Today it's the first time we've had a physical meeting in just over two years. It's fantastic to be here and see many familiar faces and some new faces as well. Of course, we have people calling in today as well. For those calling in, we have the chat function, so if you have questions, you can pose your questions to that. Unfortunately, we cannot cater for verbal questions for those virtually, but of course, anybody in the room here can ask questions verbally at the end. For the presentation today, it is myself, Jethro Holter, the CEO, and Børge Sørvoll, our CFO, who will walk you through the presentation. The agenda, we have the standard agenda. We go through the highlights for the quarter.
We will then dig a bit deeper into the different business areas. Børge will walk you through the financials, and then we finish going through the outlook for 2022 and a little bit looking beyond that. For the highlights, we're very proud of our Q1 performance. It's been a strong performance, and that's been on the back of a strong Q4 performance as well. Some of the highlights here is we've achieved our highest ever quarterly sales, coming in at NOK 49.2 million. We also had a strong EBITDA performance of NOK 27.9 million. In terms of the two business areas we have, Biomanufacturing and Molecular Tools, again, we achieved our best ever performance, and I'll come back to that in a little bit. We also signed a new OEM agreement with a global life science company.
What that means is this customer will private label several of our enzymes and integrate them into their extensive portfolio. We also are excited now to expand our base beyond Tromsø, and we're now in Oslo, where we expanded into ShareLab at the Oslo Science Park, and there we are establishing an applications lab, and you'll hear more about that in a minute. In terms of the business update, let's start with the commercial sales. As mentioned before, we had our best quarterly performance ever, and we experienced growth in both biomanufacturing and molecular tools. Before I go into that, I wanna say something about geographical distribution of sales.
When you look at total sales for the quarter, 46% of sales came from EMEA, 41% of sales came from the Americas, and 13% from APAC. You can see we certainly have a good geographical reach when it comes to sales. I think it's important to, you know, to talk more about that in future and sort of show, you know, where our sales are coming from from a geographical perspective. Particularly since, you know, a lot of our customers are paying in US dollars and euros, of course, and that does we have some exchange rate things always to deal with there. In terms of the two different areas, in biomanufacturing, we had our best ever quarterly performance, very strong, coming at NOK 18.8 million. That accounts for 38% of total Q1 sales.
It's really the SAN, the salt active nuclease products that are already driving those sales today. Those are used in gene therapy, viral vaccine manufacturing, and other biomanufacturing applications. We have certainly experienced an upturn in sales, particularly following the pandemic now when it comes to the SAN sales. That's in all regions. What we're seeing now in Europe, sales are certainly bouncing back. We're seeing an improvement in sales there. Actually when you look at this, 39% of sales from Europe were in biomanufacturing when you look at the biomanufacturing sales there. Beyond the SAN products, we've been in very active discussions with numerous customers regarding RNA therapeutics.
This is a new area we're wanting to get into and innovating. It's very interesting. We've also been to several trade events as well and there speaking to customers and learning more of what's going on. What we're seeing is, you know, of course we're developing enzymes. There's enzymes in our pipeline that customers are interested in. But also it seems that our some of our existing enzymes are of interest in that area as well, so we're looking at potentially reformulating some of those, or even re-engineering some of those enzymes in order to meet the needs for RNA therapeutics. That's kind of interesting to see even our existing products fit as well. With respect to Molecular Tools, this is where we sell enzymes to research kit manufacturers and diagnostic test developers and manufacturers.
There we had our best quarterly performance coming in at NOK 30.4 million . It's slightly ahead of what we had in Q1 last year. Remember, Q1 was a very strong performance, so we just shaved slightly ahead there, so that's good. Overall, our molecular tools contribution to total Q1 sales was 62%. If we break it down into research and diagnostics, research contributed 23% towards Q1 sales, diagnostics 39%. Again, when we do that split, it is an estimated split because for some customers they buy our enzymes, and it goes in both directions. That is an estimation at the end of the day. When it comes to research, the main product driving sales is the recombinant shrimp alkaline phosphatase product.
