Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the IP Group PLC half-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 will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from IP Group. Greg, David, good morning.
Good morning. Thanks, Jake, and I guess in keeping with the late summer weather here in the U.K., a warm welcome to IP Group's Half-Year 2024 Results Presentation, and thanks very much, as always, to Investor Meet for continuing to host these live updates. They're open to all shareholders or potential shareholders and reflects our continuing commitment to transparency and reporting and getting the IP Group story out to as many shareholders and investors as possible. I will quickly start with the customary disclaimer. If you can read it, your eyes are definitely better than mine. As usual, though, the presentation will be up on the IR section of our website, and so please do note the important disclaimers here about the nature of the information here in the update, and particularly any forward-looking statements that we might have within.
So in terms of today's presentation, I want to do a quick recap on the market opportunity for IP Group and how we're structured to capture this for our shareholders and our investors over the longer term. Then secondly, look at the main value drivers in our portfolio and the value opportunity on a bit more of a shorter-term time frame, and then do a run through the financial results for our first six months, and then we'll get on to questions following a short summary. Thanks very much to everyone for sending in questions in advance. We had a good number. It's very helpful because then we can ensure that we cover as many of those as possible in the content of the presentation, but also afterwards.
So we'll endeavor, as always, to cover as many as possible, either live if we've got time, or otherwise, we can do so via the platform. As Jake mentioned, today you've got myself, Chief Exec, and Dave Baynes, our CFOO, and he'll be taking us through the numbers shortly. Key things for us to cover today, or the sort of the summary, if you like, of the half year. You'll probably remember that, or you might remember, I'm sure you follow lots of companies, that I said at the full year that our strategy of increasingly sort of focusing our capital into fewer maturing companies meant that we had a portfolio with multiple upcoming milestones.
It's good to be able to report that the themes for this half year so far are that, firstly, we're now starting to see that maturity translate through into portfolio exits. Secondly, that those exits have enabled us to continue to deliver on that commitment that we made to shareholder capital returns, and that's been done despite a mark-to-market loss in the first half. Thirdly, we'll cover this. The momentum really feels like it's building in the second half, with a number of potential further exits anticipated between now and end of 2025 . To start with the market opportunity and the model that we're adopting to best optimize that for you, our shareholders, I covered some of this back at the time of the full-year results.
I'll go through it reasonably quickly. But as a reminder, over the last twenty years, we have been a leader in creating a thriving ecosystem for science and technology commercialization and investment here in the U.K. And the U.K. now compares very well to the U.S. and Europe on this front in terms of producing new seed and spin-out-type companies. To this day, we are the U.K.'s most active investor in science and innovation companies, and we're the most active backer of university spin-outs in the U.K., and that's primarily done through our award-winning EIS fund manager, Parkwalk Advisors. This was reconfirmed in our latest annual Equity Investments into Spin-Outs report that we do in conjunction with Beauhurst every year, and that was released yesterday. And we maintain extensive access to pipeline opportunities through these EIS funds.
For example, we invested in 15 new companies just in the first half alone. So the beginning bit of the funnel is very strong, and that is a sort of a U.K. common U.K. story, and we're particularly well positioned on that front. But as probably some of you will know who follow this space, the scale-up side of science and technology is really key to the U.K.'s future industrial strategy, and you'll have heard the moniker in the U.K. of sort of growth, growth, growth, and that was certainly reconfirmed under the new U.K. government. Although it's very early, it was very encouraging to see the Treasury confirming earlier this month that the EIS scheme will be extended out to 2035, and that sort of underlines, I think, support for the sector.
You might also remember that we highlighted the Mansion House Compact, and the commitment therein to invest about 5% of default DC pension saving funds into private assets a year or so back. Although it's understandably taken a while for the eleven or so signatories to start putting the relevant investment structures in place, the plumbing for this capital is sort of starting to take shape, and this was particularly clear at the recent BVCA annual conference. They did a pensions summit for that for the first time, and I and another member of IP Group were speaking on the subject of the opportunity and the investment case.
And of course, you will know we already have a couple of the signatories, Phoenix and M&G, as investors and co-investors, and we also are very well suited to defined benefit pension schemes, including our largest shareholder, Railpen. So given this backdrop, what we've been doing is adapting our structure and strategy to be best placed to take advantage of that sort of significant growth opportunity. The group is now increasingly making the bulk of its earliest stage investments through our Parkwalk platform. Here, the lower cost of capital from EIS tax relief is particularly well-suited to sort of pre-seed, seed investment, and we raise about GBP 30 million-GBP 40 million per year, and this provides management and performance fees to the group, as well as differentiated investment pipeline.
Then the next stage of funding, which is starting sort of late seed to Series A, predominantly comes from our permanent flexible balance sheet, and this offers capital returns to shareholders directly, and we obviously use a proportion of cash realizations to make capital returns or dividends when not such a significant discount to NAV per share, and then for the later stage, which is starting at sort of Series B and beyond, more traditional funds and backers, private backers, can be more appropriate. And again, these sorts of funds generate management and performance fees, and they also help to ensure that maturing portfolio companies can better access growth capital, hopefully in turn, generating better returns for shareholders. To give you sort of an idea of the scale of all of this, so Parkwalk at the beginning is currently about GBP 500 million in assets.
It's at a good scale, but we've got opportunities to work with more universities here in the U.K. with that model. The balance sheet, as you'll have seen from the release, is about GBP 1.1 billion in NAV, and we're aiming to grow that to at least GBP 1.5 billion and beyond organically over the coming few years. Then the scale-up stage is where there's that sort of real opportunity, and I'm very pleased to update that we've signed a further increase in our investment partnership with Hostplus in the last week, taking our commitments with them to over AUD 400 million . Of course, Australia and Canada has somewhat led the way in terms of private pension fund investment in the space.
So I think this further endorses the strength of our offering, but clearly, there is a big opportunity for the U.K., for U.K. funds to follow suit here, easily, you know, sort of GBP 1 billion-GBP 2 billion over coming years. So you can see there's a sort of GBP 3 billion-GBP 5 billion and beyond strategy just from our current activities. So overall, the thing to take away is that the wider market context, and particularly that context in the U.K., continues to move very much in our direction, and this will be good news for our shareholders. Now, on to the half-year results, taking each of those three themes that I described earlier in turn. So firstly, that strategy of increased focus in terms of, you know, more focused portfolio investment into fewer companies is starting to bear fruit.
I said at the start of the year, we'd be really proactively driving cash exits, and we were very pleased to be able to update in August that we'd already passed the total cash realizations achieved in both full year 2023 and full year 2024. The main contributor to that was the private sale of a top 10 holding, Garrison to U.S. cyber firm, Everfox. This is a strong outcome, and our congratulations go to co-founder and CEO, Dave Garfield, and his team.
