Good afternoon, and welcome to this investor update with Stenocare. With us today, we have the CEO and the CFO. First, there will be a presentation, and afterwards, a Q&A, where the management team will answer questions submitted via Stokk.io. There have already been pre-submitted questions on Stokk.io, and the Q&A is still open so that you can submit questions live as well. I will now hand over the mic to Stenocare to start the presentation. Thomas and Peter, your line is now open.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
My name is, Thomas. I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders of Stenocare, and together with me-
I'm Peter, and I'm the CFO of the company.
So thank you very much for joining us in this presentation of Stenocare and the share issue transaction that is currently available in the market. I'll just briefly introduce to people that have not heard about Stenocare before. We are a Danish company. We were founded back in 2017. We are traded on Nasdaq First North in Copenhagen. And our prime focus is medical cannabis as a treatment, so we're talking prescription-based medicine that is needing to be approved by local medicine agencies in the markets that we serve. We have, as you can see on the picture in the middle, we have a Danish cultivation facility where we are growing medical cannabis plants.
We also have products that have been approved in different markets for prescription-based treatment of patients. You see some of them on the upper left-hand side. And then we are active in six countries in mostly Europe, and then we also are active in Australia. So that's kind of the very quick introduction to who Stenocare is, and with that, we'd like to take you to an introduction of why we're here today.
That's the TO2 warrant exercise, which actually was part of an 18-month plan that we introduced in May last year. A plan that would go to December this year and consist of a unit share issue in June last year, with actually an oversubscription of 27%, 170% subscribing. And there we raised around DKK 15 million, partly as cash and partly as loan conversion. Then there was a warrant exercise in December, which was subscribed with 76%, and there we raised around DKK 7 million. And then this issue for this introduction or presentation is the TO2 warrant, which is actually in the middle of the process now.
Thomas, if you just take there. We have an exercise period, a transaction period from June, that was Monday last week, June tenth, until Friday next week. The subscription price is a discounted volume-weighted average price, which ended up being DKK 3.616 per share. And all owners of the TO2 warrants, they can buy a share at that price until Friday. And later we will explain in detail how we... how to subscribe.
If I was to give a brief overview of some of the key activities that we have there in 2024 and 2025, we started off in the early part of the year with having two new products approved by two different medicine agencies, one here in Denmark, and one in Australia. So that added more products to our portfolio of products we can sell. We've also lately introduced and launched our innovative new product called Astrum. It's a multi-year product research and development investment that we are now commercializing in the first market. That will be Australia.
Of course, we have also ambitions this year to increase our gross sales by 100% versus last year, so doubling sales, and then the ambition is also to reach break even at the end of the year. So those are kind of some of the financial goals that we have set. Today, we actually made a new announcement, which you see on the green star, the breaking news, that we are now also entering, or working to enter the Canadian market. This will be our seventh market that we have been working with, and we see a lot of really exciting opportunities for us to enter this market with 37 million patients. It's one of the most mature markets in the world.
It's a huge customer base that we can address... and we will address that with our new, innovative Astrum product that, as we mentioned, is going to Australia soon, and then it will also be made available for the Canadian market. So, a really exciting outlook we see ahead with that one. Looking into 2025, of course, that year will be all about scaling our six different markets or seven by that time, hopefully with Canada also being active. And it perhaps even expanding into one or even two new countries during 2025. What we want to do is duplicate also take our Danish cultivation facility and make that operational in a way where we can export to other markets around the world.
That is also part of the 2025 outlook. How we'll use the funds?
Yes, as mentioned in the beginning, this is a part of our funding plan for 18 months until the end of this year. And what we are using this raise of money for now is to expand the sales of the new products in Denmark and also Australia. Also, we early announced that we will enter into Australia with our new Astrum product, which is a new oil formulation. Also we will use some funds for our approval processes and preparation of our production facility to enter or start selling bulk flowers of medical cannabis.
Finally, we will use it to strengthen our balance sheet by repaying some of the short-term loans, and make us more independent of funding that way.
So how can you, if you find this is an interesting business or industry to be part of, medical cannabis and the growth opportunities ahead, and if you think Stenocare is an interesting company, and of course, this special offer that we have right now, with buying a Stenocare share at DKK 3.16 each, then there's basically two steps to be part of that. First, because it's a so-called warrant transaction, so you actually need to own TO2 warrants. And if you go into your bank where you normally purchase shares and type Steno in the search field, you will actually see a drop-down menu where it says Steno TO2. So that's kind of the way that you find it.
