 12 new financial fund managers on the register as part of that raising for AUD 30 million. We opened it in the morning, we closed it that day. We were looking for AUD 30 million. We got offered over AUD 85 million. A lot of people who applied for stock got nothing because they weren't already on the register, or we didn't like them, or didn't like the color of their shirt or whatever it was, they got nothing. The AUD 30 million was taken up quite easily, and we had to scale that back quite a lot.
We tried to look after, as we will with our shareholders, you know, those who are already on the register and make sure that they, you know, got their share or what they'll bid for, or certainly some sort of pro rata. You know, that part of it was very successful. At the end of the day, when we closed the book that afternoon, we had AUD 30 million worth of financial institutions. That money is now in the bank. We've got AUD 3 million committed from the directors. That is conditional on shareholder approval. That will go to a meeting in January that Jan and Bart, who's on the phone as well, will coordinate. The AUD 17 million will come in from the SPP. We'll talk about the SPP later.
Normally, we expect to see these things coming in on the very last day. You're looking for AUD 17 million. In my mind, being in the market for a long time, I expect to see 80%, 90% of that in the last day. That's the reason for that is if people agree they're gonna take it, they wanna take it, but they set up their BPAY, so it happens right at the last minute so that they get maximum funds in their own account, but also they get the ability to pull it if, for example, the market were to tank or something like that. Interestingly, in this case, I won't give you the number because I haven't seen the Monday morning number yet, but we've probably got...
As of Friday, we had AUD 2.5 million in the tin paid for in advance, probably by today, I imagine we'll have AUD 4 million of the AUD 17 million. It's coming in a lot quicker than I would normally expect to see, which is a very good sign. When you think that these are shares at AUD 1.90 and they're trading at AUD 2 or thereabouts, you know, we expect that people will take them up. That's up to you. The only other thing I just wanted to say was that the ASX 200 is obviously important to us in the sense that there are a lot of index funds around the world who can only invest in you if you're in one of the indices.
We were in the ASX 200, but because our share price was down, which I largely put down to shorters, we got bundled out of it, which means that a lot of index funds sold out, which, you know, doubles down your sort of price on, you know, what's happening to the reduction in the price. Just so people understand it, there's really two aspects to being in the index. One is liquidity and one is market cap. They really check to see how many shares are you trading compared to how many shares you got on issue. I won't bore you with the formula on this and, and sometimes these formulas are a matter of art as far as I can see as exact science.
We easily qualify on the liquidity thing. Everybody will know that on an average day, we'll get AUD 2 million, AUD 3 million, AUD 4 million, AUD 5 million traded in our stock. The liquidity side of it is fine. On the market cap side, if I look at our market cap today, which is probably about AUD 1.35 billion, in my calculation compared with the ASX 200 there at the moment, we should be easily in. When the index is calculated, that's done on an average of six months market cap. You'll all know that a few months ago we had quite a lot of quite a low market cap because our share price was still recovering. We're easily there today.
When I did the calc in my own rough way, I figured we're just on that border of getting into the ASX 200, which was last Friday. The reset is done every three months. It's done at the third Friday in December, third Friday in March, et cetera, et cetera. If our share price was to stay roughly where it is and our liquidity the same, you know, I imagine we're easily gonna be in the 200 come March. Of course, you can look at your own, but it's not just us, it's who's going out, who's going in. There could be people better performing than us.
I just want to give people a bit of a sense of this because I see a lot on social media, and it's not well, well, argued. All right. That's me just for the moment. What I would like to do is to pass over the presentation to Swami and to Jan to talk about, you know, what we're raising money for, how it's gonna be used, when it's gonna be used, and so forth. Excuse me, just to apologize before we even start. We're trying something new here, so my screen doesn't look like yours, but I'm hoping our operator is gonna pull up the agenda just for a few seconds so you can see who's talking next.
Reduce it to where it is now and pull in Swami and Jan and get me off the screen as well. Welcome to Swami and to Jan. I'll go off the screen and let you talk.