It's a great validation of their anti-malware solutions for enterprise-level cyber defenses, and the initial cash proceeds of GBP 30 million that we received after the period end, plus about a further GBP 1 million in deferred, is almost exactly the same as our carrying value at full year 2023 and represents just over a 2.2x return on our cost. In terms of funding rounds, we had Paul Barrett on our full-year results call to talk about Hysata's prospects, and we announced the successful completion of their funding round in May. Then I also spoke about the fact that we were entering this milestone-rich window in our therapeutics portfolio, and we've had 4 out of 5 positive results, either on interim or final data during the period. The second point is around that sort of maintaining capital return.
So those exits, particularly Garrison, has enabled us to both deliver on our capital returns commitments and maintain our financial strength. We did have a fair value loss in the period, about GBP 110 million or about 9% in NAV per share terms. Obviously, this 9% is disappointing. However, it's also worth noting that GBP 95 million of that was from Oxford Nanopore, and they were not alone among their peers in having a weak first half. However, I guess less like their peers, strong share price performance since the half year has added back about half of this already. So sort of excluding Nanopore, our NAV was broadly flat for the first half, with momentum building well in the second half.
Having accelerated our current GBP 20 million buyback following the AGM, we completed it yesterday, actually, with spectacular timing, buying about 4% of our issued share capital at about a GBP 0.44 per share average price. So that makes now a total of about GBP 95 million returned, and that's mostly been since I took over as chief exec. And we also announced a further GBP 10 million buyback that we will commence shortly. Cash remains strong, GBP 160 million at the period end, and actually over GBP 180 million as we included in the release at the end of August, as those realizations have been coming through. We mentioned in the release, we've also addressed our sort of structure, capability, and cost base.
During the first half, this was partly through revenue increases and partly through OpEx savings, but we've reduced overheads to GBP 8.7 million from GBP 10.3 million last year. And then consistent with that investment funding stages structure and the strategy I described earlier, we've been able to consolidate some of our functions and further streamline our business. And in this way, we anticipate reducing our net overhead run rate by 25% on an annualized run basis by the end of the year. And then looking forward, as I said, I think we've seen really positive momentum building in the second half. So firstly, as I mentioned, Nanopore has had a much better second half. The share price is up about 60% since June, and I'll come on to what we think about Nanopore and why we think that's the case.
We expect to see further exits, and this includes a number that are at an advanced stage of negotiation, and if completed, we would expect these to take place at or above the 2023 year-end carrying values. And there are a number of other milestones to come in our leading companies, not least Istesso. So NAV per share was about GBP 1.05 at the half year, and a further GBP 0.05 per share has been added from the quoted portfolio since then. So quite a lot in there, but that basically is our half year results in one slide. So it covers all of the main points that we wanted to get across in the release.
Having talked about that increasing momentum, I just want to try to cover now where this momentum could take the portfolio, very much focusing on the larger holdings. The opportunity to sort of frame it, this is the NAV per share at June, and the only real major change is that Nanopore is now nearer sort of GBP 0.13 rather than GBP 0.08, and the total is about GBP 1.10 rather than GBP 1.05. And it's a bit above that, actually, including the impact of the completed buyback. Now, of that, there's about GBP 0.70 in the top five holdings, plus the 14 therapeutics companies that are at a clinical stage.
So I'm just going to cover those sort of top ones and give you an idea of the scale of opportunity and why we believe that that balance sheet value can grow organically over the next couple of years and deliver value for shareholders. Features pace, I mean, this is a really compelling business. It's addressing a growing multibillion-dollar market in fraud. And this business was actually founded in 2005, but it was very much a consulting business at the time. So we were the first institutional investor in 2012, and we brought in the excellent Martina King as CEO shortly thereafter, and we remain the largest shareholder at around 20%. We've invested about GBP 23 million to date in the company. It's maturing well, it's funded to break even.
And as you can see from the data on the slide, the revenues are growing strongly, about sort of 50%-ish, almost 50% in 2023 to hit the GBP 50 million. In terms of value potential here, we've consistently said that by 2025, 2026, revenue should be approaching the $100 million level, recurring, and with a decent, you know, sort of market revenue multiple, a company value of around a billion is more than realistic. Hysata, another very compelling business, one that we founded in 2021. CEO Paul Barrett, who I mentioned, was on our full-year results release. He was one of our former IP Group senior investment team members. We remain the largest shareholder here, too. There was a question asking about our stake size.
We have 37% holding in this company, which is the largest shareholding. Paul gave a really great overview of the business and the opportunity. It's on the Investor Meet platform, so from March, so please do revisit it if you didn't see it at the time. In terms of value, the recent AUD 111 million funding round, that was the largest Series B in Australian clean tech history, and it was led by two excellent investors alongside us, BP Ventures and Templewater. There was a really good mix of international investors, including strategics and financial investors. People like POSCO, Shinhan Financial Group, Oman and TelstraSuper.
Hysata will be using that funding to expand production capacity at its fantastic beachside manufacturing facility, which Paul mentioned, and it will further develop its technology as it focuses on reaching the sort of gigawatt-scale manufacturing. Now, this one's a bit earlier than Features pace, obviously, but the company's technology is very scalable, and it has ambitious revenue targets out in 2028 and 2029, which would point to a very valuable business well in excess of AUD 1 billion. The company's funded now until at least 2026, so we anticipate funding in sort of half to 2025 at the earliest, and we would hope for a material step-up in the value if they can achieve the milestones and make further commercial progress there. Moving on to Nanopore. So again, Nanopore, we were the founding investor in Nanopore.
We've invested about GBP 78 million to date in the company, and actually, we've now realized about GBP 106 million in total. We remain the largest shareholder, just under 9% now, following the Novo Holdings investment, but just over 9% at the half year, as disclosed on the slide. Now, as I said earlier, the value of our holding in Nanopore fell by quite a lot in the period, about GBP 95 million, and that reflected about a 50% reduction, or more than 50% reduction, which was pretty much in line with U.S. peers.
That said, the shares have performed strongly and rallied around 60% so far in quarter three, and I think that reflects both the outperformance against peers, but also the reiteration of guidance that they will grow revenues in full year 2024 by 20%-30% in underlying terms. Now, one of the big opportunities for Nanopore, which we were pleased to see disclosure of for the first time in their half one results, is that their customer base is now evolving to an increasingly diverse group of customer types. So in addition to the sort of traditional research, you, you'll probably be aware of at about 70%, it now includes biopharma and clinical and applied industrial customers. And it's particularly important, this, because those end markets are both very significant, but also Nanopore's technology attributes often make it uniquely suited to deliver....
