Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the IP Group plc full-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, I would just like to submit the following poll, and I would now like to hand you over to CEO Greg Smith. Greg, good morning, sir.
Good morning. And good morning. Welcome, everyone, to IP Group's 2023 full-year results presentation. As always, really pleased to be working with the Investor Meet Company team. These live updates, and they're open to all shareholders, to all potential shareholders. They reflect our ongoing commitment to transparency and enabling a deeper understanding of the group, of our investment sectors, and our key portfolio companies. And as many of you will know, we've continued to invest time, and we've had, you know, a very active year, in terms of a year-round program of IR activities. And in fact, we more than doubled IR activity in 2023 compared to the prior year. The presentation, I will just quickly skip on to the disclaimer.
I know this is quite challenging to read on screen, but the presentation will be uploaded onto the IR section of our website as usual. Please do note the usual disclaimers around the nature of this update, particularly any reference to forward-looking statements that might be contained within. So today's presentation will comprise a short overview from me that's on the key messages for 2023 and the opportunity that we are pursuing as a group. The first is our portfolio progress in the year, and the many forthcoming inflection points this year and beyond. And then the second is a summary of our financial results. We'll then have a short summary, an outlook, and then we'll save hopefully time for Q&A.
As Jake said in the intro, please do post questions in the Q&A section. And as always, we'll endeavor to cover all of them. We might group them by theme, but we'll endeavor to cover all of them. And Dave, as always, will chair that session for us. In terms of today's speakers, you have myself, the Group Chief Executive. We have David Baynes, our CFOO. He will be running us through the numbers shortly. Sam Williams is our Managing Partner of Life Sciences, and he will be talking particularly about the many milestones that we have approaching in that part of our portfolio over the next year or two. And I'm also delighted. We'll introduce properly later, but we have a guest speaker today, joining us from Australia, a former colleague of ours, Paul, who is now founder and CEO of Hysata, one of our most exciting companies.
Paul will be giving us a rundown of the opportunity that Hysata is pursuing. I should also say we do have Mark Reilly, as usual, our managing partner in technology. He will be with us for the Q&A section, in case there's any tricky questions on AI and the applications thereof. On to an overview. This is an overview of the business and the year to 2023. The key things that you should take away from today are that we have a focused business and portfolio with multiple upcoming milestones. We have maintained our financial strength, and we have maintained our commitment to shareholder returns. Taking each of those three points in turn, the strategy of the business in the last two years has really been one of increased focus.
To try and put that into context, almost half of our investment in the past 24 months has been into eight companies. More than 90% of our portfolio value is in 40 holdings. So as a result, we are well-positioned going into 2024 with many milestones in our portfolio to create both impact and shareholder returns. Specifically on geography, we've taken decisive action in the year to deprioritize further investment in the Longview platform in the U.S., and we've decided not to proceed with our plans to raise a fund in China. And while these are not easy decisions, we believe they are the right decisions in the current environment, and they have taken to focus our resources and our capital onto the highest growth opportunities.
A mark on the portfolio side, a mark of the quality of the portfolio is the breadth and the quality of our co-investment partners. The portfolio as a whole, as you'll see there on the slide, raised about GBP 0.7 billion in the year, and that came from over 50 co-investors. That includes the likes of Bosch and BP Ventures on the cleantech side, and the likes of Merck and Pfizer and Roche and others on the life sciences side. On the second point, you know, we've maintained our financial strength during the year. This was building on the proactive steps we took in 2022 to secure a fixed-rate private market debt issue, and our level of investment was somewhat lower in 2023 at GBP 73 million. Our NAV per share was GBP 1.15 at 31st of December.
Now, our overall financial performance for the year, which was a negative return of 13% on NAV per share, was disappointing and definitely below our long-term aspirations. Dave is gonna cover the main elements of what comprised that, shortly, but you will see that the biggest element, maybe around GBP 0.10 per share, is where we've taken fair value reductions in the portfolio where funding has been delayed or it's reflective of the more challenging, current environment. We are confident that the milestones ahead in the portfolio, a number of which you're gonna hear about today, give us the opportunity for significant NAV appreciation in the future. And then the final point, the third point there is our continued commitment to shareholder returns. And no one understands the importance of shareholder returns more than me.
And in practical terms, as I mentioned, we've doubled our IR engagement during the year, and we engage extensively with our larger shareholders during the year. That included things like structure, and I was pleased to be able to announce an updated approach to shareholder returns in December where we are focusing on buyback rather than dividend for cash returns where the share price discount to NAV is greater than 20%. A big, big focus for I and the team this year is proactively driving value-maximizing cash exits. The venture market as a whole has seen pretty significant and sustained reduction in exits over the last two years. However, we are laser-focused on this. We intend to maintain that capital allocation approach of using a proportion of realizations to support NAV per share growth with cash returns.
And since 2021, as you can see there, we've returned more than GBP 75 million to shareholders. So those are the key elements of this year's financial results. Now, before I get into the sectors, and the portfolio, I just want to remind the listeners of our position in the market and why we focus on those companies that are driving a Healthier Futures, a tech-enriched future, and indeed a regenerative future. So, over the last 20 years, IP Group has played a leading role in creating a really vibrant ecosystem for science and technology commercialization in the U.K. We took a pioneering role more than 20 years ago in partnering with the University of Oxford. We were founders in a number of the now dedicated investment vehicles in the space such as Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital, the UCL Tech Fund.
And to this day, we are the UK's most active investor in science and innovation companies, and we are also the most active backer of university spin-outs in the UK, and that's primarily through our market-leading EIS fund manager, Parkwalk Advisors. We're creating a similar ecosystem in Australia where actually the early returns from that portfolio are amongst the strongest in the group. And why does that matter? What's the content? Well, it matters because this activity is a really key focus for building the economies of the future. The UK has been particularly focused on the commercialization of scientific research, and there are lots of initiatives underway, many of which we are actively engaging with, such as the Mansion House reforms. I'm very pleased to say we have a number of, the sort of UK pension fund pioneers in this space as investors.
That includes the likes of Railpen, Phoenix, Schroders, M&G, Border to Coast. And we think there is an opportunity to do much more, and we are well-positioned to work, to co-invest, and to partner with others in the space or who are interested in getting into the space. So this is the really important context. Now, those of you who know the group well will be well aware of our investment focus. Our business model is actually really quite simple. You know, we are aiming to be the leading value-add backer of impactful early-stage innovation. We target opportunities at the intersection of huge societal need, huge commercial opportunity, and the group's strengths.
And our USPs are built on understanding and backing breakthrough innovation and using the technical acumen and the sector insights of our experienced teams to better assess the value and the risk-reward profile of innovation. And these teams are focused on companies in these three areas. And the investment profile over the next years is largely, as I reported in August, I said, over the next sort of 18-24 months, these would be the main drivers. That remains the case, and I'll come onto each of those shortly. And why are we in this space? Well, part of the rationale for the focus on those areas is because they represent very significant markets, high-opportunity markets.