Thank you, David. Good morning, everybody. Four months ago when I joined PolyNovo, many of you asked me the question and David asked me the question, "Why did you join PolyNovo?" I said, "It's a combination of two things. One, it's a genius Australian medical technology, and two, coupled with a bold and ambitious board which wanted to accelerate global growth and impact, which truly influenced me to join PolyNovo." Now, four months into the company, let me share with you where I think we are with both those things. First, the genius technology. I keep getting ringing endorsement about NovoSorb and BTM from customers, surgeons, and our own people across the world. It does a terrific job of improving outcomes, much better than the standard of care. It does a terrific job of improving patient experience, much better than the standard of care.
It does a terrific job of decreasing the complexity for surgeons, nurses, and OR staff. Again, much better than the standard of cost. It does a terrific job of reducing cost for the hospital systems, much better than the standard of care. That's a ringing endorsement, which is driving the adoption and penetration of PolyNovo, NovoSorb, and BTM dramatically. You heard David talk about the 70%+ growth. The second is bold board. The board has supported almost every request that we put in as a management team for global acceleration and impact. You know, whether it was moving from distributor to direct in India, accelerating our entry into Canada and Hong Kong, everything we got terrific support. The thing which I'm gonna share with you is, and something which surprised me pleasantly was our teams. I'm really proud of our teams.
They're a very passionate bunch of people, hungry to reach more hospitals, more surgeons, more patients, yet in a very responsible and outcome-focused way. Just to share with you where we are today, in Australia and New Zealand, we are a leader in third-degree burns, and we're expanding to trauma. If I look at our Australia team's performance per capita, per surgeon, per rep, the number of cases that we do in Australia are highest in anywhere in the world. When I think about our U.S. performance, we're a strong number three with the best possible growth trajectory in the U.S. market, and we're taking market share away from everyone. In many of the apex burn centers, the burn directors are already turning to us as the go-to choice.
Most importantly, from a U.S. perspective, I'm very proud of how Ed and his team have executed in a very responsible, profitable way. Our business today delivers more than 20% EBITDA already for a very young business. That's extremely creditable. That has given me a whole lot of confidence in terms of driving geographical expansion across the world. I spoke to you about Hong Kong, Canada and India, but we're also moving faster and harder in U.K. and Germany, where we hope to be leaders over the next 12-18 months. We are looking forward to expanding in Japan and China as well. These are the world's largest medical device markets, and they will be extremely important to our future. We are stepping up in terms of trying to go and cover more indications wherever we can across the world.
We are moving from a burn supremacy into trauma, into neck fash, into many other indications which our surgeons are taking us to. We are looking at also alliances globally, which can take the NovoSorb technology into different fields, which is not today covered by us. We believe we can do a terrific job in orthobiologics. We're looking at partnerships there. We're looking at partnerships in general surgery and oncology, which hopefully can give NovoSorb better expression in different parts of the hospital systems and channels. Lastly, after we drive all this demand, we also need to make sure that we have the capacity to fulfill the demand. We are already embarking on a very ambitious capacity expansion agenda. I will ask Jan to take you through how we are going to spend the funds and the sequence and timing of it.
Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Swami. In terms of timing with the placement of funds of AUD 30 million plus the AUD 3 million from the directors, the initial priority is growing that top line and expanding in our markets and new markets. Supporting Ed with the acceleration of a hiring plan in sales and marketing, and also clinical hires to help support the sales and marketing team. That's already now underway. That's gonna be a big part of the spend leading up to June out of that initial AUD 30 million. We're also working on towards a design freeze on the new facility by June 2023. Again, we've already made a start on that.
The bulk of funds from the AUD 30 million will be allocated to the construction phase, which we plan on commencing in FY2024 after we go through the tendering process. The key point is driving that acceleration of top line, supporting Ed with the growth in the U.S. and accelerating efforts over there, but also supporting the expansion in India and entering that market, also with Hong Kong and Singapore all happening right now as we speak. That's a chunk of the spend leading up to June. A big part of the AUD 30 million that we'll raise from the placement will be spent on the, you know, up to AUD 20 million-AUD 25 million on the fit out of the new factory, and that will commence in FY2024.