And given Illumina is guiding to sort of single-digit revenue growth in the core research markets, and even though we expect Nanopore should be able to grow quicker than that, these end markets are the ones that really underpin that sort of 20%-30% revenue growth opportunity. So the company is making good progress in those markets. In the applied industrial, it was about sort of 12%-ish of the company's revenue in half one, and these are customers who are using sequencing for, sort of industrial service setting. Nanopore announced a multimillion-dollar, multi-year contract with a business called Plasmidsaurus, and that gives an example, and we think that customer segment could reach at least 20% of the company's revenue by 2027. So a big growth area.
Then the two other areas, so in clinical customers, these are people who are funded by reimbursements, such as like clinical labs. About 9% of the revenue came from there, and about 9% of customers from who are sort of funded to develop, make and sell pharmaceuticals, so sort of biopharma-type clients. Very encouraging to see the traction in that market. It's got a huge opportunity, and they've got some really blue-chip customers, so people like Lonza, Sanofi, BioNTech, many of whom will be presenting at the customer conference in Boston this week. So I'll be looking out for updates from those businesses. Lots of technology updates as usual. The two of particular interest to us were the launch of two new products in their regulated product pipeline.
They have an automated sample-to-answer solution called Elysion and a sort of lockdown version of the GridION, the sort of mid-sized device, and they are both aimed to drive adoption in the new clinical and applied industrial markets. Another really good piece of news following the half year was a significantly oversubscribed placing, and that was led by a really renowned life science investor, Novo Holdings. We see that investment as a really strong endorsement of Nanopore's strategy and its future growth plans, and we think there's scope for work between other companies in the Novo Holdings portfolio. This, again, is probably particularly relevant in that biopharmaceutical market. We believe this is a very exciting opportunity for the company over the medium term. So in terms of value opportunity, I mean, Nanopore clearly addresses multi-billion markets with highly differentiated technology solutions.
Some near-term milestones for value creation will obviously be hitting 2024 guidance, potentially joining the FTSE 250 index when the golden shares expire in October, and we're looking for more sort of brand-name customer deals to further underpin the applied markets opportunity, and hopefully, we'll see those this year. Moving on to Oxa. So again, a bit of a theme here. We were the first institutional investor. This is also held through our Parkwalk funds. So as a group, we are the largest shareholder. On the slide is just the balance sheet investment, which is off the back of having invested about 17 million into the company. This is a really, really...
If you, if you're interested in this space of autonomous vehicles, a great company to follow on LinkedIn and X, and you can see some of the, the very significant customer-led solutions that Oxa is rolling out in the field. There are now three locations in the U.S. where they've rolled out their software in conjunction with a Beep and another company, and what's interesting about those rollouts is it's Oxa software. It's not operated by Oxa, it's not on an Oxa car, and it's not Oxa's hardware, so it's a very demonstrates the sort of scalability of that model. In terms of sort of potential value here, I mean, there's a widely cited, listed U.S. comp, Aurora. They're currently at about $8 billion valuation. However, they are a bit more commercially progressed.
They've got revenues in the sort of tens of millions, but of the longer-term potential here. And then closer to home, Wayve, which is a Cambridge-based autonomy company, which is a bit further behind Oxa in terms of commercial rollout, reportedly completed a $1 billion funding during the first half. So again, great opportunity for value here. And then the last one, since I'm running out of voice, the last one is First Light. So again, another company, we were the first investor here, and the largest shareholder at 27%, having invested about GBP 18 million into the company. The company's definitely had a mixed first half. On the tech side, continues to make very strong technical progress.
Major milestone in February in becoming the first fusion company to successfully fire a shot on the Z machine, which is at the Sandia National Laboratories. This is the world's largest pulsed power machine, and that shot broke the pressure record for the machine in its first shot. So it's a really major achievement, and it validates a couple of things. Firstly, that the amplifier technology is clearly world-leading, but secondly, their ability to work with third-party facilities, and this points the way for First Light to follow a more capital-light strategy. And this will include working in partnership with the likes of Sandia and other providers of inertial confinement fusion driver technology.
We strengthened the team here with the appointment of a new Acting CEO, Graeme O'Keefe, in the period, and our founder, Nick Hawker, has moved into a new role of Chief Scientific Officer, and he'll be responsible for, you know, driving the company's scientific mission and focusing on how it really transforms its sort of unique technology for ICF into a commercially viable, scalable proposition for energy production. I said it was mixed because there, while there's still some activity in the fusion funding market, we definitely haven't seen a return to the sort of multi-hundred million funding rounds of 2021, and First Light is yet to complete its Series D funding.
So as a result, we've again reviewed our valuation using expert third-party input, and we reduced the value by a bit to our holding at about GBP 50 million for our 27% holding. I mean, in terms of the opportunity here, completing the financing is clearly the short-term priority. Beyond that, unlocking the engineering behind inertial confinement nuclear fusion power could clearly lead to a very valuable business, and given the potential size of the end markets, again, could have multi-billion-dollar potential. Two more portfolio things to update you on and so on the therapeutic side, and this is about GBP 0.28 a share across 14 clinical stage companies. I'm not going to go into detail on this, but it's there in the presentation, if you want to refer back to it. Two things to note.
First, the biggest single position is, Istesso, as you will probably be aware, and while we remain in regular dialogue with the company and with management, the company has told us that it is not yet in a position to update us on the final data from their phase II-B trial. This is later than we had expected and later than I had guided shareholders, which is obviously frustrating, but it definitely doesn't mean that the trial has failed. In fact, I would imagine if that were the case, then we would definitely know by now. So having given a pretty clear view on timing and not achieved this, I'm not going to risk making the mistake of giving a new date. However, we do look forward to updating the market, as soon as Istesso reports to us.
Second point, we've had five readouts, though, in the first half, either full or interim, of which four were positive and one was negative. As it happens, Oxular, the one that was negative, we'd actually largely written down by the end of 2023, and we might be able to rescue a small amount of our value. You can see we've got it in the books at just over GBP 3 million. And of the others, we're typically on the board, and we're working very closely with them to deliver value. And of course, a positive trial result doesn't always mean an exit or a licensing deal, and it can sometimes mean moving to the next stage of development. But we would hope to have a deal on at least one of them within the next six months.
There is a bit of further info in the appendices on each of those four, if you would like to know more about what the company does and the nature of the trial, but I won't go into it in the interest of time. Okay, so final one from me before we pass on to Dave to do the results, and don't worry, this is meant to be illustrative rather than for me to talk to the detail. I think what I just wanted to do, now that the market is clearly picking up in terms of funding and in terms of exit appetite, and some of our key companies are clearly reaching maturity, I've had an increasing number of shareholders asking about, "Okay, well, what's next?
You talk about the sort of the top five and the focus, what is behind that?", and I just wanted to include a slide to give confidence in the depth of the future pipeline. So there's about 80 companies in the portfolio, and so that's excluding some of the platform companies like sort of OSE and the UCL Technology Fund, et cetera, but taking out the five that I've already covered and 14 in the therapeutic side, there are about 30 that are worth more than GBP 3 million , so more than GBP 0.003 per share, and this is where the future value for shareholders will mostly be derived from, and you can see there's, you know, some quite mature companies in there, too. For example, in that more than 10 years, and on the right-hand side, Hinge Health.
