How are you doing, mate? You keeping busy?
Yeah, all going good here.
Yeah, planning the wedding and all that?
Yeah, I won't give away all my secrets in front of 60 participants.
No one else is listening, mate. It's just you and me here. It's a private forum. Holly's in now, though. She's on, David as well.
Morning, guys.
Hi, Holly.
Hey, James. It's just Alex. Can you hear me?
Yes, yes.
David's just on his way in, but I've just set it up on his computer, so he might join on his phone. Anyway, it's just good to go on his computer when he walks in.
No worries. Yeah, thanks, Alex.
No worries.
Sorry. Are we live? We might be live here. Holly, are we live?
James, I think you've taken over as host, so I can't see if you have actually started. It looks like there's 73 participants sitting in the room, but I can't see if they're in the waiting room. Can you see anywhere to start the webinar on your screen?
I think it might have started. There are three with their hands up. Okay.
Hello, mate.
Hi there, David. Good. How are you?
Hey, David. How are you going?
I'm good, thanks.
Can you hear me?
Yep, yep.
Yep.
Okay, I'm just trying to get my working. It didn't seem to go. I'm still a couple of minutes away from my office. Anew, can you hear us? You on the line, Andrew?
It looks as though we are live, Ben.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
Okay. We are live. There's still people joining, David.
Good.
Yeah, we're ready to go when you are.
All right. I'm just crossing Berk now. I'm only a minute or two away. What time is it? It's not yet 8:30.
We've got one minute, David.
Oh, Jesus, you're a panicker. I've missed the light at work, but that's okay. I'll give you a punch-by-punch go. It doesn't matter if we start one minute late, does it?
No, it does not. David, I'll just introduce Thomas Wah Kim standing in for John Hester today.
Yep, good. Hey, Thomas.
Hey, David. How are you going?
Good. I can't see you on my screen, but that's fine.
No problem.
Oh, there you are. Yeah, good. All right. We're not going to speak for more than half an hour, will we? It's pretty simple, straightforward.
Yeah, I think that sounds good.
Yeah, I mean, all the feedback I've got so far, Ben, is pretty damn good. I can't complain.
David, just so you know, there are 120 people online, and they can all hear us.
Oh, they can? Oh, great.
Yeah.
If they can hear us, I am just doing a right-hand turn into Collins Street from the airport. If you don't mind, we'll start this in one minute or two minutes, and I'll just get upstairs.
No worries. Thanks, David.
Sounds good. Once you let us know you're good to go, David, I'll kick things off.
Okay, good. Thank you.
Maybe you jump on mute, David, and we'll jump back on when you're up in the office. Maybe turn your camera off as well, David.
For those in the audience that have dialed in in the last minute or so, we're just waiting another one or two minutes for David to get set up, and then we will kick things off. Please bear with us. We'll be starting shortly. Just a reminder for those who have dialed in in the last minute or so, we will be starting shortly once David is set up. Please bear with us.
Okay, David's just a moment away. Thomas and everyone else.
Thanks.
Wow. Sincere apologies, everybody. I just came in from the airport and got lost in the traffic.
No worries. All right, let's kick things off. Thanks, David. Without further ado, thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. We're really pleased to have PolyNovo Chairman David Williams to talk us through the FY25 trading update that was released to the market. David, thanks for making the time. Nice update released yesterday. Why don't you take us through your key highlights to kick things off when you're ready?
I think the key highlights for me is it's still business as usual. We've got good growth across the globe, but more particularly in the engine room, which is America. We're still seeing roughly, you know, across the globe and in America, roughly that 30% growth. It doesn't show any signs of easing at the moment. I think one of the things I'd point people to, which is sort of interesting, is the turnover that was in the U.S. So sales of, I see, $88 million. I ask you to sort of think about that in terms of which I've revealed in the past, which is that we put a salesman on. I don't look at that as an investment.
I look at that as working capital because, you know, I really want them to get up to speed and pay for themselves pretty quickly, which they do because of the margin and the product. It's very interesting because elsewhere in the release, I've said that we've now got 88 people on the ground in the U.S. By on the ground, I mean, you know, litter on the street, not the support people back in the office and so forth. We've got another nine, which are a mixture of new and some backfills. When we have those hired shortly, hopefully that'll be 98. Interesting, you know, we've got 88 people on the ground and you've got $88 million of turnover.