Now, I'm really conscious that, you know, sort of big market numbers on a slide can be, somewhat meaningless, but these ones are particularly relevant to the IP Group investment case. I'm just gonna pick on two. So, in context, firstly, I'm gonna start down at the bottom, in the regenerative future section with green hydrogen. And it's worth saying green hydrogen itself really came into focus, following the commitment of many countries to net zero at COP in 2015. And then as things progressed through 2018 and the IPCC were asked to look at, you know, what how does this work, there was a pretty groundbreaking report from a group called the ETC and one of our key co-partners, Rob Trezona. He's a commissioner there. And there was a report produced on the so-called hard-to-abate sectors.
That's things like, steel manufacturer, heavy transport. And it set out this sort of huge role for hydrogen in the transition to net zero. And the numbers I have on here are actually from Goldman Sachs, and they estimate that about $1.7 trillion of investment in electrolyzers is needed out to 2050. Now, it's a big number, and it's arguably a long way out, but you will see from Paul shortly about the immediacy of the opportunity that is facing Hysata in this area and how they are delivering against that. And then secondly, back up to the top, in the Healthier Futures area, the interesting thing here is there is, you know, there's a very well-documented and huge innovation opportunity in how we understand, how we treat, and how we prevent disease.
However, for us, the most important market context comes from the fact that while worldwide drug prescription sales currently exceed $1 trillion, there is a very well-documented patent cliff for blockbuster drugs that is putting tens of billions of that at risk. As a result, Ernst & Young, or EY, as I think they're now called, estimate that biopharma companies, the top 20 biopharma companies, have about $1.4 trillion in so-called firepower for business development and for licensing of potential new drugs. Our portfolio is very well-positioned for this opportunity with 10 companies in clinical studies and expecting data by the end of 2025. In that context, I will pass on to Sam to talk about a few of those opportunities in the Healthier Futures section. Sam. Thanks, Greg. So good morning, everyone.
So, I just talk for a moment about our broad life science portfolio. I and I think we're really excited about that portfolio at the moment, because we do believe it is well-placed to deliver some very significant milestones over the coming two years. So, a couple of points to consider about the portfolio. This portfolio has now been 10 years in the making. It's had an almost $1.5 billion invested in it over that period, obviously not just by us, but by the syndicate of investors that we work with. And that includes international life science investment funds, and also global pharmaceutical companies that that we partner with in in financing these companies.
It happens that we've come to a moment in time where many of those companies are at a point of delivering milestones in the coming two years that will provide significant evidence of the efficacy of their drugs or their technology platforms, whichever it may be, and assuming success, will drive significant valuation uplifts or potentially cash exits. So this specific slide here shows the therapeutics portfolio. Therapeutics comprises probably the majority of our life science portfolio. In fact, we now have 14 companies that have products in clinical studies. The important thing is these are all critical clinical studies. So even though quite a few of them are still in phase one, these tend to be phase one cancer studies, which are conducted in patients.
And that means that we will achieve data from these studies that will tell us and tell the pharmaceutical companies that are looking potentially to partner with some of these products or on some of these products if the drugs actually work because the trials are being conducted in patients. So those are gonna be important readouts. And in a couple of cases, we think directly, if positive, could lead to partnering situations with the pharmaceutical industry. And then we also have a couple of companies in phase two studies in chronic diseases. And the data from those studies will tell us whether those drugs warrant going into Phase 3 clinical studies, which obviously, when you go into Phase 3, that comes with it a significant uplift in valuation.
And then, for example, in the case of Pulmocide, we have there a company that's actually in Phase 3 with its lead drug, and, when successful data could actually lead to market launch in that disease area. So we'll just, we'll focus on a couple of companies, for a moment. If we talk about Pulmocide, which I just mentioned, so Pulmocide, as I said, they have a product in Phase 3 clinical studies, pivotal, clinical studies for those who aren't familiar with the drug discovery, and development, pathway. Phase three is the final, assessment that one does in the clinic, before applying, to the regulators for market access. Now, this is an interesting drug. It's an entirely novel agent for the treatment of a relatively rare disease, which is an infection of the respiratory tract called invasive pulmonary aspergillosis.
The drug is entirely differentiated from the current standard of care, where really, in the current situation, the response rate to current drugs is about 30%. This is a very nasty disease. Most of the patients, with this condition, face a very serious, morbidity and mortality situation. With the Pulmocide drug in early-stage clinical studies, in a very small number of patients, we were able to show that this drug brought about an almost complete, resolution of disease and saved the lives of about 10 or 11 patients in, in what's known as a special needs situation. On the back of that, we were able to go to the FDA and get approval to go straight into a large pivotal clinical study, which will read out, in 2025. We've got about a year and a half to wait for those data.
But the exciting thing about this area in the respiratory infection space is that the pharmaceutical industry is becoming increasingly interested in this area. And we've seen that manifest itself in a couple, in fact, three or four very significant transactions between pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies with drugs like Pulmocide in the last couple of years. So we're really excited about the prospects for Pulmocide. We think there is the possibility that we could generate quite a bit of corporate interest in that drug before the data actually come in 2025. But at the very least, we'll be seeing that data, we hope, around the middle of 2025. Another one I'd like to focus on is Crescendo, which works in the field of monoclonal antibodies and has a novel agent for the treatment of prostate cancer.
So, this particular monoclonal this particular class of antibodies and in fact known as bispecific antibodies. It's a very technical area. But suffice to know that this has become, again, another area of significant interest for the pharmaceutical industry with multiple billion-dollar valuation deals being struck over the last few years for products like Crescendo's that have shown efficacy in the cancer setting. And so Crescendo's study is a phase one open-label study. The significance of that is that it's in patients but would be guessed we'll be seeing data as the trial progresses over the course of this year. And again, if the data proved to be positive, we would expect to see significant corporate interest in the product and in the company.
So, there's a number of different examples here of really very exciting products that we expect to play out over the next couple of years. But it's not all just about therapeutics. We also have some very exciting companies in the broader life sciences space. One I will mention is Genomics plc. So this is actually a private company focused on advanced genetic screening to try and identify risk of developing chronic disease. So the company has published really some quite beautiful scientific papers showing that its approach to this genetic screening can increase the sensitivity of current protocols and current methods that are used to predict the risk or identify the risk or quantify the risk of developing conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune conditions, diabetes, and so on.
And that's incredibly valuable when you think about the huge amount of money that is spent on caring for people who have developed cardiovascular complications or complications as a consequence of diabetes or have developed full-scale autoimmune conditions or cancer because of a lack of early screening. With the Genomics approach, you have the potential to manage healthcare in a way that you can avoid the development of disease at an early stage and start with intervention in disease at an early stage so you avoid later-stage cost. And the company has really recently started to hit a very nice vein of commercial success.
It has just started executing on its business model of partnering with global insurance companies to make its technology available to life insurance customers who can then have access to the Genomics technology to help them identify risk of disease and manage that risk appropriately. And then also is talking to a number of pharmaceutical companies about applying its technology to drug discovery and development. So we're very excited about Genomics and expect to see significant commercial traction continue across the course of this year. And then I'll come on to one of our major names in the portfolio, Istesso, which I think you've all heard quite a bit about. So Istesso is significant because it's our, it's actually our biggest holding within the life science portfolio, after Oxford Nanopore.