Where the SPP is important to us, the AUD 17 million that we hope to raise from everyone, will lead to an acceleration of current efforts. We already do a lot of work in R&D with our team of nine on various products. We also do a lot of work on the clinical building clinical data to support our product claims and expanding the indications as to where our products are used. The SPP funding will help accelerate those efforts, make us more competitive, be able to bring forward a lot of plans that sales and marketing teams do have, but also that the R&D teams have as well. It's an important part of the process.
All in all, you know, geographic expansion, increase in capacity, expanding our indications and investing in R&D is where all the funds will be put towards. The spend profile will mostly be in FY2024. We're making a big start in, you know, lead up to June, and it's already underway, and there'll be a balance of spend in FY2025. I hand back to you, David. Thanks.
Great. Thanks, Swamy and Jan. I'd like to now move on to the U.S. and Canada, and we're lucky to have on the line Ed Graubart, who's our Senior VP of Sales and Marketing in the U.S.. He wasn't probably aware that we're about to raise AUD 50 million himself, so you're gonna hear from him as I'm hearing from him. You know what it meant for him, and did he actually get any sleep that night when he was told that he had some more money? Anyway, welcome, Ed, and tell us a little bit about what the, you know, this money means to you in terms of how you're gonna look at hiring in the U.S. and growing in the U.S., and then we'll go on to Canada.
Sure. Thanks, everybody, for joining the call. Good morning there. David, what it really means to us over here is we have an opportunity to accelerate, as Swami said, the plan that we've already had in place. We do try to run a responsible business and maintain the profitability because we do understand that our investment and that profit or profitability allows us to fuel global expansion and reach more patients. What this will allow us to do is to kind of continue down that plan and accelerate and bring people on, not only in the field so that we can go develop new markets, but also the support structure. These are people who indirectly can impact our top-line revenue, but they can also directly impact because they are also working with our customers.
When we talk about things like that, we're talking about internal marketing and clinical people to support the sales efforts. We can upgrade our training programs and offer new programs to our existing and new sales reps so that we continue to expand our clinical indications. We can really start to drive the peer-to-peer education. Something that Swami saw firsthand last week with us while we were in while we were traveling a couple places around the U.S., is that the impact in the field and the discussions with the surgeon, surgeons need to hear from them more than they need to hear from us with their experiences. Let...
allows us to really build that program out. It also lets us build out the clinical support demonstrating the economics and the clinical outcomes that we are so proud of. Again, development programs within new geographies, allowing us to go deeper in existing territories and really allowing us to become that standard of care across hospitals by really allowing the team to focus within those hospitals. It's just really pulling a lot of that forward so that we can contribute sooner in a lot of these territories than we originally may have planned. You know, the second part of it is, you know, the Canada piece. We officially are launching in Canada on Tuesday. If everyone remembers from the AGM and from the announcements, we had approval back in October.
It's taken us a little while with regulatory quality and getting our logistical pieces all set up there that needed to wait until we did have the formal approval. I'm happy to report we did our first revenue case last Friday in Canada outside of the Health Canada Special Access. That's good, and we will start shipping product either tomorrow or Tuesday at the latest for all new cases in Canada. We've had success at a number of the recent trade shows up there. We've just actually completed a plastic surgery meeting this weekend, and I think we shared at the AGM the success we had at Canadian Burn. You know, we're finalizing the agreement with the sales agent on the west, but we haven't wasted any time.
Their team has been through training, and then continues to go through training until we can really get them ramped up to where they need to be. We are also now engaging with sales agents on the eastern part of Canada, which will, you know, just allow us to go deeper into that market overall. Very positive things going on here. I'm excited about being able to, you know, grow out what we're gonna do, happy to have the money to do it and, you know, committed to doing it responsibly like we've done in the past.