Hinge Health continued to deliver strong revenue growth into hundreds of millions of dollars, and we're effectively already in cash realization mode there at the right price, of course, and we have sold down, and will continue to do so, and we're always looking at, secondary opportunities there. And then if that's not enough, beyond this, you can see at the bottom, there are a further 100 or so companies in our Parkwalk funds. So there's a really rich pipeline, and this is particularly for that Series B plus private scale-up capital opportunity that I mentioned earlier. So overall, I hope that gives you a flavor of why we're confident on the value creation opportunity, on the balance sheet. And with that, I will hand over to Dave to take us through the numbers. Please, Dave.
Thank you, Greg. Yeah, hello, nice to see you all again. It's David Baynes, the CFOO. Some of this you'll have already heard, but it's worth just going through it again, I think. We ended the period with gross cash of about GBP 161 million. Actually, of course, it's strengthened, as Greg has already mentioned, since that time because of the exit of Garrison. So at the end of last month, we were about GBP 184 million. So we still feel pretty confident. Our plan was always to end this year of about GBP 150 million, and that still looks like what we will achieve.
As Greg mentioned, we did have a relatively sizable loss in the period, about GBP 110 million, which has reduced to about GBP 1.04 per share. But since the period end, actually, we've recovered about half of that. So GBP 95 million of the loss related to Nanopore, and then that's effectively halved some of the other public companies. So but now, actually, having had a reduction in NAV per share, about 9%, it is only about 4% or 5%. So much of that has recovered. And the last point is around overheads. They are slightly down from about GBP 10.3 million- GBP 8.7 million. It's a little bit nuanced, and I'll explain that a little bit more on a slide in a moment.
As I said, the vast majority of that loss was actually in single stock, Oxford Nanopore, public stock, much of which has already recovered. The remaining portfolio was pretty much flat, actually, about a loss of GBP 8 million. About a total loss of the portfolio of about GBP 103 million of GBP 0.95 Nanopore. On the positive side, we've already heard about Features pace, so performing extremely well, revenues up from about GBP 32 million to over GBP 50 million. We really had to take some increase in that value... and about GBP 40 million of that GBP 54 million uplift does relate to that. We still believe there's probably more in that, but I think it more fairly values the stock than how we had it valued at the year-end.
At the other end of the scale, while we're sort of canceling out that benefit, we did take a little bit of a write-down on First Light Fusion. That's in that GBP 18 million negative funding environment. About GBP 14 million that is actually on First Light Fusion. It's performed well, as Greg has explained, but actually it, it's just a little bit delayed on the funding. And when you have a situation where the funding's a bit delayed, it makes sense to perhaps adjust the price. We did get a third-party valuation on that, and we've adjusted the valuation in line with the kind of guidance we got from the third party. And the other slightly large negative swing is a company called Ultraleap, which actually made its own public announcement about reducing its workforce and slightly changing its model.
And for that reason, we wrote that down, and a relatively big proportion of that negative company specific, it's from that one company alone. So it's a relatively simple story. Most of the loss, Nanopore, the rest pretty much flat, and where there's a swing in that, it's sort of one up and two down. So it's actually quite a simple story to understand. Same thing with balance sheet. Net assets, as you'd expect, net assets are down by the value of reduction, about GBP 110 million. But actually, overall, things like the net liabilities are pretty much consistent year on year, GBP 66 million-GBP 68 million. All of those, by the way, are only liabilities that are payable in the event of an exit, so we're not gonna affect too much.
Cash at the period end at about GBP 29 million net, but because we've had more exits since that point, well, at the end of last month, it's actually up to about GBP 55 million. Next point, a point Greg has already made, a very simple slide. It's just a point worth making, that we are increasingly focusing on the top value companies. So we have a great pipeline, as Greg has just shown you, with a lot of really interesting stuff coming down the production line, if you like. But actually, in terms of our investment and our money and our focus, a lot of it is in that top 40 companies. So 75% are in the top 20. If you include the top 40 companies, you're nearly at 90% of the portfolio. Our portfolio remains well-funded. I talk about this each time we speak.
About a third of it, and it's quite simple math. About a third of it is funded. It doesn't mean those companies won't have to raise more money, but they don't need any more money to get to breakeven. In the second half of this year, actually, in the second half of this year, there's only two companies above four million that need to raise money. But then, you know, next year, about another third. About a third of the portfolio will need to raise money next year, which is pretty consistent, and then another third the year after that. So we're pretty comfortable with that. Obviously, we run a portfolio, a lot of the companies do require fundraising, but actually, there's no immediate requirement for a lot of cash.
What tends to happen is, you'll know if you follow these presentations, as you move forward, things get funded, and these numbers move out. Kind of a third, a third, a third seems a fairly good guideline to us. The next slide changes something I talk to every time, so it didn't seem fair not to include it, 'cause actually, it's technically worse than slightly, but I'll explain it a bit more. We've been consistently looking since the end of 2021 at the kind of ratio of when we do fundings, whether they are actually up valuations, flat valuations, or down. Basically, as a kind of endorsement of the carrying value of our portfolio, whether we're getting the valuations right. Then half, we saw this at the end of last half, there has been a little increase in the down rounds.
Going from very small, so sub 20%, up to about a third. It's only across eight companies, not an enormous sample. You know, you've got there sort of a sort of three going down, one flat, and four up. But I think one point, which I failed to make in past years, but is worth making, is that although they had down rounds from the last funding round, they weren't down rounds from the price we carried them at. So in fact, all three of those companies were carried below the price we fundraised at. So that seems to support our sort of carrying values very much. I mentioned that overhead's a little bit more nuanced than just a simple reduction that we've seen during the period. There has been a 16% reduction in the first half.
A couple of points I'd like to make about that. That's net overhead, so that's both our costs less our income. So some of that reduction actually is an increased income, over GBP 1 million of it, actually, mainly from Parkwalk, where we've had slightly higher income in the period. There is some reduction in costs, but not the full 16. About 5% of that was the reduction in costs. However, since the year-end, we have focused more on the cost and accelerated that process as we increasingly sort of refine our strategy, and we've done a number of things. We're increasingly trying to streamline our operations, particularly between Parkwalk and the balance sheet, simplifying things like legal, compliance, and accounting, and that allows us to reduce costs. We've simplified the structure. We talked about this in the past.
We're doing less in China than we had originally planned, so that's saving quite a lot of money. And we're also rationalizing our sourcing, putting more and more reliance upon Parkwalk, which, of course, is a brilliant business, helping us source, particularly in the area of university opportunities. And that, across the board, has allowed us, well, will allow us, more accurately, by the end of the year, to reduce costs on an annualized basis by 25%. So just to say that again, so it's clear, costs won't reduce by 25% in the year, I don't think. I think what will happen is when you get to the end of the year and you look at the costs, they'll be 25% lower than they were at the same time last year. So obviously, by 2025, they'll be running at that lower cost level.