What's significant here is that the company will be having data from its phase 2B clinical study for its lead drug, MBS2320, in rheumatoid arthritis. Those data are due at some point in the second quarter of this year. That's significant because these data will tell us whether MBS2320 is efficacious in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. It will also tell us which dose it's efficacious at. Those data are very important for the company's plan for the drug, which involves preferably partnering with a pharmaceutical company before going into Phase 3 clinical studies at some point during the course of next year. So we're really excited about those data, again, expecting those in the second quarter. The drug is entirely differentiated from the current range of drugs for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, which is a huge market, about a $25 billion market.
It's differentiated because, mainly because, it is able to repair the bone damage that you see in rheumatoid arthritis that none of the current drugs address. So, the drug has also shown promise in other conditions related to rheumatoid arthritis, in the autoimmune and other chronic disease settings. So one example is pulmonary fibrosis of the lungs, where the drug has shown an ability to resolve fibrosis in the lung. And that's something that you don't see with the existing $4 billion class of drugs. So the FDA, on the back of those data, has granted the company Fast Track designation for 2320. And that will be starting a clinical study in pulmonary fibrosis over the next couple of months. So we're really excited about 2320 and looking forward to the data in Q2. And with that, I will hand back to Greg. Thanks very much, Sam.
Just to say, there'll be questions time for questions at the end, if anyone has any questions on the life sciences side. So onto the second of our themes, Tech-Enriched Future. This is really about the global so-called digital transformation. So this is the, you know, comprehensive integration and really sort of relentless increase in sophistication of digital technologies in pretty much every aspect of society and business. We think this is one of the most profound and pervasive megatrends that's really shaping the future of our world. Numbers astronomical, $2-3 trillion by, you know, the middle of the 2020s. And clearly, emerging artificial intelligence technologies represent some of the most, you know, profound technological trends that are really shaping the evolution of this whole sector.
If you want to know more about, say, the theme of AI and the internet, I would really encourage you to access. We did a deep-dive webinar on this, last September on our website with a few of our portfolio companies. Really fascinating. You can access that via the website. And one of the things you'll see from that is that IP Group has been investing in AI-related companies for getting on for 20 years. And we're now very well positioned to support the fundamental technologies that will enable the transition to an ever more intelligent computation at every layer of the computation stack, the computing stack.
So if I come and try and sort of explain that a little bit in terms of our portfolio and the relevance to us, if you start kind of at the bottom of the stack, the communications layer, innovation here is gonna be needed to support all of the huge data loads and the rapid response times and the ubiquity, you know, literally everywhere, that's demanded by next-generation intelligent computing. So that's up in the top right-hand corner there. And that's why we're investing in companies like AccelerComm. They are building advanced signal processing and error correction solutions. And that really improves the throughput of wireless comms. And another good example that I've got there on the slide is a business called Deep Render. They, that was a new investment in the last year or two. And they are using AI to compress online video.
And they're already getting traction with some of the world's largest online video companies. If you then sort of move up the stack to the computing layer, AI algorithms and this is something that if you watch the webinar, you'll see they place very different demands on computing hardware, will need new processing and new memory technologies to support this sort of fast amount of parallel processing and to reduce bottlenecks in memory. And all of this has gotta be done in a very energy-efficient way. And that's why we're investing in companies like Intrinsic up there that you can see. That's a UCL spin-out. And they're developing some silicon oxide-based memory. It's a non-volatile memory, and it overcomes the sort of the current limitations of flash memory chips.
And the market for this, again, is huge. It's sort of into the, you know, $100-$150 billion by 2030. But the current state-of-the-art flash memory, it can't adequately support the demands of AI computation. So the chips that Intrinsic are developing, they offer far higher performance compared to flash while using about 100 times less energy. So really, really important in that space. As you probably know, we also have exposure to quantum computing and to some of the nearer-term emerging technologies like optical computing that's being developed by one of our Oxford spin-outs, Lumai. If you then move up the stack again, the human-machine interface is changing fundamentally. You've heard Mark talk about this many times, becoming more human-like as computing to interface with more human-like computing.
The whole, sort of extended reality, AR, VR, XR market has seen some false starts in recent years. But the release of the Apple Vision Pro this year is, I think, just the beginning of an era of more immersive computing. And we've anticipated it for some time. You remember we sold our business, Wave Optics, a couple of years ago. And we've been nurturing Ultraleap, which is here on the slide. And this offers the most advanced hand-tracking technology in the world, better than that shipped by both Apple and Meta. And Ultraleap is now starting to ship royalty-generating extended reality headsets. And we see a big growth opportunity as the next sort of wave of device manufacturers enters the market and license that Ultraleap hand-tracking tech. And then finally, at the top of the stack or round the wheel, the software layer.
This is where we're investing in AI companies where the sort of application of AI is either delivering new insight or capability with a clear economic benefit. A good example here is Featurespace. Featurespace is a company that we've highlighted before, that CEO Martina, brilliant CEO Martina, she gave a great overview of this business at one of our results presentations a couple of years ago. Again, recording on our website if you want to know more and hear a sort of a deeper dive into the business. And on this one, again, starting with the market opportunity, the numbers I have back on the previous slide, we're talking about, you know, the sort of overall data analytics market, that sort of $40 billion-$50 billion.
But specifically to Featurespace, Forrester anticipates that spending on enterprise software solutions in this area would reach about $8 billion by the middle of the 2020s. So the market opportunity is more than sufficient to support growth into the high tens of millions of revenue and indeed into the hundreds of millions. And what Featurespace have is they have an applied AI solution. And what it does is it learns ordinary behavior of a customer or of a person, me, or people like me, and that enables it to more quickly identify unusual or abnormal transactions. And so it automatically kind of evaluates and then reduces financial crime risk. The scale of this in terms of impact is really significant.
You can, based on the data that the company has from all of its various partners, they process close to 50 billion events, 50 billion sort of payment events each year, protecting more than 500 million consumers from risk. In terms of value, clearly the value driver here is around continued strong revenue growth. They grew revenues to $34 million in 2022 and continued double-digit growth in 2023. That was across a range of significant blue-chip customers. Encouragingly, recurring revenues are now up to 80% of that number. So this is a very strong company operating in a big market. They have a very clear strategy to be the most valued and respected technology partner in the payments industry. So one to watch and progressing very well. Finally to the regenerative future, our sort of cleantech theme.
And in this space, we invest primarily through our market-leading cleantech platform, Kiko Ventures. Kiko is focused on the UK and a small number of European countries like Germany and the Nordics, where uptake of climate technology is significant from a consumer point of view. But the company we are highlighting today actually originated from our Australian business, which I mentioned earlier has some of the best early returns in the group at the moment. And we work very closely with the team at Hysata going from patent in 2021 to the business that it is today. And so it's really with great pleasure that I introduce Paul. Paul is a former colleague of ours from the Australian team, joining us from Australia. And he is now CEO and founder of Hysata. Paul, welcome. Great to see you.
Greg, real pleasure. Great to chat with you today and to the audience, as well. So while you're pulling up my slide, maybe I'll start with the background I've got here. So we're a Sydney area-based company in Australia. And this is our facility just over my shoulder here. So we have an 8,500 square meter big kind of beachside shed that gives us the room to grow our manufacturing facility. So it's a really beautiful location that I think is fittingly a great home for us as we grow. So I wanted to spend just a couple of minutes talking a little bit about the business and what we do, why green hydrogen's important, and kind of the road ahead for Hysata. So firstly, for your listeners, Hysata, we're an electrolyzer company.