I've sort of said as a rule of thumb in the past that I look at somebody, I really hope that a salesperson is going to be able to pay for themselves very quickly, but then get themselves up to, you know, a million dollars worth of sales. It's sort of interesting to reflect on that. I think that in itself, given the strong growth that we're still seeing in the U.S., it gives you a much better feel for where we're going to get to this FY26. I'll leave that to you, Thomas and John Hester and the other analysts who follow the stock. In that context, I would also say, I just saw something on social media last night talking about, oh, we haven't got another record month yet, et cetera, et cetera.
I've made it pretty clear in there that June, you know, was a record revenue of $13 million for June 2025. If you're trying to do some sort of calculation about where we might put in FY26, that's not a bad starting point. Now, yeah, months on, months off, you see it's a bit lumpy. When you look at that graph that's in the release, you know, going from only 2021, FY 21, 22, you know, very low monthly sales right up to now revenue of $13 million per month. It hasn't eased off, is my point. That means that the U.S., in particular, is very profitable. I should just say on that, because I keep getting asked, the issue of tariffs and Trump is not giving me one ounce of sleepless nights. The tariff, whatever it happens to be, is going to be levied on the cost of the product.
The cost of our product is trivial. If it's 10 by 10, the tariff might be $3 or $4 or $5. Put it in the context, by the way, of where we are compared with our competitors. We've already got a lot of fat in that system. If people had any sort of criticism, it might be, why don't we fill that gap between ourselves and other products in the market? The short answer is we have increased our prices this year roughly 10% in the U.S., and there's still plenty of room for that as well. I'm not worried about the tariff at all, not only just because it's trivial in terms of what the dollar figure would be, but not only because it's how much fat there is between us and our nearest competitor, but this is, in many cases, a trauma product.
If it's a soldier in the field, he's going to get seen to it, whether Trump has put another $3 on the product or not. I don't have any concerns with it whatsoever. I think the other interesting thing about the revenue, even though the U.S. is still the engine room, is just the growth we're seeing across the globe in two ways. Number one, just first sales, countries that we weren't supplying last year. There's a list of those there, interesting things like Malaysia, the Czech Republic, Malta, Portugal, Peru. In each of those ones I've named, we've already had a second order. It starts off slowly.
It started off slowly in the United Kingdom, by the way, at the end of COVID, where we weren't really supplying much in the way of burns at all because it couldn't get an operating theater and a whole lot of other reasons. We did a lot of small sales there. Now we've hit the burns market and it's going fantastically. You see the growth in the U.K. , for example, was 51% this year. Ditto in Canada, 48%. I should have said there, by the way, we've now got three people on the ground with a couple in support. I think that Canadian figure's going to, luckily, they're all going to go up. The growth we're seeing in Canada, you know, 48%, U.K. 52%, France, okay, coming off a zero base. I just expect these countries are going to continue to grow. The U.S.
will still remain our engine room in more ways than one, but these other countries are going to catch up pretty quickly. The other reason why the U.S. will still go ahead and leave some boundaries is because we've released NovoSorb MTX there. The MTX, as everybody knows, is the BTM product without the plastic on the top. I think we sold up $2 million in the first half when we just released it. The second half just finished, did $4.6 million. The total for the year is $6.7 million. That is growing very, very quickly. It's also being used sometimes in conjunction with MTX and NovoSorb BTM . Even in deep wound, a surgeon will put the MTX on the bottom and then the NovoSorb BTM on the top.
We're also seeing a lot of interest in that product out of plastic surgeons in particular, who are using it for fillers and to put under flaps and so forth. We expect that going to grow very quickly this year as well in the U.S. because that's where we've released it. As soon as we've got that ready to go in Australia, we're going to see the same sort of growth here, I think, with the plastic surgeons and a different market. I think that's the sort of highlight for me. The other highlight, because it seems to exercise some people's mind, and I think it came out of the fact that we said at the end of March that our cash was $22 million. Everybody knew we were building a factory. That was going to take some capital, like not very much, as everybody knows.
I think the whole thing was $25 million, $30 million and can probably do 10x what we've got now. It's going to serve us for a long time. The cash has now come back strongly because of the operating profit. We've announced today that our operating profit for the year will probably be around $10 million- $12 million, $11 million, I think the consensus is amongst the analysts. We see profit just increasing next year as well. When I look at cash and I look at where we are now at the end of June, it's $33 million. That's up from the $22 million that people were sort of worrying about. That came about, number one, from cash from operations, which we see continuing. Number two, it came from a collection of debtors. We had our debtor collections outsourced and they just blew out to 90 days.