That was the first enzyme. It used to be the flagship enzyme of ArcticZymes Technologies, and still that's going strong after 20-odd years. That enzyme accounted for 50% of the research sales during Q1. Over the last three quarters, we've seen the sales of this enzyme increase. On top of that, we're seeing that our largest customer and some of our other key customers have purchased the enzyme, that purchasing patterns have changed, and we're seeing more frequent orders now. We suspect the increase in demand is very much related to classical Sanger sequencing for use of infectious disease testing and monitoring. That's where we suspect the increase is related to. When it comes to diagnostics, this is, it's the Cod UNG and the DNases which are the primary growth driver there.
This very much relates to, again, infectious disease testing, particularly viruses such as HIV, HCV, and coronavirus. With respect to coronavirus-related sales, these remain, and they will continue to remain, but we now consider them part of the established business. I think today what we're seeing with our customers now, they're really now supporting what we call endemic testing and look at monitoring surveillance of of variants. We suspect that will continue for the long term and of course ArcticZymes Technologies will be supporting that through its customers. Not shown on this slide is the deal where we signed an agreement, an OEM agreement with a global life science company. Basically what they're gonna do is private label several of our enzymes and incorporate them into their extensive synergistic portfolio.
For us, it's a way of indirectly gaining commercial reach beyond what we do directly. That will be within all three areas. It will be within Biomanufacturing area, it will be in research and diagnostics they have reached. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose who the customer is. That's due to we asked, and they're not willing. They won't allow us to use their name, which is normal. That's how our business works. To give you an idea, they are a large company. It's a tools and solutions provider of more than 20,000 people. So that sort of gives you a kind of idea of the size of this company. It is a starting point of a relationship, though.
You know, it's the beginning days of a strategic partnership, but it's one of those things in years to come, it could be something the size of our largest customer today. But again, we need to, you know, like I said, it's a starting point and we can do a lot more together as we move forward as well. I think the highlight for us is establishing ourselves in Oslo with our applications laboratory at ShareLab in Oslo. It's good to finally have another site and now we're here in Oslo. We signed an agreement with ShareLab AS to rent laboratory and office facilities at the ShareLab facility at Oslo Science Park up in Forskningsparken.
Børge Sørvoll and I were there yesterday actually, so that was kinda good to have the day there. Sorry. Actually, sorry. First, ShareLab is basically a platform provider of laboratory and office facilities for biotech companies, and there's quite a few biotech companies up there already today. For us, what we're gonna do initially, this laboratory will be supporting application development. What application development is all about is demonstrating the utility of our enzymes in customers' workflows and technologies. Again, what ShareLab is a very flexible model. It's something we can potentially expand further and build a bigger base in Oslo as we move forward, but we're gonna start with applications.
It has strategic relevance for ArcticZymes Technologies to be located there at ShareLab. I think, you know, when you look at where it is, that is the heart of Norwegian biotech. For us, it's good to be there. It means that we can interact much more with the Norwegian biotech community and have a greater presence. That's certainly gonna be important as we grow as an organization and also bringing more talent into the company as well. To head up activities there, we've hired Dr. Darren Ellis. He's pictured there in the middle between Ole Lahnstein and myself. That's Darren. He's a Brit like myself originally. Moved to Norway because of a Norwegian girl. That's how it is.
You know, we actually worked together before at Thermo Fisher Scientific in the past, and, so, you know, so I know him very well. He has over 20 years of experience in industrial R&D application development. He comes from companies such as Solexa, which is now part of Illumina, and Thermo Fisher Scientific, and several other companies too. This is the kind of experience we wanna bring into the company, and of course, you know, you can get that in Oslo. That's part of the reason for establishing in the Oslo area. We're currently hiring two application scientists at the moment as well to support Darren. I think we're well moving forward with that.