Electrolyzers are the machines that split water, H2O, into hydrogen and oxygen. As Greg said in some of his opening remarks, when you power an electrolyzer with renewables, you can make green hydrogen. On the path to net zero in 2050, green hydrogen is a vital energy vector to help deeply decarbonize the hard-to-abate sectors. These are sectors that are in everyday life that are very difficult to electrify. This is things like steel manufacture, the steel that's in our buildings and our cars, chemical manufacture that is in everyday life, including the fertilizers that make our food, a high-grade industrial heat, and heavy transportation like shipping and aviation. Green hydrogen is really the backbone to deeply decarbonize those sectors. They have pretty big emissions. The emissions in those sectors are about 20% of the world's emissions.
So fast forward 2050, green hydrogen as an energy vector will be about 10%-15% of all the world's energy, in this case, chemical energy. And what got us really excited about the Hysata electrolyzer is it's really, really differentiated. So as Greg mentioned, I found this opportunity at a university in the University of Wollongong, which is about 50 km south of Sydney, with a prof I'd known for 10 years. And this prof has, you know, 30 years' experience in electrochemistry and hydrogen generation. And he called me one day and said, "Paul, listen, I got this super exciting idea. You've gotta come to my lab and see the performance." And was absolutely blown away by the performance of his system. And it's really the performance metric here is efficiency. We need less energy to make green hydrogen than an incumbent electrolyzer.
And it's a pretty big giant leap. It's 20% less energy than an incumbent electrolyzer. And if you tease that through the kind of economics of green hydrogen production, the actually biggest expense in making green hydrogen is actually the cost of the renewables. So the solar and the wind, is the most expensive part. And when you use 20% less energy to, to make a certain mass of green hydrogen, you need 20% less renewables. So this really redefines the economics of, of green hydrogen production. And this is translating to, to really big traction, globally. So at Hysata, we're really focused on, major global blue-chip companies in those sectors I mentioned that are deeply committed to decarbonizing their, their operations. And our business model is to manufacture these electrolyzers.
Our first units will be manufactured in my building, over the shoulder and ship these electrolyzers to our customers. And just for the audience to visualize, these units will be shipping container size. A typical blue-chip company will need hundreds of these shipping container-sized units to decarbonize their operations. So these are pretty big orders, multi-billion-dollar potential orders with these customers. What's really enabled it is not only the capital from our investor group, including IP Group, but it's also the team. So the team is something I'm really proud of what we've built. We have about 70 people at the moment, all working out of this building. Close to 60 of them are in product engineering.
So this is a laser-focused organization on scaling this technology so we can get it into the field, with, with the customers. And there's probably two major elements to our, I think, our team and, and to some extent, our culture. One is science excellence, which is the efficiency and the differentiation I talked about, but also a focus on ability to mass manufacture. And, and we've been focused on both since the outset. And we've really got a unique electrolyzer architecture that lends itself really well to hyperscaling, which is more of a software term. But we've got a really capital-efficient way of, of scaling our, manufacture of our product. And that's based not only on supply chain and materials we've selected, but also designing for mass manufacture from inception.
In that team, probably I'd highlight one person, our Chief Engineering Officer, who has a PhD Stanford, but 30 years in high-tech manufacturing, including the hard drive industry, where he ran a manufacturing division for his hard drive company in Japan. He also worked at Apple designing and mass manufacturing the haptic devices that go in the watches and phones we use today. So he brings a you know volume manufacturing mindset right from inception that we've really been able to piggyback off and give this company a really outstanding roadmap to scale the manufacturing. So, if I distill that all together, our value proposition is multifaceted. But it really comes down to that efficiency, and our customers will need less renewables to power their electrolyzers. That efficiency also translates to simplification of the system. We have less waste heat.
So we've got a simplified balance of plant. So we win on OpEx with efficiency. We win on CapEx with the intrinsic simplicity. And then this pathway to manufacturing is also a really differentiating factor that excites our customers 'cause we're one of the few that can really get to scale, really quickly. So I probably have lots more to say, but I thought that was probably a good overview. And happy to take a few questions from you, Greg, now or at the end of the session.
That's excellent. Thank you very much, Paul. Very exciting opportunity. Well, let's, we'll fit all the Q&A. You're good to hang around for a little bit, aren't you? So we'll fit the Q&A. And at the end, I'm sure some of the viewers may have questions as well. So with that, I will turn to David to give us a summary of the financial results.
Great. Yeah. Hello. Really good to be back with you again. I'll go through this relatively quickly. I can summarize the financial position and a few key messages fairly briefly. As we've said already, we've maintained our financial strength. So we still have gross cash of GBP 227 million. As you can see, that's only a relatively small reduction from what we had last year, only about GBP 15 million less than we had last year. I'll explain that in a minute over a little cash bridge, which explains quite simply how we achieved that. We have had a reduction, about a 13% reduction in NAV. We've gone from about GBP 1.33 a share down to GBP 1.15 a share. That's right down the portfolio of GBP 160 million. And I'll look at that, that's a total loss of about GBP 175 million.
However, given our strong cash position and the fact that actually the share prices remain stubbornly low, still about GBP 0.50 today, well below half of our NAV, we have commenced a GBP 20 million share buyback, which Greg will talk about a bit more in a minute. So first, if we look at how we can try and summarize this kind of GBP 160 million number I mentioned as being a sort of reduction in value in the portfolio. And we've summarized it in the buckets there. And probably the major feature, which Greg's already touched on, is that actually the biggest area has really been about some delayed fundraising. So not that we've actually crystallized a reduction yet, but where we've got some delay in fundraisings, and therefore we've made provision. Probably the two biggest items in this First Light Fusion and also our American platform, Longview.
First Light, you may remember if you've been with us long enough, when they achieved fusion there, which was a great technical breakthrough, we did at that time double the value, which is from about GBP 57 million to GBP 114 million. We've actually chosen to write much of that back down. It's about a GBP 50 million reduction in that number there because we're taking the view until we actually get a firm valuation number. It's probably right to carry it back at where it was before as we knew its previous valuation number. But obviously, hopefully, during this year, that kind of valuation, we'll confirm a number. Similar in America. In America, that's a platform. We part-fund it. And there are other LP investors, as they're called, that invest in that platform.
That sort of venture LP market in America, despite public markets being strong, that early-stage venture market is still very flat, very hard to raise money. It's not just for our platform. It's true across the board for that kind of type of investment. For that reason, we've taken a more prudent view, and have actually, again, written down by approximately half. We've taken about GBP 40 million out of that value, which again is, you know, once we get some perhaps more fundraising, we'll have a better idea of the valuation there. When you actually look next, much smaller cash flow, actual down rounds, where you've had a funding round and the price has been lower, actually, then you represent about GBP 27 million of a reduction. And then again, smaller cashes, market-based, some event that's actually happened in the company or something specific as well.