Now we've brought that back in-house and we've got that now back under control. There will be another $6 million or $7 million in the next two or three months that comes out of just getting back the debtors to normal terms. When I look at our $33 million that we've got in the bank today or at the 30th of June, I take off $8 million because that's what it's going to cost me over the next six or seven months to finish the factory. Of that $8 million, I'm going to get, on our calculation, just getting our debtors back in order will give us another $7 million. We've already brought it, by the way, down from 90 very quickly down to 60 days. We'll get some more out of that as well. I think we're going to get $6 million or $7 million out of that.
We've got $8 million to pay, you know, in dribs and drabs as we finish that factory and the R&D center off. Then we've got cash from operations on top of that. When people say to me, you know, you're going to have to raise cash. What? Why do I have to raise cash? I'm now profitable. I'm going to be more profitable. I'm going to bring some cash in. That $33 million, just to put it in context, up from the $22 million, is after paying off debt. As I did on page one of that, after paying off debt of $4.5 million and another CapEx to build their plan of $13 million. We've got the $33 million, but that's after paying our debt off and most of the CapEx off as well. I'm pretty happy about where that cash figure is at, not the debt figure.
I think the other thing, just digressing, I'll probably come back to some of this, in the U.S. and elsewhere, it's not just the number of people who are on the road. The other metrics that you'll see, and we've mentioned it, what's happening to the number of hospitals we're serving, the number of customers, and the number of pieces of BTM we're selling. That is continuing to go up. Not only are we now in 46 countries, but the number of hospitals just continues to climb every week. The number of pieces we sell continues to climb every week, partly because we're in other markets, but also partly because, as I've said, surgeons are finding new ways to use this product all the time. As I said, it just surprises me, to be honest, surprises everybody what they use it for.
I'll give you one what if, which isn't in the report, but I was talking to somebody last night from Belgrade in Serbia, where we had given some humanitarian stock earlier in the year for a 16-year-old boy that was train surfing and held on to the electricity and 95% burns to his body. We gave them a lot of PolyNovo to get that guy back on his feet, and he's now up and walking. We got Avita to come in and put some skin on him because there's not much skin to go around. The same surgeon has just done a cleft palate in Serbia. Everybody on this call could sit around on a whiteboard forever, and we probably wouldn't come up with a cleft palate. This is a notoriously difficult operation to do and to cure in any circumstances. It's very interesting.
Every month I wake up and there's a new use that we never thought of. I'm not saying that's going to be a blockbuster necessarily, or even that it'll continue to work. This is just an example of how innovative the surgeons are and how useful they think this product is and how they can sort of extend it across the planet and across indications. I think finally, which got announced earlier, was this first in man study using our PolyNovo under the skin with the Beta Cell guys and professors from Adelaide, who incidentally, by the way, are here this morning in about half an hour for some meetings on other cell opportunities. This is really exciting. They've given it now twice. I think there's two more papers they're going to give on it in the next week or two.
There's a lot of interest in this around the world. When I talked to Novo Nordisk about this, their cell people, and they supplied a lot of the cells. Novo Nordisk, everybody will know, is now the biggest company in Europe. It's bigger than LVMH, and it's got Ozempic. We all know what that is. They're intensely interested not only in cell therapy, but obviously in diabetes. You know what they say to me, and it struck me very hard when they said it, was that within two years, every cell therapy company, and there's people working on delivering cells everywhere around the planet, everybody's going to need a delivery device and not one that involves just injecting into a liver or a kidney or somewhere else in the body.
That's fantastic for us because when I look at it from my helicopter, I look at us as having a wound care business. That's our silos that everybody knows about. In and out of the body, I call it wound care, but things like spina bifida, cleft palate, breast, hernia, all that sort of stuff. Now I see a clear possibility. These guys are pointing me, and Novo Nordisk is pointing me towards we could have a product here that'll have a completely separate silo. That silo will be cell delivery and medical delivery. That's really powerful. It's worth reading that paper that Dr Toby Coates gave in Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago or our release, because at one level it sounds trivial.