That also probably be a more appropriate cost base for the amount of assets that we're managing on the balance sheet. I think this is the last thing for me before I come back on questions. We continue, we believe, to deliver on share returns. Greg has mentioned this before. Still committed to making returns on exits, still committed to doing that in the form of share buyback if the discount exceeds 20%. As Greg already mentioned, by a bit of a miracle, we exactly completed the GBP 20 million yesterday, which allows us to say that's completed. And as soon as possible after the end of this result period, we will commence the next GBP 10 million buyback, which we have already announced our intent to do. So to date, we have actually...
Pay back GBP 95 million, that doesn't include the additional GBP 10 million, so the additional GBP 10 million will actually be at GBP 105 million, and I'd kind of guess that the rate we're buying back, the rate of buyback accelerated quite quickly in that second half of the year. I would anticipate that GBP 10 million will probably get completed by the end of this year. You never know for sure, 'cause it depends on price and volume, but one would anticipate on that sort of timeline, and as Greg has already said, we managed GBP 20 million buyback. We bought back about 45 million shares at an average price of about GBP 0.44 . So it's quite a significant amount. That's for me for the moment. I'll hand back to Greg.
Thanks, Dave. So I'll just do a very quick summary. One thing that we always like to do is just to put up the catalyst that we mentioned at the full year results in March to say how we're getting on against them, so you can sort of mark our homework. You can see the main ones that have happened so far was the Garrison exit and the Hysata and Genomics fundings being completed. They're the main ones, but there's a number of other potential milestones to come. So a quick summary, leaving us sort of twenty odd minutes for questions. So in March, I said we'd focused our capital into fewer maturing companies and also that we were proactively targeting cash exits.
The first takeaway is that we've made good progress in seeing that maturity translate into exits, already exceeding the totals in 2023 and 2022. Secondly, we've used those exits to enable us to continue to deliver on our commitment share capital returns, completing our GBP 20 million buyback and a further GBP 10 million, as Dave said, to start imminently, despite a marked market loss in the first half. And then finally, momentum is really building in the second half, including progress at Nanopore and a number of potential further exits anticipated between now and the end of 2025. So we will stop there, and we will go to questions. And Dave, you can
Yeah.
Come with the questions.
I'll come with the questions. We actually we started, before we started, Dave, with 15 questions, so, I quite understand if people can't stay for all of them. We'll try and get them done by the end of the hour. Probably a little risk we won't get them all done. However, here we go. I'll try and answer the first one. I welcome the increased rate of share buybacks since the AGM at prices well above NAV and encourage the total program has increased to GBP 30 million. Good. Why does the board not commit to canceling all future purchases of treasury shares, perhaps limiting the outstanding number to, say, GBP 900 million? This would address a concern that the board should be more disciplined in the issue of stock. Well, I mean, we do have that option.
I think that the actual practical effect isn't any different. When you cancel that, calculate NAV per share, you exclude those shares in treasury, so it won't actually affect the NAV per share at all. We use a relatively small amount of the shares just to satisfy any shares issued under our EIS or bonus scheme. So we'll barely use a fraction of the number of shares we're buying back. So I think the answer is practically, it doesn't make a practical difference, but it is an option that we could do at some time. Certainly, at the moment, it's not our intent to increase the shares at all, and I think as Greg mentioned, we have now fallen below a billion shares, and hopefully, as we progress with share buyback, it'll fall further. Next question.
Your current discount implies that your net asset value figure is not trusted by the market. As the board has signed off on the asset value, should they not be considering their positions in light of the ongoing and prolonged disbelief of the market? I'll let Greg have that one. That's a tricky one.
Thank you. Very pointed question, but fair, all questions are valid. I'd hope, as we've demonstrated in the presentation today, we think our portfolio is very appropriately valued, and this will be demonstrated by further exits and uplifts. I think, didn't Warren Buffett say that the market is a short-term voting machine and a long-term weighing machine, and our asset class has definitely been out of favor with the electorate, you know, as evidenced by the performance of us and our peers. But, I guess it's sort of fair to say that acquirers of our portfolio companies are definitely coming along with their scales, and they are concurring with the weights that we've got our companies at.
Yeah, hopefully we'll deliver some further evidence on that in the coming months.
The next one, I'll fire your way as well, though you may feel we've answered some of this. Share price discount. Like another investment company I own, Augmentum Fintech, suffers from a large discount to NAV. Help understand the pathway to profitability of its holdings and the likelihood of them probably being taken out in trade sales. Could IP Group choose a few of its companies to highlight where they are? If several are close to being profitable, that needs some funding, then their IPO will stand up regardless of market shenanigans. Good work. Some of our long-held companies must be close to standing on their own feet and give you long-suffering shareholders some share.
Well, again, thanks for the question and part of the thinking with this half-year results presentation was to do exactly that. I'm always mindful of not doing loads and loads of companies, but the top five holdings, I've given you an idea of the value potential, and a bit of an idea of when we think that value potential could be realized, timing of exits and signaling when they might exit is obviously the sort of the trickiest bit. But we're confident in the value of those top five companies, and indeed more beyond. IPOs, there's not lots and lots of them in the pipeline still, there's... but there definitely are more than this time last year.
You can sort of imagine companies that are, you know, growing revenues quickly, addressing big markets, could well be the sort of first candidates for IPOs. So, you know, maybe we'll see more next year. But as I've said over the last couple of years, we're definitely not basing our realizations forecast on IPOs, much more trade exits at this point in the cycle.
Next, whilst fully recognizing the longer-term nature of the investment, please can the board outline its strategy for crystallizing the value of its shareholding in First Light Fusion and give some sense of a realistic timeframe?
Okay. So again, timing harder to call on this one than most. I sort of tried to give an update in the presentation around the new business model that the company is following. This is much more capital light, with the company aiming to partner with various providers of inertial confinement fusion technology, and really leverage this sort of the particularly unique thing about First Light, which is the amplifier technology. So if you're interested, when the shockwave hits, you amplify and focus the shockwave down to create the very high areas of temperature and pressure, and that's the sort of the real magic source within First Light.
That should enable First Light to get to revenues more quickly as the technology becomes established as a, you know, sort of unique value-adding component within fusion, you know, bigger fusion schemes. So there should be an opportunity for us to realize value from this through exit to trade. And, you know, unlike maybe many other fusion energy startups who are following that path of building a sort of a commercial fusion power plant, we anticipate that means we could achieve an exit before that through demonstration of the high gain from its target technology. So I hope that gives you an idea. I can't give you much in terms of the timeframe, but hopefully quicker than other fusion companies given that partnering approach and the capital light approach.