Once we've got those two on board, then we're fully up and running there. Again, it's something we'll be thinking about expanding further down the road as well. In Tromsø, what's going on up there? The innovation pipeline is progressing with several products anticipated for launch this year. This could potentially be a new polymerase, reverse transcriptase, a new, a different DNase, and the SAN HQ 2.0 ELISA kit, and potentially new formulations of enzymes as well. A lot's going on there. That's just this year, but of course, we have a very active pipeline of products, more longer term as well in development.
I think if you recall last year, we made a decision to expand innovations into developing enzymes for a whole suite of enzymes for RNA therapeutic manufacturing. Activities have kicked off very well, and I think we're still on track to launch our first enzymes for that in 2023. That's where we are on innovations. Operations, end of last year, we moved into our new production facilities at the Siva Innovation Center in Tromsø. I think those facilities are now fully operational with all production processes transferred, and it's going very well there. This will certainly support all future manufacturing, at least for the next 4-5 years. It's also been busy on the customer front.
We've had actually three customer audits, where they've come and audit ArcticZymes, have conducted cGMP audits of the company and the new production facilities. That's related to the salt-active nuclease manufacturing. What was interesting is now we had our first on-site, in-person customer audit, where we had the customers coming to us and rather than doing a virtual audit. That we haven't had that for over two years because of the pandemic. I think that's good because, you know, when on-site audit's always better. You know, when you see things in the flesh, they go much more efficiently. You know, when somebody's walking around with a camera, you just don't get the same kind of a meeting.
I think it is very good that we can entertain audits again, physically, and customers also willing to come to Tromsø. When it comes to audits, it's really about a mandatory process that customers do, and that's important because it is about them qualifying us as a critical component supplier. Also it's part of often it's a requirement for their regulatory approval process as well. In terms of strategic growth initiatives, we remain committed to executing on our growth initiatives here. Organic growth at the moment is very much focusing on incremental investments in talent acquisition. We have an ongoing recruitment drive this year, to strengthen the organization cross-functionally. What we mean is, we're putting more people into, for instance, quality assurance, quality control, production, R&D, and applications, and business development as well.
We need to strengthen the organization. This also fits with what we talked about expanding activities much more into biomanufacturing area, in particular RNA therapeutics. If we really wanna play hard in that space down the road and be a strong player there, then we need to very much have greater competence and support in quality, in GMP product development, and commercialization. These are critical for us to leverage the future potential in biomanufacturing. You know, again, this is why it's also good to have different sites as well because of course, you know, sometimes we're not gonna be able to get everybody to Tromsø. You know, we can hire in Oslo, and we're looking also hiring elsewhere as well. It's very much a recruitment effort beyond Norwegian borders as well.
In terms of inorganic growth there, we continue to intensify activities towards acquisitions. We are still in discussions with several of the earlier acquisition targets, but beyond that, we've reached out, we've looked for new targets, and we've seen some very new interesting targets that we're considering. This is following extended search effort, and we continue to look for new targets as well. I think, you know, we can do that now, and we're very committed in prioritizing these efforts this year. We have engaged external support. You know, it takes heavy lifting, and we realize, you know, we need a lot more support, and we're using external expertise to help us as well to make this happen. With that, I'm gonna stop and hand over to Børge.
Thank you, Jethro, for that introduction of the first quarter highlights and the things that we have managed to achieve now in this quarter. I'm gonna take you through a little bit about the financial side. As you have seen, is how we have managed yet again to deliver a top performance in the quarter, both on the profitability side and on the growth side. Moving on to the sales side here, we managed to deliver sales with a growth of 20% compared to the same quarter last year. Our sales were NOK 49.2 million this quarter, compared to only NOK 40.9 million at the same time last year.
What is also interesting to see is that we are now actually delivering a really strong Q1 after a strong Q4 as well that we had last year. It's also interesting from the graph on the right-hand side. You can also see that we have now kind of changed the trend that we've seen over the last few years when we had kind of two weaker quarters, one strong quarter, two weaker quarters, or not as strong quarters, and then one really strong quarter. That trend has been broken now, and hopefully we can continue to break it moving forward. Jethro has talked about currency as well. Our trading currencies are of course in euros and USD. Based on in 2021, we had a negative impact.