Put a bit of our foam under your skin, sew it in, inject it with some cells, foam disappears in the usual way, but the cells stay and the cells continue to produce insulin and so forth. That could be any cell. It could be adrenaline cell, it could be thyroid cell. That sounds simple. When you read the paper with some depth, the foam of cell has some very unique properties with respect to a couple of things. The first one is just vascularization, that it encourages vascularization and blood, which is why it's so successful when people are using it for diabetic foot ulcers or venous leg ulcers or something like that, where blood has not been enough of it. That is number one. Number two is that it's able to be topically immunosuppressed.
If you need any immunosuppressant, you can see it, you can deal it topically without going into the body. If in the event that the cells somehow go rogue, you can take them back out again. Whereas if you inject the liver, that's a very complicated procedure and a complicated method to try and change it. Thomas, I'm just having a quick look. I just want to emphasize again the momentum. One of the first points I make, apart from what our cash is now, is that the cash flow operations in the second half of this year just finished, are worth $15.7 million. Again, look at the sales, look at the sales growth, look at what we're doing with extra staff, extra countries. You'll see therefore that we've got some confidence that that's going to keep going, number one.
Already, it's starting to throw off quite a bit of cash. I just got my fingers crossed for the rest of FY26. I think probably I've covered everything that I think is a highlight. Everybody knows I like to get into my helicopter and look at these things from a height. All I see is more indications, more doctors, more countries, more products, and more applications even outside of that wound care space. I see a high margin product that's throwing off cash now. I just thank you guys for following it and everybody else for that matter, but more particularly the shareholders who have hung around for the ride. Everybody knows we're getting shorter. I don't care. I saw some stuff on social media last night that said David said he hated shorters. No, I didn't say that. I said the opposite. I said I love shorters.
These guys are my friends because they're going to have to buy back. We've got a lot coming through here in terms of steady growth and lots of nice surprises in terms of new countries and new applications and so forth. Thomas, that's probably all I need to say about where we are. It's just a quick update.
All right, thanks for that, David. We've got a couple of minutes, if you don't mind. Mike's shooting a couple of questions at you. Clearly, you had a really good turnaround in that operating cash flow in the second half compared to the first. Could you just elaborate a bit more on what the differences were that led to that turnaround and how you are going to be managing that working capital moving forward?
We've started to hit our straps in a lot of these new indications, such as NovoSorb MTX, but in a lot of these countries. You know, India's been slow to take off. We thought we were going to win a lot more tenders than we did, more quickly than we did. We're still winning the tenders. It's not like we're losing to anybody else. It's just much more bureaucratic than we thought. We've got at least 20 people on the ground in India, but we're now starting to get some really good sales. That looks like it'll really go now hard. We're seeing that, as I said, in the United Kingdom in particular, but everywhere else around the world. It hasn't been really about managing cash.
There have been a few heads that have come out of the business, but it's just a harder focus on the sales side of it, you know, and responding to some of the requests we've got. Some of these new countries that we've gone to, it's a mixture of people who have come to us and said, look, we've heard about it and we want to distribute for you. It's a mixture of somebody maybe in South America who hasn't got Integra anymore because they left the market. There's a whole lot of things on that. Managing the cash flow, we did have a problem in terms of collecting our debtors, but that is no longer a problem. It's even getting better as everybody's back into payment terms.
I do want to emphasize on that, though, by the way, Thomas, I've said it before, we have never had a bad debt. Even though we let them, or somebody let them go out to 90 days, we still haven't had any bad debts. Remember, why is that? Well, I'm supplying the hospital or RPH in Sydney or Harvard or something. These guys are not bad debtors, you know. When we start to go down into small podiatrists and plastic surgeons, I expect that we'll see some bad debts come out of that. That's one of the costs of doing business. Remember, we haven't got any bad debts. We've been managing, that's the working capital piece that we really needed to manage and get it back into order. As you'll see, we took a lot of cash back out of that in the last few months.
In the next six months, we'll get that. There'll be another $7 million coming out of that, just getting it back in order.
Okay, thanks for that, Color. Just another one on sales. Clearly, June was a record month, just under $13 million in sales. That's annualizing thereabouts about $154 million. Can you give us any insight? Is June typically a stronger month, or do you anticipate continued momentum moving forward over the next 12 months?
I think the answer to the cyclicality of it is really in the graph that's in the pack that takes you from our record months of $3 million a month, $4 million a month, $5 million a month. If you look at those, they're all over the shop. The first one in 2021 was in June, then the next one was in January, then it's September, May, November. It's all like, it's not a month. There was a time when we used to say, in the summer, that's when it's going to peak a bit in the U.S. because of bushfires in California and so on and so forth. It's like what I used to say about the results being lumpy. They still are lumpy, but as you get bigger and bigger and the indicators get more and the countries get more, that lumpiness comes out of it.