It's a requirement to benefit from this special price that Peter was mentioning of the DKK 3 and EUR 16 to join it. So every time you have one warrant, you can subscribe for 1 new Stenocare share at this very special price. Some of the shareholders that was part of the previous transaction Peter was talking about last year, they received these TO2 warrant as part of that transaction. So they basically are in a situation of deciding, should I use them to benefit from this deal, or should I actually sell them into the market and turn them into cash? Those are the two options, and for others that do not own TO2 warrants at this point, there's a deadline to purchase them in the market.
The deadline is June nineteenth, so that's two days away, where you can go and purchase those warrants. That's step number one. So when you have now TO2 warrants in your bank deposit, then you need to subscribe or activate that warrant, and you do that in your bank. You, there's a corporate action that you can access for the TO2 warrant, where you basically inform the bank how many of the warrants would you like to exercise. And then after closing on Friday, June twenty-first, then you will be allocated that number of new shares equivalent to the number of TO2 warrants that you had in your deposit. So that's kind of the step one and the step two.
There's two important deadlines to remember: if you wanna acquire or sell your TO2 warrants, deadline is on Wednesday, June 19th. If you wanna join the subscription with the special price on the Stenocare shares, that's the deadline on Friday, June 21st. That's kind of the important date to remember.
Then if you want to use this offer, I can only recommend to look at our homepage, which we have written here, the line here. And on that homepage, besides description of what to do and what we are and how to find the brochures that we have made, you find link for those brochures, and we have made three of them in English and Danish and Swedish. So if you're interested, I can only recommend you to seek further details on our homepage.
With that, our short presentation and introduction to the transaction is completed, and we are open for questions.
Perfect. Thank you for that, Thomas and Peter. Let's move directly into the questions with the first question from the audience here. The first questions are around financials and guidance, and the first question is: Analyst Group expects you to reach DKK 16.5 million in revenue in 2024. How realistic is this, looking at your past twelve months revenue of only DKK 4 million in net sales?
Yes, we have a guidance saying that we hope and believe that, and our plans are looking into DKK 15 million in revenue for this year, and that is based on, as we explained earlier, we have new products in Denmark and in Australia. And also, having in mind that back in first quarter of 2019, where we had the three Danish products approved in Denmark, we actually had break even for that first quarter. So, that's maybe... And that's the reason why we believe we will reach the DKK 15 million.
Yeah, but then, Analyst Group and is an external company that comes with their kind of prediction, which is for this, as we can hear from the question, is beyond the guidance that we have given. So I think you should go back and read the argumentation they have to go even further, but we cannot comment on that, 'cause we have published the guidance from the company basically six months ago. So we'll keep and stick with that.
Yeah. And maybe that's also a part of the answer to the second question here, but the second question is: How certain are you that you will reach break even in Q4 this year?
Yeah, yeah. So I mentioned before, we actually experienced that before in 2019, and also here, we believe that the new products we have will increase the revenue and also will make it possible to make break even. But of course, nothing is certain. But in looking into our plans and our forecasts, that's what we still guide.
How long run rate do you expect to have after the capital increase?
And also that, as mentioned earlier, we had an 18-month funding plan looking into the end of this year, and then. And that's what we look into. And then having break even in the end of 2024, it should be possible to have funding until we reach that, and then that's our plan.
How do you see the competitiveness of your Astrum product? Can you explain how this is better than other competitors on the market?
Well, yes, of course. So the Astrum product is a multi-year investment that we have been making with different partners in Denmark and Canada and elsewhere. And the idea is really there's a general challenge with all medicine on the market today that you take through your mouth. So that goes for any medicine, not just medical cannabis. All medicine have a similar problem, which is when you ingest it, and it goes through your digestion system, that breaks down. Like it breaks down your food, it breaks down the active ingredients, and therefore a high percentage of those active ingredients never survive your digestion system, to be very simple about it.
We have come up with a solution with a new oil technology that is, in a way, bypassing... It's not bypassing, but it's cheating your digestive system to let a higher percentage of the active ingredients, in our case, it's the cannabinoids, the cannabis active ingredients, actually survive it and make its way into the bloodstream of the patient. And that's where we need it to be, because that's where it starts circulating in the body and has an effect that the patient is looking for.
So if you compare the Astrum product with this oil technology to any other oil product on the market in Europe or actually in the world today, they all use, for example, MCT oil, which is a synthetic oil that is mixed with the cannabis. And we actually did a comparison test. So we did what is called a pharmacokinetic study. It's a study where you do a crossover test in dogs. So you give them both our oil technology and the competing oil technology, and then you, after a period, you switch the dogs and repeat it, so you know all the data.