The currencies had a negative impact on our business of around NOK 11 million when you have the same exchange rates in 2020 and 2021. For the first quarter this year, we had a positive currency effect of NOK 0.6 million in our figures. This is of course explained by a U.S. dollar that strengthened towards the NOK and a euro that weakened towards the NOK. We had one effect was positive and the other was negative. In sum, it was more positive than negative here. Looking at the segment side, both areas showed a growth, as Jethro talked about.
Of course, the biomanufacturing side showed a significant growth of 85% in the quarter, or by NOK 8.6 million, moving up from NOK 10.2 million to NOK 18.8 million, which it has been a significant increase. Of course, this is also, as Jethro talked about, this segment has now moved into kind of the more normalized activity levels following the pandemic that we have experienced over the last few years. It's also good to see that this is also the first time where we see a really good spike in spike in sales for this area as well. Over the last few years, we've been around NOK 10 million per quarter in biomanufacturing, and now you can see that we are delivering close to NOK 20 million for a quarter.
For the Molecular Tools, we are, I would say we are on the same level as we had last year. Last year, we had NOK 30.3 million, and this year we have NOK 30.4 million. This is of course explained by Cod UNG, the dsDNase driving the majority of the revenues in this area. Looking at the trend here, we have this is a graph we like to show the investors because we have a fluctuating business here, and our sales are going up or going down in the quarters here. It is important for us to highlight kind of how we are progressing as a company and how is the trend for us.
As you can see, we still continue to deliver growth in our figures, and from a low point in 2019 where we had around NOK 7.5 million in turnover, we are now delivering a turnover on average of around NOK 35 million per quarter. Of course, with the expectation of even further growth now in the coming quarters as well now on this side. From the graph, you can also see that we have taken out the COVID-related sales, and this is also part of the things that Jethro talked about. It is in alignment with what we have been talking about in the last few quarters.
We believe now that the COVID-related sales are part of the underlying business, and it's also becoming more complex to estimate what is the real, COVID-related sales as more and more of our products are integrated in our customer solutions moving forward now. Hence, we will not be presenting COVID-related sales separately moving forward either. It is part of the business now. Going into the profitability side of the business, as I said, we are delivering another strong quarter, with sales going up by 20%. Our EBITDA is only up by 8% from NOK 25.8 million to NOK 27.9 million. You can see, even though the revenues have increased, we have also increased our expenses, and this is also in alignment with our strategy.
We have invested significantly in internal resources. We are actually now we have 10 more employees in the company at the end of Q1 compared to end of Q1 last year. We see that our personnel expenses have grown by NOK 3 million now. This is also including we had a reversal of an accrual of NOK 0.5 million relating to, you can see, options and national insurance contribution or Arbeidsgiveravgift in Norway. It had a huge negative effect last year, but depending on how the share price fluctuates, this accrual will also fluctuate as well. Our operating expenses have also increased somewhat. Of course, we are on a higher activity level now compared to same time last year, and the expenses are up by NOK 1.4 million now.
Our cost of goods and inventory has gone somewhat up in this quarter also because we have acquired some products that we have sold out now. It's products that are complementary to the Biomanufacturing portfolio or SAN products. Our margin remains strong. We delivered an EBITDA margin of 57% for the quarter. It is a little bit lower than we had in the first quarter last year when we had 64%, but we are still delivering a strong and solid high number. We also have a tight control on our expenses. We will continue to have a tight control on our expenses moving forward as well. Of course, when we are driving a profitable business, this will also generate a positive cash flow.
Hopefully, it will generate a positive cash flow and it does in our case. Our changes in cash for the first quarter was NOK 14 million. This is explained by change in operating cash flow of NOK 15.4 million. We had investments in equipment of NOK 0.4 million, and we also had financial expenses of NOK 0.8 million. This is more a technical issue. It's payment on lease or rent of premises. It is kind of just the accounting rules and IFRS standards we have to adhere to. You can also see that from this graph that first quarter last year, we had a really strong quarter with NOK 23.1 million in change in cash.