What can I say? June's not special. The previous record before was a March. The previous before that was a November 2024. This won't be a lumpy business in due course because we'll just have so many countries and so many applications and so many customers that all of that lumpiness will go out of it. It doesn't mean that we won't get lumpiness within certain markets. If there's a mass disaster in New York and we have sales of $10 million in a month or something, it could still happen, but it'll be swamped by the weight of the rest of the world.
Okay. All right. Just another one, changing tact a bit. You've obviously got Director Dr. Robyn Elliott currently serving as the Interim CEO. Is there any update you're able to provide on this front, how that's all going?
No, just that it is still going. I think as a consequence of some meetings we had yesterday, we're hoping to get the interviewing a shortlist soon. I don't want to overpromise and under-deliver it. It's a difficult position to fill. When you think about it, you're a sort of billion-dollar company, but it's still a startup. You're looking for that unique blend of somebody who really knows how to start something from scratch, if you like, as opposed to, you know, I've been running Pfizer in head office for 20 years, and I've had layers of people underneath me doing the real work. I'm in marketing in every other country in the world as well. We're entering new markets, entering new products.
I mean, it's an unbelievable job for somebody, but it needs somebody with, number one, a lot of drive, and number two, it's sort of an entrepreneurial flair as well.
All right. Final question from me, David. You said you're ramping up to nearly a 100-person sales force in the U.S. Do you think you can get much more leverage out of that existing sales force in the near term before you need to further expand it?
Yes, I think so. There are still some areas in the U.S. where we're not covered, you know, because we didn't think the population was big enough or not enough hospitals or something. Some of those people that are the nine that we're looking for at the moment are a mixture of new and backfills. We expect we're going to get more out of each one of them. The reason I say that is because if I go and sell to a surgeon at the Austin Hospital here, one of the biggest surgeons that uses our product, like Professor Heather Cleland, for example. Okay, after I've sold her a couple of times, she doesn't want to see me anymore. I don't need to go there every week. Once they become a user and a big user, it's more care and maintenance.
It's more giving them the intelligence we've got about how it's being used around the world and so forth. I've got more time to then go to the next level in the hospital and talk to the oncologists or the plastic surgeons or the guys who are doing limb salvage or whatever. I think we're going to get more out of them. I think the other thing that we really haven't touched yet, and this will really supercharge the U.S., is to get our strategy on what we're doing in podiatrists and plastic surgeons more refined and actionable. At the moment, we're selling a lot of pieces for diabetic foot ulcers, for example. In the U.S., podiatry, when you study it, you come out being able to operate on somebody's feet. We don't see that in Australia, by the way. It's a different culture, different education.
We've got bigger fish to fry in terms of selling to major surgeons and major boards and all that sort of stuff at the moment. If somebody came to us, and I've said this before, and said, look, I'm already a big supplier of product to podiatrists, or I'm already a big supplier of product to plastic surgeons in private practice, and I've got 100 people on the road, or I've got 50 people on the road, that's something we're not going to get our existing sales force to do much of, or certainly with that sort of depth, organically. You can see already that if I had somebody that was supplying, just hypothetically, somebody who's supplying every podiatrist in the U.S., companies like Henry Schein, for example, or plastic surgeons, same as Henry Schein again, then that could really supercharge us.
Because, you know, if we put our product in their bag, it's no different than me having a distributor in Germany, you know, who's already calling on surgeons. These guys are already calling on podiatrists, and you give them a whiz bang product. Therein lies, you know, some of the really big upside in the U.S.
All right. I think that just takes us to time, David. Thanks very much for going through those questions. Thanks for the update. Maybe if you just want to close with any final remarks, then we'll wrap things up.
No, I don't have any final remarks. I'm amused by what I... I don't usually read HotCopper, but I was just on a plane, so I had a little bit of time to read. I did conclude that most people on there are not going to win a Nobel Prize tomorrow. That's the first thing. There's so much misinformation about how we're traveling. The numbers are in front of you. Record month in June, continued growth around the world, and it's still an unbelievable story. It's now starting to make real money.
All right, very good. Thank you once again for your time. Thanks, everyone who dialed in. Hope everyone has a good day. Cheers.
That's great. Thank you. Thanks for organizing it.
See ya.