Thank you, Ed. When we had our AGM, Marcus Wagstaff, Professor Marcus Wagstaff was on the line, and he'd just come out of that conference in Canada, and he's very optimistic about what he had heard from the surgeons there. He felt that the culture was a bit more similar to us, but that a little family there and that we already had a lot of traction. I think one of the things that perhaps our shareholders don't know is we said that we had some surgeons buying on the Special Access Program, but that revenue was already AUD several hundred thousand year to date before we've now launched and had our first case on the 2nd of December. That sounds quite optimistic, I think, and it sounds like you're also optimistic about it.
Yeah. It is. I can tell you the team up there is very excited. We've talked to a couple surgeons just over the weekend, you know, some communication back and forth, letting them know that we're ready to go. You know, as excited as somebody might be able to sound on a text, it's, number one, they're getting back to me, which is always a positive thing. I'll take that as excitement about what we're doing.
Very good. Thank you for that, and thank you for attending. I'd now like to just move on quickly to Hong Kong and introduce you to Valerie Young, who you met also at the AGM. I said at the AGM she'd been up and she'd had two cases up there and there was an enormous interest. She came back, and then she went up again, I think last Saturday week, to reinforce what she'd been doing up there on the first trip. Valerie, you're back in Australia now, right?
That's right.
Tell us about the last week up there and how it's progressed on.
Just like Ed, I wanna share with you all some really exciting news. David, yes, I did get back from my second trip to Hong Kong a week ago. Hong Kong is a premium market for us. They can afford world-leading technologies and where advancement in treatment options are widely adopted. I was just saying to our CEO, Mr. Swami Raote, last week, that if market entry is like a battle and Hong Kong is a battleground, we've made the Normandy landing. We've established our beachfront. There are only five hospitals in Hong Kong that does plastic reconstructive surgery, during my last trip, I secured two of them to start clinical evaluation of BTM, making it a total of three hospitals so far.
That means six patients in Hong Kong have had BTM applied, with the first patient's treatment now completed. Also, during that trip, I was very fortunate to have a Melbourne-trained plastic surgeon who was in Hong Kong for holiday at the same time, and she took the time to meet with the surgeons there to share with them her BTM experience. She showed them about cases that she's done and why she chose to use BTM and how to get the most out of it. Her sharing will shorten the learning curve for the Hong Kong surgeons as they embark on their own BTM journey. In reality, it is still early days yet. It is still a beachhead, and there's a vast hinterland to be conquered.
Geographically speaking, Hong Kong is only a beachhead for the vast hinterland of the Greater Bay Area, or the GBA of China, which includes really well-known cities such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou, and that's a total population of 71 million people. I touched on this at the AGM. The Hong Kong, also the Chinese government, is two years into a pilot program, which is to allow a number of facilities in the Greater Bay Area to access non-registered medicines and medical devices that are used commonly in Hong Kong public hospitals. They're now in the process of scaling this up. There is strong government support for healthcare development, and this presents a huge potential for PolyNovo.
Yeah.
In due course, the clinical evidence that we get out of GBA will be used to gain regulatory approval in China. The GBA in turn will become a beachhead for the enormous hinterland of China, which is 1.4 billion people and almost a fifth of the world's population. In a way, my mission is to establish ourselves in Hong Kong. Next week, our Hong Kong logistics partner will take the first delivery of BTM. At the same time, our finance team, led by Jan, has been working with Ernst & Young to explore setting up an entity in Hong Kong. These efforts will help us get more cases done, both to increase the sales, which is my job, and also to build local clinical evidence for BTM.
Down the line, when justified by our business growth, similar to what I did in New Zealand, we'll also consider hiring local talent to service our Hong Kong customers and also support our expansion into the GBA.
Yeah.
The road is long, and it won't be plain sailing all the way, but there's a Chinese saying, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." We've taken that first step, and the rest of the journey is a really exciting one. I invite you all to join us on that journey. Thank you and back to you, David.
Thank you, Valerie. Just a couple of quick questions. There's six patients now. They're paying patients, right? This is... Are we supplying any free product or is that...