So, in that category, you have things where actually we've changed our assessment of what the likely sort of revenue multiples are gonna be. But, again, they're relatively small amounts compared actually with actually delayed fundraisings and such. And then last category, of course, up rounds. There are some up rounds, predominantly, around Hysata, which we've heard shows a kind of uplift of a little bit over GBP 40 million. For funding rounds, not yet completed. We have no details of that really in the public domain yet. But actually, that's kind of the main area where we've seen some value happen. Very quickly then looking at that, of course, that reduction of about GBP 175 million overall, you can see reflected there, the total NAV going from GBP 1.4 billion to GBP 1.2 billion. Perhaps, more interestingly, you look at what we call the donut graph on the right there.
We've made this point before, even at this lower value of about GBP 115 million, with actually our share price at only GBP 0.50, you can see that actually what cash representing about GBP 0.09, even net cash about GBP 0.09, you only have to add up the next four companies in the portfolio down to Hysata. And there's a GBP 0.50 of value. At the moment, the market isn't actually valuing any of the rest, not none of Oxbotica or any of the other top 20 or any of the rest of the portfolio. So, I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit as questions come in. The next slide, really, again, very simple point we wanna make here. If you look on the right there, again, a donut graph, you can see that we're increasingly concentrating on our top assets. The message is very clear.
We're focusing on the more mature assets. A lot of our time, effort, and money are going into those. The top 20 companies now represent sort of 76% of our whole portfolio. You add on the remaining to get at the top 40, you've got 90% of all our value is focused very much in that most top companies. We do still have a total of about 85 companies. That's in the model. You know, we're invested in a lot of relatively early stage, very disruptive and interesting technology. So we have a very valuable pipeline in that 10%. But actually, the value and the money is billion much more mature companies. And then the other quick point to make, it's fairly consistent the way the portfolio breaks down.
When you add life sciences and NAV all together, you have about 50% of our value, with both cleantech and Deeptech being about 20%-25%. So it's fairly evenly balanced. That's a fact we've seen really, for a while now. I said I'd quickly explain cash. It's actually relatively easy to do here. We invested about GBP 73 million. We had a net dividend of about GBP 22 million to about GBP 95 million. Well, if you add up the loan we drew down, GBP 60 million, plus the realizations of GBP 38 million, you get about GBP 95 million. So effectively, it was funded by those two mechanisms. The only real reduction has been in the dividend payment balance. The money's gone out to the group. That pretty much reconciles directly to the reduction in cash that we've had in the period. Just a few last points to make.
The portfolio is actually still relatively well-funded, actually. We've only got 13% that, you know, needs to fund in the next year. There's a 35% number, which one says don't need to. They might fund. Right at the point, they might. They might choose to don't make, but they don't need to. It's about 13% this year that do. Clearly, next year, by next year, then bigger proportionally, we've got about 41% of the portfolio will need funding then. But still a year away. And we anticipate, you know, hopefully, there may be some recovery in the market as well, which may well help that. But in the short term, we remain, you know, pretty robust, good cash on balance sheet, our company relatively well-funded, and not too many needing funding.
Valuation approach, we did a deep dive in this last year, very well attended by the Investor Meet community. I'll just make the point that actually, we're still at the same valuation process. We're still getting an opinion from the auditors. So we're wildly cautious in our valuations. And you can see here, about 17% of market. So you know that. And then actually that, plus adding on the ones where based upon the recent funding round or the last funding round, but maybe with some small adjustment, you actually get 80% of our value. So a lot of our values are actually, you can touch back to a relatively recent valuation event, although we are still in the process of externally valuing 11 of our biggest companies. So we do a very comprehensive valuation process and remain confident in those values.
So really, in the last points I'll make, which we said before, we have this debt facility of GBP 120 million, drawn down in the year, the second tranche, GBP 60 million. Those aren't repayable for some time, 2027, 2028, 2029. And our unfavorably low interest rate paying about 5.25%. We are actually in that rather benign position of generating more income. We're actually paying on our loan for 2030. And then those repayments come in chunks in a later period. With that, I'll pass back to Greg.
Thanks, Dave. So into the last few points of the presentation there. So a quick reminder, you know, we aim to deliver returns to shareholders primarily in the form of capital appreciation. However, we seek to support that with an element of cash returns. And this comes from cash proceeds. We will typically reinvest most of the proceeds, but use a proportion of that to deliver returns to shareholders. And the board remains very committed to that approach. And in fact, in December, following quite a wide and continued consultation with our larger shareholders and very mindful, as Dave said, of that continued discount to NAV, we decided to change the mechanism for this so that the cash returns in the future will typically be made in the form of share buybacks where we have a greater than 20% share price discount to NAV.
And in those circumstances, we will suspend the dividend. And that's why we haven't proposed a full-year dividend for 2023. And at the time of that announcement, we talked about a further GBP 20 million buyback. It's underway. It's progressing slowly for various technical reasons. Now that the results are out of the way, we will be picking that one up. And we continue to plan to complete that during the course of this year. And it's just important as a reminder, you know, since we introduced this approach, we've returned more than GBP 75 million to shareholders since 2021. And the GBP 20 million buyback is in addition to that. So to leave time for questions, a very quick summary. I mean, the first is a summary of a recap of some of the catalysts that we've got in 2024. You've heard about those.
Sam talked about that number of events in the therapeutics side of the portfolio, which is some of which we've highlighted here. I talked about that, that great opportunity in AI across the compute stack, but particularly Featurespace and its continued revenue growth. And you heard today from Paul about one of our most exciting, breakthrough companies, Hysata. So I come back to those three key messages that I started with. Our portfolio is now entering a very milestone-rich window. We are focused. We're focused in terms of investment. We're with over half of our investment over the last couple of years into eight companies. We're focused in terms of geography. We're focused on delivering cash exits. We've maintained our financial strength, although that -13% return is well below where we're aiming, particularly with those many forthcoming milestones.
When we're successful in delivering cash exits, we'll continue to use a portion of those to support capital returns with a cash element. The current GBP 20 million buyback is adding to that GBP 75 million return to shareholders since 2021. With that, I and the team thank you all very much for listening. We've got at least 10 minutes for questions.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, all . I'll sort of take over from there and just take a spoonful of questions. We've got quite a lot of questions, by the way. We do endeavor to answer all of them as a rule. We will try to do that. I'll let you know when we get to 10. For those that you have to drop off at 10, we quite understand. We won't get sort of offended. What we'll probably do, if we do overwhelm, we'll carry on doing a few other questions. Anyway, without further ado, I'll try and move on. The first one, I think I'll point to you, Sam, if that's okay. Question comes from Steve White.
Given the frozen U.K. IPO market and the U.S. focus on tech and realistic tech valuations, do IPO plans target using NASDAQ as a route to market for our more advanced portfolio assets? I point that to you because obviously, that's a place where life science companies in particular find.
Yeah. I mean, yes. Not necessarily for the reasons you raise. But we have all, particularly in the biotech therapeutics side, I mean, I don't think there's the AIM market has been quite useful, for a number of companies at an earlier stage of development, as a capital-raising forum. And that has worked quite well. But I think for our bigger therapeutics companies that we expect or that may generate, you know, some of those good data that I was alluding to earlier, I think the right market would be NASDAQ. Again, nothing just simply because there is the bigger pool of investors who understand these sort of companies, the very esoteric technology involved, and speak the language, etc. So it's just a more sort of natural market.