The data that came out of that study showed us that the oil that we are using, for the exact same dosage, for the exact same medical cannabis type, actually increases the uptake in the blood by minimum 2.5 times i n some of the dogs, it was more than 15 times higher. So it tells you that we can, with this technology, we can deliver a higher dosage, for treatment in the patient, or the patient could take a lower dosage. That's also an option. But we also found that, one of the challenges with medical cannabis is that each person actually reacts differently to the dosage, because that's how our body works. So we saw with the traditional product that's on the market today, each dog had a very different experience.
So someone had a very fast uptake, someone never had an uptake, some had a very delayed uptake, and yeah, so it was all over the place when you looked at the charts. But when we looked at the Astrum Oil, they were similar. So we had unified the experience across all the dogs in the test. And of course, a doctor likes to know what's happening with his patient when he's prescribing a new drug, that he's not hoping that this patient is gonna be the one that actually has the effect. So it's that type of findings that we believe puts our product and Stenocare in a special position because it's something that our competition do not have, and it's a technology that is protected by a patent and we have the worldwide exclusivity to use this patent for cannabis.
So in that way, we are very optimistic of what this product can do for us in the future.
Interesting. If we then go further on to Canada, we have seen a lot of Canadian cannabis companies expand to Europe and try to enter this market, your home market, and now we see you go to Canada, wanting to compete with this on their home turf. So can you put some words around this choice from Stenocare, booking your flight tickets and entering Canada?
It's about time we do this. No, it's again, I mean, we have been learning a lot from the Canadian market. They are so mature, and they're so ahead of all the markets that we see around the world. So we've been kind of looking at it, but we've kept away, because we didn't want to bring another oil product into the Canadian market, kind of a me-too type product. But with the Astrum product, we think that we have a unique offering for patients in Canada.
Having looked at the Canadian market very narrowly for the last five, six years, I mean, there's been very little innovation from a medical cannabis point of view in the market, because they have been so focused on creating recreational products with gummy bears, and I don't know, all kind of stuff that you can imagine, that there's been actually zero innovation. So now we can bring innovation into the Canadian market and hopefully offer the patients something that's not available today. So we think we have a very interesting niche ahead.
What is the strategy here in Canada when you're entering a market where there already is a lot of other suppliers and companies in this market? Are you going to have to push some of these companies out to take a market share, or are you entering with a product that is so significantly different that you will have to open up a new market in Canada that they are not addressing today?
I think we will be addressing a new market because we're not gonna compete on even terms with the local and very well-established local suppliers. And again, this is why we haven't entered before, is we know that that's an uphill battle if we were to fight the big guys that are significantly larger than Stenocare, of course. So having this unique product, we hope and we expect that we will find a very nice niche for the product, and this is why we are working with a very well-established local team that has a long track record in the medical space, not only for medical cannabis but from other medical offerings in the market.
So we think, as we are maturing the business model over the next few months, I think, it'll be really interesting to see when we can share more details on how we are gonna do that.
Interesting. Then we also have another question from the audience here around Canada. We have addressed some of it, but the question is: how do you view Canada as a market? What do you expect ramped up time to be and potential to be here in the coming years?
Well, I mean, this really, the answer to that question is really the name of the partner or partners that we end up signing to take the product to market. I mean, there's different options. So some of them will be piloting and sort of easily, but carving out a slice of the market for a specific type of patients. So in that scenario, it's gonna be slow. Then if there's some of the major players that might see this as the innovation that no one else has brought to the market, and they wanna fast-track by partnering with us, that will have a different speed to market.
So I think we are looking at different avenues of how to do this, and it's too soon to really say whether it's gonna be one or the other, because at the end of the day, it needs to be an attractive business case for Stenocare, in the way that we do this.
Perfect. That was actually all the questions that we had today, Peter and Thomas, so thank you for the answers. Before we end the webcast, I will just hand over the word for you, if you have any final remarks to end with.
Yeah, but we both wanna thank you for your time listening to this introduction to our TO2 warrant transaction, and hopefully, you think medical cannabis as an industry and Stenocare specifically as a player in the industry is exciting. We hope you'll take the time to look at the information available on our investor homepage, and it would be fantastic if you join as a new shareholder or you increase your holdings in the company. We are on a journey and a mission to really grow this market, and we welcome any new shareholders. So with that, we'd like to thank you for your attention, and just remind you the deadline is on Friday.