At one hospital, they are choosing to do a paid evaluation, and the other two hospitals, it is a free trial evaluation. One of the reason for that is there is no funding for use of BTM outside of burns. They want to make sure it is a good enough product in their hand so that they will use it out of their own departmental funding. It's a slightly different setup at the other two hospitals.
Yeah. The six patients that you've already had, a re they paying patients or?
Are they what, sorry?
Paying patients.
They are paying patients, correct. Five of the six are paying patients.
Okay. Of those patients, just to give us a sense of what it's being used for, are they all burns?
No. In fact, the very first patient who received BTM in Hong Kong had the competitor product put on, and unfortunately for him, that product had failed. BTM came to save the day. The other patients are mostly burns, but there's also the last patient who had a oncological excision and they have ran out options for that poor gentleman, so they're using BTM to try to close that wound. We've got a mixture of uses.
Brilliant. You said you've got three of the five hospitals in Hong Kong. What are the other two waiting for? Are they just waiting to see how it goes in the other three or?
They're probably waiting for me to go back.
I figured you'd find some way of it, you know, orchestrating a return trip. That's great. Beautiful. Well, listen, thank you for that. Finally, I'd just like to update on India, and I'm gonna hand back to Swami, just to talk about what's happening in India as well.
Thank you, David, and I'll be very quick about India. We've been fortunate to hire a top talent in India. Between the two of them, between the Managing Director and the Chief Medical Officer, they have close to 65 years of experience, not just in India, but also in North Asia and in U.K. and some of the European markets. I'm excited about them having joined PolyNovo. We are going to get the certification from board as a registered legal entity in the next 10 days, after which we have already identified our 3PL. We have participated in an All India's Plastic Surgeons Conference early November, where close to 350 surgeons visited the stalls with a request to do samples and demo in their surgery rooms and clinics.
This team that we have in India has already identified 25 centers of excellence, which we'll be using as for training, and we are in the process of now hiring the next batch of people, which will be close to 18 people hired over the next couple of months, the minute we get the approval from the Ministry of India. I expect India to go off like a rocket just because of the expertise and the talent that we have there. Honestly, the sheer number of patients who deserve this product is phenomenal. We would be truly saving lives in India because they don't have too many options today. I'm proud of what I'm doing for my country, and I'm proud of what PolyNovo will be doing for us across the world.
Last year, in full year 2023, we saved just under 10,000 lives. This year we hope to save more than 20,000 lives. Honestly, the opportunity is in millions. You know, that's where we hope to take this glorious Australian technology. Thank you, David, for all your support, and back to you.
Just one question, Swami. I think a lot of people probably don't appreciate that the rate of burns in places like India, but also Indo-China and so forth, is significantly higher than what Ed sees in America or Valerie sees in Australia and so forth. Could you comment on that just to sort of reinforce that?
Yeah. Because if you really look at where do burns and trauma occur in the world, China and India are the burns and trauma capitals of the world. Unfortunately, the advanced dermal templates category is kind of a paradox. I mean, I call it a 90/10 paradox. 90% of the market today serves just 10% of the world. Out of $1.5 billion, $1.35 billion comes just out of one market, which is U.S. The rest of it is spread out across Western Europe and a little bit in Japan and Australia. PolyNovo truly has an opportunity to go where the patients are and truly save lives, you know, redefine healing in many of the markets, because really there are no solutions.
That's something which motivates all of us to keep driving hard on this global expansion, to serve many more patients for burns, trauma and beyond burns and trauma. I think it's truly amazing technology which the surgeons are telling us, and they will take us to many more places than just burns and trauma. I'm pretty confident of that.
Yeah. All right. That's great. Thank you for that. I'd now like to move on to just share purchase plan itself. Just in case there's any confusion out there. I know just by way of the money that we've already been paid, that certainly plenty of shareholders are not confused about it. But I thought just as partly a novelty really, I'd get Bart Oude-Vrielink along, who's a partner at MinterEllison, so our corporate lawyers. Bart's Dutch, by the way, if you can't tell by his name, which means by definition, you can't tell him much. You know, the Dutch know everything, so that's an even better reason to have him here. Bart, welcome.