But as you can see with a company like ONT, obviously, we went for London. Companies that have a story that is based more on a revenue growth type profile rather than a sort of milestone-driven therapeutics play, London may still offer an interesting opportunity. But for most of our mainstream biotech companies, I think NASDAQ is ultimately always the end market. And that's reflected in the fact, you know, although they're UK companies, we usually have international syndicates backing those companies. So there are already US investors involved who would be the natural partners when it came to, you know, crossover rounds and then floating on NASDAQ. I hope that answers the question.
Thank you, Sam. Very comprehensive. John, how are we different? Paul, it says, "If you really understood shareholder returns, you would not have suspended the dividend, forcing funds that require dividend-paying investments to divest." I've never really seen this before. Why did you need to suspend the dividend? Do you need to create a history of reliable dividends to attract new investors? It's not like you haven't got enough cash, GBP 200 million. I'm using both parts of that. Maybe, Greg, would you like to refer to that first?
Yeah. I mean, it's the balance of exactly how you have your mix of returns to shareholders. This is something that we are trying to optimize. We spoke to a number of the major shareholders and obviously analyzed our register very significantly. There are actually very few holders who have either joined the register or been on the register since we introduced the dividend policy. And we felt that it offered greater value for all of our shareholders, taking into account the different stakeholder needs, including the fact that tax is different. There is no perfect solution to this. But it felt to us that the right approach at this stage was where we have such a significant and persistent discount to NAV per share that we should be using the buyback mechanism.
So the impact in terms of our existing shareholder base is that actually there aren't that many funds that are holding us as a dividend stock. And that impact is quite minimal.
If I remember it, it was actually even one who does. Who actually so he said, "We never like buybacks. Never recommend them," in your case, make an exception given the difference between your NAV and your share price. We would actually understand why you would do it. Interesting. Interesting. I'll move on to the next question given time. Richard N. again, I'll probably do it just so you, Greg, don't mind. Share price is at the same level as it was 10 years ago. So where is value for shareholders given some discount of 50% as stated now?
Well, that's what we're seeking to address both through primarily portfolio performance and generating cash exits and then through that approach to support share price with some cash returns, including the buyback. That's a good need to both improve the NAV per share through performance. And we need to close the gap between NAV per share. And those are the actions that we've taken as a board over the course of the last 12 months.
Thank you. M&G, again, I'll do this to you, Greg, if that's all right. What is the geographic strategy with the significant presence, presence in the UK and still very good success in Australia?
I think I don't know if that was post the summary or not. I mean, the geographic focus for the group is U.K. predominantly, with a strong business and growing but smaller business in Australia, particularly given superannuation funds over there with whom we have great relationships and our sort of unique position in Australia. This is, as I said in the presentation, this is all about focus. We could play in lots of places, be it geographic or technology areas. We are increasingly focused as a group. And we are focusing our effort and our capital onto the areas that we think reflect the highest value opportunities for shareholders.
Paul Stevens, I believe one of our analysts, I suspect. Hello, Paul. Nice to have you on here. I'll have a go at this one. NAV in third parties has declined GBP 650 million. That's about GBP 700. Is that outflow or portfolio value reductions? If it was the latter, is this concentrated in a small number of holdings? Actually, mainly, Paul, actually in one side, particularly Parkwalk side, they were unable to raise money at one stage earlier in the year, which meant we raised slightly less than we expected. We also had some exits. So it's not really valuation reductions as such. I think we are very focused on increasing funds under third-party management. And, hopefully, we will see that increase actually in the coming years.
Yeah. There's a sort of positive element to that, isn't there? Like, part of the reduction in, or the reason the Parkwalk didn't go up so much was because they had some successful exits. And the model is to return capital, which then is reinvested. And there is some exposure, I think, to Oxford Nanopore in one of the third-party funds. Obviously, that's had an impact.
Then, to you again, Paul. I'm delighted Sam's online for this one. MBS2320, that's the therapeutic. The expectations of the placebo, it's ACR20 response rates. Would success be greater than 40% response rate versus increasing dose? Have U.S.-based principal investigators shown interest in potential future studies?
Yeah. Thanks, Paul. Yeah, last bit first. Yes, very much so. You know, and as you can imagine, you know, when you, you're more familiar with this drug than most, people are very excited about the drug because it's the only non-immunosuppressive in development for the treatment of RA. So it's very significant when you think about the side effect burden that current drugs carry with them. So yes, there's a lot of interest in the drug from potential investigators for the Phase 3. And then, look, I think the whole landscape is shifting quite a bit. So you'll be familiar with the recent combination data that J.&J. put out for a couple of the autoimmune drugs. Sanofi's been quite public in talking about combination looking for combinations in RA.
The story has been that these companies are willing to sacrifice efficacy with one of the combination agents in order to be able to bring about a combination because obviously, if you want to reduce the side effect burden, you need to dial down dose, and then you're going to compromise on efficacy. But you hope that the synergy of putting two drugs together will outweigh that. So the beauty of 2320 is we don't need to dial down dose to address any sort of safety issue because there is no safety issue in our view. So it's perfectly positioned for combination as that becomes something that people strive for.
And so actually, increasingly, I'm not concerned about. I'm not particularly focused. I mean, I think it will be important to get an ACR result, which for everyone else is, it typically is, the primary endpoint in these studies. But I think if you're thinking about combination, coformulations, adjunct therapy, then actually, what you want to see is differentiated profile, a differentiated profile. And that will come through the secondary endpoints, things like bone erosions, disability index, etc. So I think any ACR result will be a positive one. But I don't think that's the way our potential partners are thinking about this. This doesn't need to go head to head with existing agents on the standard endpoint. It needs to tick boxes.
But what it needs to do is show a differentiated profile so that you can believe if you put an existing standard of care together with 2320, you're going to get a differentiated profile.
Thank you very much. I'm going to pass the next one to you, Greg. Just so people are aware, it's now 10:00 A.M. So if people do have other appointments to go to, it's 10:00 A.M. We're going to carry on. We'll try and answer as many of the questions as we can in a sensible timeline. Over to you, Greg. Post-Mansion House, pretty quite short answer to this one. Have you yet seen any evidence of increased pension fund access in BC?
Not yet. I mean, look, we think there's a big opportunity here. It's got to be done appropriately. You know, the FCA makes these points that it's, you know, it's around balancing risk and reward. We think there's a big opportunity here. I heard the chancellor at the last budget talk about trying to make the U.K. pension environment more like that in Australia, much as it pains us to say that the Aussies have been ahead of us on anything. So I think there is opportunity. We do engage on this. There's various measures that hopefully all taken together improve the conditions for the U.K. to be a place for the best companies to start, to grow, to scale, and to stay. But there is, there's quite a long journey there.
And there's various initiatives that we are trying to get behind. And hopefully, over time, this both encourages long-term capital to come in, in addition to that, which is already here. I mentioned Railpen and Phoenix and others who are already big supporters of the group. So we're very well positioned for that. And we are, you know, actively partnering and actively co-investing.