Yeah. It's always going to be difficult, the lifetime in that company, by definition, but the upside is so enormous, there's a kind of balance between the two, isn't there? The next one's an Oxa question. The announcement of recent contract awards for Oxa Autonomy are encouraging. Please, can you indicate how this revenue is being recognized and whether there is scope for price escalation within these contracts? Can you give a rough estimate of likely revenue in 2024?
Well, generally speaking, we have to be a bit careful with the confidential information of our companies where they don't publish their results unlike a public company. To give you a bit of an idea, they're still in the initial revenue phase, so most customers are in sort of proof of concepts and trials. So as a result, we're not expecting material revenues in 2024. What we can say is each of the various verticals that they address, so sort of, you know, industrial, the shuttles, like what we've got with Beep, logistics, each of those is a multi-hundreds of millions of dollars ARR possibility, and it can roll out quite quickly, as you've seen with Beep, because you're just using Oxa's software on others' machines and technology.
Whether it will gear up in 2025, we'll have to see. But, you know, there might be some brand-name customer contracts that could start at sort of the end of this year and then roll out quite quickly next year, for example. So sort of probably quite small this year, and hopefully, there'll be some larger ones that could scale quite quickly next year.
Has the board approached other existing shareholders in Hinge Health with a view disposing of its shareholding?
Yes, in simple terms. Yeah, I mean, I mentioned it very briefly in the presentation, this is a really healthy, growing company with impressive financial performance and metrics, and those types of companies tend to be realizable. So definitely one that we have in our sort of, you know, in the realization phase of the portfolio.
Yeah, absolutely. What's the timeframe for Hysata to be manufacturing product, and what is the peak year for CapEx expenditure?
Remember from Paul's presentation, it is at scale, we'll be using outsourced contract manufacturing. But I guess to answer the question, we're expecting first commercial units to be deployed from sort of 2026 onwards with partners and then scaling up the manufacturing after that. And so sort of peak year for CapEx will be over the next few years as we establish those sort of manufacturing processes. And then once we've established the manufacturing processes, including the one that will be funded by this funding round, we'll then go on to the contract manufacturing, and then there'll be much lower CapEx requirements as we scale.
I can do this one because it's an easy one. I'll take it. Is IP Group the biggest shareholder in Hysata? How much debt is Hysata carrying? Yes, we are. I think you've already seen we have about 37% on balance sheet, and the company is not carrying any debt, which makes that easier. Next one, please outline the measures for reducing the group's recurring cost base to 2025. I think I probably sort of answered that earlier. I talked about the way we're rationalizing across the business, legal, compliance, and finance, and we're reducing complexity in the group, and we're also simplifying our approach to sourcing, all of which allows us to have a streamlined, lower-cost business.
Next one, does the group extend loans to any of its portfolio companies or invest only in the form of equity? If loans, what is the total? Well, we do invest in loans quite a lot. We tend to normally do them as convertible loans because normally they're kind of like a bridge. So often it's not possible to ascertain exactly what the right equity investment maybe you're pulling around together, and you quite often will provide bridge loans for some of the companies, and in most cases, those bridge loans will then themselves convert. And I think off the top of my head, we have about GBP 53 million of the values in loans. I'll check that in a minute. I think I'm about right of the total ones-
Just over 50.
Yeah, just over 50. Yeah, out of about just over a billion of assets. So about 5%, I guess. Next, you can have this one, Greg. What are the principal assets of Oxford Science Enterprises? And what is the logic of its very small shareholding, relative to IP Group taking a direct shareholding in the underlying assets?
There's a long answer and a short answer. I've given it ten to ten, I'll do the sort of shortish answer. So the reason we have a holding in OSE is because we helped to found that specialist investment vehicle, which is a private investment vehicle that focuses capital only on Oxford University. And it's an important relationship for us and offers a bit of pipeline. Increasingly, actually, most of our sourcing in Oxford has been done through Parkwalk and through our alumni funds. So we manage annual alumni funds in Oxford. I think we're up to number nine or 10 now. And that-
Mm.
We run those in partnership with the university. So a lot of the early-stage spin-outs we do through that range of vehicles. OSE is often a co-investor with us, and to be honest, there's way more opportunities than capital at the moment, so it's good to have another check around the table with their connections. We have sold a little bit of this during the year to date. It's helpful to have a, you know, it's almost like a sort of a little fund to funds holding for sort of for pipeline and co-investment. But you're right, it's a smallish holding, and we do more principally hold a direct shareholding in the underlying assets.
Next one: Can you please give a rough time frame for the results of the phase III trial being undertaken by Pulmocide?
End of 2025.
Correct. That is right. Another slightly tricky one: What is the likely level of turnover for Features pace in 2024, and time frame for EBITDA breakeven?
I won't comment on the latter, the time frame for EBITDA breakeven, although, as I said in the presentation, the company is funded to breakeven. Level of turnover. Well, they, so the company has been growing at or above the level of the market growing, so the market's growing sort of 20%-30% per annum. The rate of growth sort of varies from year to year. It's quite high in 2023, nearly 50%. So I guess you could envisage it will be sort of at or above the level of the market again in terms of increase during 2024, continues to trade very healthily and very well. So we're very, very pleased with that business and the progress that they're making.
Yeah. I guess I can have a go at this one, and Greg can correct me if he disagrees. Does the board agree that the focus of returns to shareholders from the realization of investments should be in the form of share buybacks rather than, say, tender offers or dividends? I think the answer to that is, at the moment, our policy is to do share buybacks at the time when NAV is, or shares are trading at a discount of more than 20% to NAV. It doesn't mean that we completely discount other alternative methods. So, you know, if a tender offer was more appropriate, for example, it's a very sizable buyback or very large exit, that is something we would consider, and if there was a lower discount on NAV, I think dividends is something we would consider.
But at the moment, the current policy is to do share buybacks. But, yeah, we don't discount any of them.
I think it's fair to say that we consulted pretty widely with our institutional investor base, and there are a couple of income funds on the register, and even the income funds agreed that given the current discount to NAV, that buybacks were the most appropriate way of returning capital to shareholders. One of our investors said, "Look, I don't think I've ever said this to a company before, but I actually support you shifting from dividends to buybacks in your unique circumstances." So as Dave said, it's not to say that we won't ever do dividends or tender offers, but the buyback seems to be the most value-efficient method at the moment. As I said, we've retired about 4% of our capital just with that GBP 20 million buyback.
So hopefully, that will prove to be very good value for shareholders.
We're doing well, and if you're not counting, we're on question 16. 10 more have come in since we started talking, so you know. Potential future exits through 2025, mixed by theme? More tech or balanced? Both have a go at this, I guess. There is a mix. Actually, at the moment, we do have a thing called capital allocation policy. It's kind of almost a central planning document within the business, where you're looking at what you think you're going to exit, you're looking at what, obviously, your costs are going to be, what you want to invest, and obviously, what your closing cash is. So at the moment on that kind of 2025 realizations, there's quite a big list of potential exits in 2025. Number comes, at least 10 with significant value.