Bart and I have known each other for probably 35 years. I'd like just to explore quickly, Bart, at the SPP and how they operate. Perhaps I can top and tail it with a little bit about how we're gonna allocate, if there's overs and unders and so forth.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, David. Thanks for the opportunity. The SPP is an offer of shares by PolyNovo to shareholders. It's made in accordance with an ASIC instrument, which provides an exemption from the prospectus provisions, and it's in fairly standard form. The offer booklet for the SPP with the application forms have all been dispatched. It opened on the 30th of November 2022, and it closes at five o'clock on the 13th of December 2022. There's a bit over a week to go in order to make applications.
The offer is made to everyone who's on the register as at 7:00 P.M. on the 21st of November, and they have to have also have registered addresses in either Australia or New Zealand. In terms of the structure of the SPP, it provides for a maximum per shareholder of AUD 30,000. That maximum also applies to clients of custodian, professional custodian shareholders. The underlying clients of professional custodian shareholders also have the opportunity to apply for up to a maximum number of AUD 30,000 worth of shares.
The share price, or the issue price at which the shares are offered is the same as what was extended to institutional shareholders in the placement of AUD 1.90, which represents a 10.5% discount to the five-day VWAP to the record date of the 21st of November. This placement tries to bring a little bit of order in terms of applications. In addition to the AUD 30,000 maximum, it requires that shareholders who want to take up minimum parcels of shares beginning at AUD 1,000 worth of shares, going through to AUD 2,500, AUD 5,000, AUD 10,000, AUD 15,000, AUD 20,000, AUD 25,000, and AUD 30,000, being the maximum.
In terms of what is being sought, as David said earlier, a maximum of AUD 17 million is being sought. David can talk about the scale back algorithm in a moment. There is a sort of a discretion to accept overs, but essentially the plan of the capital raising is a cap of AUD 17,000. To the extent that the experience with the SPP is the same as what the company experienced with the placement, there will be a scale back algorithm that's described in the placement booklet. David, if you wanna talk about the scale back, yeah.
Thank you, Bart. I mean, just from that, it doesn't make any sense for you to apply for AUD 50,000 worth of shares because the limit is AUD 30,000. It doesn't mean we're gonna look at you any differently. If it turns out that we're we are bid for more than AUD 17 million, which is the cap, we do have the option but as Bart said, never say never. Who knows? We'll see what happens. My guess is that if the stock stays above AUD 2, we'll easily get the AUD 17 million and we'll have some overs and therefore, as a board, we'll need to determine what to do about that, whether we take additional money or more particularly, how we scale it back.
I think what we said in the SPP booklet, Bart, correct me if I'm wrong, is that we would as a concept, like to try and look after people pro rata. And that has also subject to our discretion as well. For example, a common trick that a lot of people do at the moment, or not a trick, is to have one share only in the company and then try and use that to buy AUD 30,000 worth of shares. If we're over, then, you might not be surprised that I might not wanna give those people AUD 30,000 worth of shares and pro rata it differently. They're just some thoughts on how we might likely handle that.
I think standing here today, and there's still, as you can see, December's still got eight days to go. Anything could happen to the share price, but it looks to me like we'll easily raise the AUD 17 million if things, if the status quo stays. Have I missed anything, Bart?
No, no, that's right. Just amplifying the point about the scale back algorithm. The booklet says essentially scale back will be done pro rata to your shareholdings as at the record date. Those, you know, long-standing and larger shareholders, they can expect to be treated more favorably if there is a scale back situation than shareholders with nominal holdings of shares.
Yep, that's a good point and well said. Thank you very much. Okay, ladies and gentlemen. I thought this would go for 30 minutes, but it's gone for 39. Apologies for not allowing questions. We wanted to try and give you everything that the fund managers got and a bit more, and I'm sure we've done that. I hope you got something out of it, and I wish you well with your deliberations on taking up the SPP and reporting to you again at the half year. Thank you all for attending and adios.
Thank you.