Brilliant. Next one, I'll have a go at fairly quickly, from Charles W. Thank you. Could you please highlight the companies with the greatest revenue growth across the portfolio alongside your shareholding in them? Well, very briefly, I mean, one shouldn't forget Oxford Nanopore, which, although it has a difficult performance at share price, did still turn over about GBP 170 million this year, still expecting depending on which analyst you believe to something like GBP 190 million next year. We still own just under 10%, 10% of that. Featurespace, a company which we've referred to today. We don't talk about its revenues normally but in the public domain, as I think you've mentioned in the report. From a couple of years ago, it was doing about GBP 28 million. That's grown considerably since that time. We own 20% of that one.
Hinge Health, again, not in the public domain but turning over $ hundreds of millions. Extraordinary business, growing very fast. And we do own a small amount, 2% of that. That's still a valuable holding, as a result of because it's such a significant revenue and speed of growth. Perhaps the last one I'll mention is Garrison. Garrison, we own 23% of that one. And that's, growing I think, again, it's in our documents. It's growing from a relatively small start but sort of over 60% compound over the last four years. So that's showing some very good growth. It'll be probably lower as you expect going forward. But that's another very fast-growing, business, I think, in our portfolio. The list isn't exhaustive, of course. I'm going to move on to I'm going to give this to you, Greg. Sam might have an opinion. We'll mark at some point.
This is from Charles Roach. A recent article in The Spectator by Mark Reilly suggests that subsidizing industries may kill off developing innovative technology companies. How do you protect your portfolio from this squashing of innovation that you agree exists? On the other side, how do you decide to abandon investment because you can see it'll be overtaken? That second bit might be understandable. Mark, first, maybe to you, Greg.
Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Well, I'll get Mark here. Let's, I'll add The Spectator. But, let's Mark.
Thank you. Yeah. I'm not sure I accept the premise. I know that I haven't read the article. But I know that Ridley has been accused of lobbying on behalf of the coal industry and has a particular perspective on the energy transition. So I assume that this is directed at subsidies for climate technologies. And that's, it's not our experience with subsidies to engender innovation in that sector. I suspect that the innovators in our portfolio, several of them, would find that suggestion quite amusing, actually, given the pace of progress that we've seen in some of those subsidized sectors. And if you look at countries where those sectors have been subsidized, that sort of correlates with innovation in all of those areas. So I'm not sure I agree with that.
I'm just to hear if Paul felt that was the case. But I don't. And then, second question. I think the answer's sort of in the question. When we see that the investment will be overtaken, then it is time to relinquish our interest in it. For every new investment we make, we make it on the basis of a bottom-up analysis of the viability of the technology and the competitiveness of the technology. No, we don't base our decisions on sunk cost. We look at its current position in the market. And sometimes, we do have to make a hard decision that no longer leading.
Thanks, Mark.
Thanks, Mark.
Paul, I don't know. It's sort of 9:00 P.M. There's a couple that one maybe. And then, sorry, Dave, you're yeah. I don't know.
No, no, no. You're talking about.
Stole, stolen your, your.
No, no, no. Actually, I'm very happy with that. Paul, yeah, you're on. Hysata . Has there been interest from India, China, that are ramping investments in coal?
Yeah. Thanks, Dean. We're still wide awake. So, so no problem. Yeah. We, we've had huge, huge global interest and are really around that, value proposition. So the phone rings pretty hot. We've got a pretty focused strategy around Europe, U.S., parts of the Middle East, and Australia, but also demand in India and China as well, where there's huge deployment of renewables, going on, over the last few years.
Great. Thanks very much. Let me finish that, Paul. I'm going to move on, if I may, keep trying to keep momentum going a bit. This is from Odysseas. So again, an analyst. Thank you for being here, Odysseas. He's got three questions just to keep you on my toes. First one's for Greg. Given you've been involved you've covered some of this already. But given you've been involved in discussions here, how should we think about Mansion House reforms' timeline for implementation? Very similar question. How soon will we see you get an uplift, which is the same question, really.
I think I think we've probably covered that one. I think I think the thing is to keep, keep an eye on the progress of the various bills and initiatives moving through Parliament and then, you know, hopefully, further announcements of, of, of investment and commitment to investment in the space. I think one of the things was, recently was talking about the disclosure requirement for, pension funds to talk about how much they've got in private and how much they've got in, UK, for example, some of those measures maybe. But it's, it's quite a long burn, this one.
Yep. And one for me. What was the total impact for write-downs that you took through 2023 as a result of third-party valuations? Well, I'm glad you asked that because I looked at this at about 7:00 P.M. last night. It was about exactly GBP 80 million of that of those write-downs actually came through from that part. And then the last question for you, Sam, from Odysseas. On Istesso, could you please remind us on your conviction on phase 2B, have you managed to recruit the less severe RA patient group? And should we expect some better efficiency numbers from phase 2A as a result?
I think conviction is pretty high given the amount of money we've invested in Istesso in the last 12 months. I can't comment on anything from the study at all, because obviously, that's all under wraps. But we do expect the patient population to be more normal. We've built in procedures, etc., into the protocol and the management of the study to make sure that the patients are more like a normal phase two patient population compared to that phase 2A where it was skewed towards very severe patients. And what was sorry, what was the last bit of the question? Yeah. Better efficacy. Well, I mean, I, I, I like to believe so. I'm an optimist. But you know, we'll find out in Q2.
Brilliant. Thanks, Sam. Next one, moving on. We've sort of done it. I'm going to point it to you, Greg. And it's more of a statement to give Richard M. the chance to say it. If holding in an ISA, no tax on dividends, so why using buyback? Private shareholders have been slightly disadvantaged.
Yeah. I mean, my own holding has the same impact. I've got to try and balance the overall return of value to shareholders. And we felt the decision we took was in that context.
I think that's fair. Milos, another analyst. Good to see you. Hang on. Hello. How much do you expect to invest in 2024? And how much will this be divided into the following ones? Probably one for me. Well,we also invested about GBP 73 million this year. We're kind of now in the range of investing for between that and GBP 90 million a year. I would guess we'll be somewhere in that range is what we'd anticipate. Changes all the time depending on the movements we have. You have to keep a fairly sharp eye on the exits. Your liquidity position. But at least somewhere in that sort of range. And new investments. We're still making new investments. We are very much focused in the later stage in the developed portfolios we've talked about.
But I would anticipate something like about GBP 10 million of that going into new investments across the group. Martina, what happens to the shares that you buy back? Are you keeping them on the balance sheet or cancelling them? We are keeping them on the balance sheet at the moment. But we haven't cancelled any yet. And they get used for some issues. But at the moment, we're keeping them on the balance sheet. I think this might be one for you, Paul. I hadn't seen this one. Are you aware of considered Viritech, the intersection of hydrogen and vehicle emission reduction? I don't or maybe Mark, I don't know if you've got a view on that one.
Yeah. I'd almost certain that our cleantech team would be aware of them. The Kiko Ventures team would be aware of them. But I will pass on the name to make sure that they're aware of them. I don't want to set a precedent for this being the route to a green pipeline to IP Group. But I will pass it on.