I would say on balance, off the top of my head, slightly more weighted towards life sciences, actually, but there is, there are representatives of every part of the business. I don't know, I don't have any more to that, but that's-
No, that's fair.
Um-
That's it. Yeah.
Next question, I think we've answered. David S, I'll ask it, but don't be offended if we don't do it again. How would you weigh share buybacks versus other forms of shareholder returns, such as dividends in your capital allocation strategy? I think-
I hope that one's answered.
Yeah, I think that's. I hope that's answered, too. So, another good question. Paul C, it's Paul, analyst. Istesso, data is long overdue. Will IP Group commit any more capital to it in the event of mixed data? I think you have that.
I mean, obviously, you never say never. We're not planning to, and I would say the plan from the management team with our full support is that we use this data to get commercial validation or indeed, an exit. So I don't see that as being a plan at the moment, but, I suppose you never rule anything out.
No, I agree.
There's definitely a, you know, sort of a base case and a couple of other cases, depending on the nature of that validation. I mean, we've funded this business largely from IP Group for a number of years with a number of grants. I do think now is the point at which we're looking for, sort of, you know, commercial validation off the back of this data.
Yeah. And if you had your cash out, that is quite a long way away at the moment.
Yeah.
So hopefully, it's not something you have to consider-
Yeah, there's plenty of time.
In a second, start. There's plenty of time. Again, certainly one for you. How is the U.K. government's policy on innovation and science influencing your operations? And are there any regulatory changes you anticipate that could benefit IP Group's business model?
Yeah, good question. We've definitely done more engagement with industry bodies, government, the regulators, the stock exchange. I mean, in some cases it's very specific, so the sort of very important in our world probably didn't get noticed in anybody else's world sort of thing, but there was a risk that the EIS tax reliefs would expire next year, which obviously would be quite tricky for our award-winning EIS investment business. But we engaged, including through the BVCA, so we've got a number of people on their expert panels with treasury and with government, to explain both the very cost-effective nature of this for the public purse.
So when we look at our portfolio as a whole within our Parkwalk funds, we repay the initial tax relief that you get on the EIS investment annually, about every 15 months through payroll taxes. So it's actually a very efficient mechanism for the exchequer, and we engaged a lot with government, explained that, and we were very pleased to see in the last couple of weeks, in fact, that the EIS so-called sunset clause had been confirmed to be pushed back out to twenty thirty-five. So that's very good news. There's little things like that. I mean, there's lots of big picture stuff going on. There's, I mean, there's a real need for us to deliver growth in the U.K. economy.
I heard at the Capital Markets Industry Task Force and the second annual CMIT conference at the Stock Exchange a couple of weeks ago, people were talking about what's the investment need in the U.K., and a report by that was sort of chaired by Sir Nigel Wilson, who was the former chief executive of Legal & General, which is worth a read, actually. It's if you search for Capital Markets of Tomorrow, talks about the need and the investment opportunity and also what might happen if we don't do this. But there's about a GBP 15 billion or so opportunity to invest into science and tech scaleup, out of about GBP 100 billion in total annual investment needed. That's across things like housing and infrastructure, as well as in equity assets.
It was talking really about the role that long-term capital in the U.K. can play on that front as various metrics. So I think some of the government policies that have been announced. It's very encouraging to see the Pensions Investment Review announced. Encouraging to see that there's a joint minister across sort of DWP and pensions investment, which is obviously sort of again indicative of the direction of travel. So I think the new government's obviously bedding in, having not been in power for a while, but the fact that they are focusing very much on growth and very much on funding that appropriately through a smaller portion of the pension fund assets feels like it could be very good news for us. So we're engaging a lot on that front.
Of course, you know, through Hostplus, we've been doing that for sort of six years or so. We've got good track record to date. Yeah, we definitely think that there's a big role for the group to do there.
Yeah. So, I have noticed it's now 10:00 A.M., so we quite understand those of you that need to go, obviously, please do. We'll carry on. I thought I've got six or seven more questions, so we'll carry on and try and answer all of them. What kind of annual NAV return are you targeting over the medium term? Let's just start on them.
More than history, we've delivered about, so NAV per share has been sort of high single digits, seven, eight percent or something over 20 years.
Yeah.
We've definitely made mistakes along the way. We've had to refine the model. We've had to help create an industry. I think, you know, above that level, in the shorter term, I think there's, you know, good opportunity for double-digit returns, and double-digit returns with cash. Yeah, and I think, we're targeting above what we've been able to achieve historically, and hopefully, some of the top companies that I mentioned in the presentation underpin why we think that's possible. Yeah.
Agreed. This one we sort of had before. I'll read it out, but it's a theme, Hank. The share price has been trading at very persistent and frustratingly large discounts, which we agree, which typically indicate markets lack conviction in willingness and ability of company's management to deliver shareholder value. Are you contemplating any changes to the structure and/or composition of the management in order to address market's negative perception of the current management?
Well, we've definitely looked to address the structure, and we're also, I think. You will be the judges, but I think we are now delivering on the strategy that I set out to focus capital onto those maturing companies, to deliver realizations, to use a proportion of those realizations to deliver value to shareholders. I guess it's encouraging to see the share prices sort of getting positive momentum rather than negative, and so yeah, no, I mean, we're confident in being able to deliver on the value opportunity here.
And I think there is, you know, beyond this sort of period, there really is a very big opportunity for us to address, and we'll probably do that through private funds in addition to the balance sheet, which will sort of smooth out our earnings and make the cost base lower in total as well. So I think there's, you know, a really big opportunity here, and I would like to think we're delivering on what we said we would do.
I'll have a go at this, shall I? First, will the company consider investing in some of the exciting small cap companies on AIM, many of which have had successful fundraises this year, for example, Angle, Avacta, Genedrive? I mean, many of you may know, we actually founded Avacta. We were founders, so we're a founder of a number of AIM companies. I think in general, our model isn't about investing in companies that already established on AIM. I mean, you never say never. We have, on a few occasions, made investments in public companies. There's a handful, couple I can think of ever, but generally, that isn't our model.
Generally, our model is actually more from conception to maturity often, and we're often taking things to AIM rather than just actually identifying something that's already floated and add to that aggregate pool, if you're happy with that.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
I mean, you remember things like where there's an opportunity to deploy our, what we think is our USP in being able to sort of take and price technology risk, then we can do that, and we can act quite quickly. So, you know, Ceres Power was a good example of that. But typically, there's a big opportunity on the private side.