Yeah. We're aware of them. They're a fuel cell company. And so for the audience, a fuel cell takes hydrogen as feedstock and converts it, combining it with oxygen from air into electrical energy. So they have a fuel cell, I think, drivetrain for heavy vehicles. So we're aware of that space. Hysata's really focused, though, on those industrial sectors and those hard-to-abate. So steel, chemicals, high-grade industrial heat, and heavy transportation, more like shipping. So we're not focused on that area but aware of the technology sector.
Okay. I've got a quick question. Any update in the first line Fusion funding. I think I've already mentioned that. It hasn't happened yet. It's still in hand. I don't know if Mark wants to add anything to that. If not, we'll probably move on. No, fair enough. Question about cost base. Well, how is the cost base addressed in 2023 and 2024? Well, we expect it to remain pretty level year on year, I would say. We want to keep it a fixed kind of percentage of NAV, which, which we are currently doing, about 1.8%. Another question about the share buyback and whether the shares are cancelled. They're not at the moment. But there's always that option. At the moment, we're still holding them. What this is from Andrew M. What technical factors have held back rate-to-share buyback? You might regret asking this. I'll quickly do it.
I'll do it as succinctly as I can. We've been in a closed period. We treat ourselves as closed. We're actually a bit stricter on ourselves than actually the market requirements are. We take the view that from the end of our actual accounting period, say 21st of December, we're in a closed period. So in that period, we weren't allowed to give instructions to our broker to change the amount of shares they're buying back because we're effectively inside. That logic follows. So we gave them a fixed percentage to buy back. They've been doing that. And there's another for another time, quite complicated thing that involves auction. At the end of a day, you have what's called an auction process.
Quite a lot of the volume you see going through when you look at the daily volumes actually relate to that auction at the end of the day. You can't guess what that's going to be. So they don't buy 15% of that. They're buying 15% of what's in the daily totals. So you'll see a slightly lower number than 15%. Clearly now, as of this morning, we're no longer in a closed period. And we will be able to have a more direct input on that because buyback needless to say, we still anticipate over the course of this year that we will complete that 20 million share, a share buyback. Next question about buybacks. Quick one to you, Dave, Greg. Similar. Cash buybacks are not actually leading to any share price appreciation. What's the point? We've tried to fill in that one.
Well, there are some quite wide views on whether buybacks, dividends, etc., make any difference. We are trying to have a, you know, consistent capital allocation approach which balances primarily portfolio and share price return with some cash return to shareholders from exit. It may not be having a point. But it's hard to evaluate the counterfactual. If we weren't doing it, we don't know what the situation would be. So we think this is an appropriate balance. We are frustrated by the discount to NAV per share. And we're using that mechanism as a contributing factor to try and reduce it.
Yep. Well said. Next one. I'm going to read out from a question. Great presentation, guys. Well done. I will take that one. Thank you, Lucas. The next one was, why was Hinge Health shareholding not sold years ago when first indicated, suggesting being of non-necessary loss in value? I Mark, would you like to refer to that? Maybe Greg, or I can refer to that.
On Hinge, well, we have sold when we've had the opportunity to do so. So we, you know, we've taken secondary liquidity, where we can. It's not always possible to sell private companies. We always are actively in discussions on secondary exit opportunities for our companies, whether they're public or private. So we have taken cash off the table at, I think, each of the most recent funding rounds. And we continue to focus on cash exits in the portfolio that sort of have a value for shareholders. It's a big focus for us this year.
And sorry, I should have said sat inside, Mark. The other thing to say I did not on my portfolio. But the other thing to say is that the company's continued to perform very well in the time that we've held it. The market has contracted and the valuations are down. But the company continues to be very. Its performance is actually truly remarkable, isn't it? I've really seen the company grow fast to that. I've seen it with extraordinary profitability as well at the growth profit line. Yeah. And as Greg's already said, it's not a private company. So you have much less chances to trade. You know, you only trade certain cases. I'm going to move on down a bit. I'm not sure it's a question. But I'll quickly do it. Oxford Nanopore and this is a quote, Andrew from our report accounts.
We remain convinced by long-term value of investment," statement has been made since IPO. "Share buyback from supporting existing development companies have been a better investment, we would suggest, throughout this period." Well, that's not really a question, I don't think. I don't know if anyone thinks there's something to answer that. One, one for Hysata. Paul, is that all right? What's the rough timetable for Hysata to deliver products to customers?
Well, that's our laser focus. So we've got commercial-scale building blocks at the moment, a really exciting mix of strategic customers. And if you look at the market, a lot of these big green hydrogen projects are going FID, final investment decision, over the next several years. And we'll be really well placed to participate in some pretty big transactions around those.
A bit of a general question. The M&A market is apparently showing signs of life, according to the banks. Has the company seen any approaches to portfolio companies? It could be hard to answer that specifically, I think, from the general account. Isn't that correct?
Well, yes. We wouldn't expect us to be able to talk about specifics. But, we, we too are seeing, some signs of life in terms of, inbound and also outbound. I mean, obviously, a number of our companies, as they're maturing, are thinking very carefully and have, you know, some of them have board committees that are dedicated to, the exit opportunities and the strategic partners for those companies. So, I think I would I would say that's a fair reflection of what we've seen, some signs of life, some green shoots.
Next one. Tricky question. But I'm going to give it to you, Greg, anyway. We're near the end. From Luca D, which of the sectors you invest in do you expect to perform best in 2024 and why? Not Paul.
Well, look, you know, the idea is to allocate the capital to those highest opportunity areas. As I said, we've been very focused. Eight companies have had about 50% of the cash invested over the course of the last 24 months. In terms of the sort of the shorter term, the identifiable catalysts are very significant in the Healthier Futures part, the life sciences side. Does that mean that we're then going to turn those into commercial deals and cash exits? That's the job that we need to do if the data are good. So I think that looks very compelling. On the deep tech side, you know, we've got some fantastic businesses like Hysata that are accelerating growth. But that, that AI opportunity across the stack is, is also significant. And then cleantech, we've got some incredible companies there, Hysata, particularly, as one of those.
As you know, all three areas offer really compelling returns. We're in three because we think it operates it offers a balance of focus and diversification. Yeah. We will reflect that in our capital allocations. And you'll see those over the course of this year and beyond.
Yeah. Actually, I've turned that rather a neat question to end with. I've got one last one, which I think is actually a statement. But I'll read it anyway. Question 31 for those at accounting. It says, "I'm happy with buybacks." So not all small shareholders are negative on this issue. Open brackets. No need to read this out. But I thought I would anyway. So that's—I'm glad to say we are at the last question. I think I'll move the hand back to Jake at this stage because that's the last question. Thank you.
Perfect, David. That's great. And thank you, all of you, for being so generous of your time there and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. Just for you to review to then add any additional responses, of course, where it's appropriate to do so. And we'll publish all those responses out on the platform. But, Greg, perhaps before really, just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.
Thank you. Well, closing, IP Group offers liquid, diversified exposure to investments making impactful returns. The key messages are that our portfolio is increasingly focused. There are many portfolio milestones to drive those positive, impactful returns. We're financially strong and we're very focused on delivering profitable cash exits. With those exits, we'll continue our commitment to delivering shareholder returns and we very much look forward to updating you on our progress throughout the year. Thank you all for your time.
Greg, that's great. Thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete. I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of IP Group plc, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good morning to you all.