Yeah, that is true. Ceres was already listed, wasn't it, when we invested? Next one. Do you have any events where your portfolio companies can communicate and exchange ideas? The companies, of course, need to be careful about their intellectual property, but there's a lot of potential in cooperation across corporate borders.
Yes, we do, and we could definitely always do more. We host various sort of panel events and things where we get companies along. There's an annual Parkwalk showcase event that we do that has about sort of twenty or thirty companies, and there's a lot of discussion between teams, and we sometimes bring together groups of CEOs and chairs and chief technology officers. We could definitely do more on the sort of ecosystem front, for sure. And we've got a predominantly private capital-focused event that's bringing together about eight or nine of our deep tech companies with a panel which is next Wednesday-
Yeah
... I think. So, I think Berenberg have sent around some invites on Numis to some of our institutional investors as well. So yeah, we do, we could definitely always do more. Creating that ecosystem is a big part of how we make this work even better in the U.K.
Talking about Berenberg, the next question is from Odysseus, an analyst there, well-regarded analyst alongside Paul. He's got two different questions here, so I'm gonna break it in half. Number one, on Hysata, given the recent funding, are there any milestones to expect from them over the next 18 months? When would they need to raise again?
I think I covered that, but I can-
Yeah.
That's all right. No, no, we, there was quite a lot of information in there. So the funding takes them through to 2026. We would anticipate that they would not therefore plan to raise money until 2025, probably late 2025. In terms of milestones, I mean, it's really about being able to demonstrate that first manufacturing, so building a sort of a pilot line, and also building a sort of smaller stack that will go to an early partner. So not a sort of full commercial stack, but one which will be taken by a local commercial partner near Wollongong for them to be able to test that, and then that will pave the way for further sort of manufacturing.
Then this is the second part. In the case of a big cash realization or exit later in the year, or let's say early next year, how should we think about the potential buyback if you're still trading at a wide NAV discount? If I take it to the second bit, I'm not quite sure I fully understand. Is there a way to think of buybacks as a proportion of the exit? Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah.
Yeah, great question, Odysseus. So the sort of stated policy, which is the one that we're delivering on, is that we use a proportion of our realizations each year to return some cash to shareholders to supplement the share price, particularly when the share price's performance from a capital side hasn't been what we want. The sort of steady state, I guess, is a reinvest 80%, return 20%, plus or minus. Last year, it was higher, we returned much more than that. I think it was nearer to 40%-50%.
But what we have said is, if we had a very big exit where there were, you know, sort of more capital than we would plan to invest over the next year or two, then the proportion would be greater in terms of returns of shares, and perhaps in those instances, we'd look at things like tender offers. We might look at just ordinary buybacks to sort of keep the return going regularly. So, it's sort of ordinary course, 80-20, but obviously, if there's a very significant amount, we don't sort of hoard capital. We try to be capital efficient and would return a greater proportion if we didn't need it for the next year or two.
From Julia, do you think there is scope for further cost cuts beyond what's already been done or earmarked within the 25% reduction expected by year-end? I guess if I go on that, I guess, my answer, there's always, I mean, obviously, in any company, you can, you can choose to structure as you think is appropriate, and you can obviously do a lot less than you already do. But, the answer is no, not at the moment. There isn't a plan to do any further. The plans we have, we've put into place, and, there isn't a current plan to do any more than that at the moment. I'll come back to next, I might do, puzzled that you have not been able to say more about Istesso.
Does raise doubt about any uplisting value, albeit modest, at June twenty-four. Does Istesso have the readout data, but revisiting it because it is disappointing? Want to go first, or?
Well, I don't want to speculate on the data. I mean, the company is under obligation to tell us when it's got the final data. It's well aware of its obligations, and obviously, I think we'll be working as any board should in the best interest of all shareholders to deliver value. We'll update as soon as we can. I do hear it's frustrating and, you know, with hindsight, guiding to H1 2022, obviously, sorry, H1 2024 wasn't the right thing to do. However, I remain confident that there is, there's still value potential there, and we, you know, we will update as soon as we get an update from the company on that front.
Uh, yeah-
By the way, the little fair value change was just a technical change. It was just an unwinding of the discount in the way that we value it. So it's just a very small change to the valuation.
And Lucas, nice to have you here. I think we're speaking to you later. On Oxford Nanopore, Gordon's anti-takeover share is due to lapse next month. Are you expecting market activity, given the undisputed stellar technology advancements? It's a very good company. ONT is valued at a depressed GBP 1.4 billion, which is considerably cheap. Would you agree?
We would definitely agree, and we've been doing a lot of work with Nick and Gordon around how you know we can sort of better communicate that to the markets. I think the team have done a great job in bringing in Novo Holdings as a strategic investor, and the shift away from sort of purely research markets to a greater proportion in clinical, applied, biopharma, et cetera is very encouraging because certainly that life science research tools market, which is weighing on Nanopore's peers, and they really do have a unique technology, and that can address many of those markets, like this sort of RNA manufacturing QA, as you're going QA, QC. I'm reading QA on the slide. QC, as you're going through the manufacturing process.
There's a great talk by the guy at Lonza at the Clinical and Pharma Day at the end of London Calling that you can watch online that talks about sort of like revolutionary from, you know, six, seven, eight different machines and tests to just one in a much shorter timeframe. So there's a big opportunity there. On the Golden Share, you know, that's an interesting one. I mean, the technical thing that it should allow is index inclusion, which will create greater liquidity. We think that the book of investors who participated in the placing alongside Novo were was a high-quality book, and it was oversubscribed. So again, that's encouraging, and the share price seems to be showing good traction.
They've got a number of really interesting strategic investors as well, so I think the ability for somebody to sort of buy them on the cheap might be quite challenged. If you think there's bioMérieux, Oracle, the Larry Ellison Family Office, now Novo Holdings, so there's some quite big strategics there. But yeah, you're right, that might well be a catalyst.
I think for all intents and purposes, that's our last question. We haven't done too badly there. 10:12 A.M. In the absence of any more, I think we're there, Jake.
Great. Thank you very much, everyone.
Thank you, Jake.
Perfect.
Yeah.
Greg, David. Greg, David, if I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed, for your presentation and 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 add any additional responses and, 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'd be great.
No problem. Thanks very much again for hosting. Thank you, everyone, for giving your time and for actively engaging with questions. We do try to answer all of them. I'll just leave you with these three key takeaways. Good progress, that portfolio maturity that I talked about coming at the beginning of the year is now starting to be validated through particularly exits, which is good news. Tough exit environment for the last couple of years. Those exits, particularly, have enabled us to maintain that commitment that we made on capital returns, but we still also maintained our financial strength, despite that half-one loss. I hope the presentation has given you a view of the positive momentum and the value opportunity that is building in the second half.
So, thank you all for your time, and look forward to updating you, again soon.
Thank you.
Perfect, Greg. That's great, and thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will 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, but I'm sure 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, so good morning.