This is also explained by the divestment we did of Biotec BetaGlucans at the end of 2020, where we actually start the final settlement was settled in first quarter when all the records was finalized, and we had a settlement of NOK 16 million in that quarter that of course helped the changes in cash for us in first quarter last year. Taking that out, we would only have had around NOK 7 million in changes in cash for Q1 last year. Of course, at the end of Q1, we had NOK 214.6 million in our cash balance.
This is of course significantly up from from the other quarters, when we had NOK 200 million at the end of Q4, and we had NOK 164 million at the end of first quarter last year as well. I would say our cash position, it's a nice graph that just goes up and up, and hopefully at some point we will utilize this money through kind of a more inorganic activities as well. I think with this positive cash position, I think I will hand it over to Jethro who will give us a little bit more input on what to expect for the future.
Thank you, Børge. Okay, I'd like to just finish off with the outlook. For those of you who attended the last quarterly presentation, the outlook is the same outlook we presented, and that's good because the outlook remains unchanged. It's the same. I'm going to go through it anyway. The outlook for 2022, we have annual sales guidance that we were bringing in NOK 155 million in sales. When you look to the right, you can see where we are today. Well, we're 32% of the way there, based on sales from Q1. When you look at the graph below, it's another way to look at it.
When you look at the last twelve-month revenues on a quarterly rolling basis, you can see after Q1, when you look at 12-month sales accumulated, that is NOK 137 million. When you put those together, we've got off to a very good start. We maintain and stand by the guidance we have here. Of course, you know, our business is prone to quarterly fluctuations, so you need to bear that in mind. You know, the quarters will vary. That's how it is, and that can be up and down, and that's just how it is. I think you're very familiar with that, these days. We will expect that in subsequent quarters, the sales will be up and down. It's not a run rate business.
When it comes to COVID-related sales, we do anticipate that overall this year, the sales for COVID-related sales will be lower compared to what we had last year. That's natural when you think where we are. We're now in most regions, we moved out of the pandemic into endemic state, but of course, you know, endemic testing and variant testing is going to be needed very much down the road. Of course, many of our customers are doing that with ArcticZymes as enzymes today. We have, as mentioned, we have now expanded into Oslo. You know, we've got a footprint there, and it is the innovation activities that we're gonna do there through application development initially.
I think, you know, we can tick this box after we've hired the two application scientists, then we can certainly tick this box off. We'll keep you updated on that. It's also about new innovations. We are working on new products, as mentioned earlier. We do anticipate new products this year. Beyond new products, it's also about upscaling and increasing the batch sizes of some of our existing products too. We're working on that. In particular, the proteinase is one enzyme which is really important for us to get scaled up. That's one we're working on as well. It is about investment and investing in people, talent. You know, that's what really drives the value from our enzymes.
Of course, what we're doing is beefing up the team to support both short-term and long-term organic growth. Particularly if we want to expand and grow and be a, you know, a competitive force in biomanufacturing beyond SAN, we certainly need to build the team. And that needs to be built today in order to capture that value long term. We're working very hard to beef up the team. Then it's about M&A, merger and acquisition activities. You know, this is very much a priority for us. We've been talking about it for a long time, and we're certainly now in a very good position. The market's in a good position to do something now, and hence why we have it as a goal to secure a deal this year.
Of course, while, you know, there's heavy lifting to do, that's why we engage in external support and help to make that happen, because of course we've got a business to run at the same time as doing this. Hence why it's important to get outside support to help us. Longer term, the outlook is, we have that goal to realize an annual sales potential of NOK 350 million by 2025, and that is solely through organic growth. Of course, if we make an acquisition, then of course that number is gonna be different then. But that's where we are today. I think that's a good place to stop for today. We'd like to thank you for your attention and also, everybody in the room for actually coming today.
We appreciate that. We will open up for Q&A, and Børge has been moderating the chat board, and of course, we'll take some questions from there and questions from the room here today. Thank you.
Yeah, I think we could probably just start in the room here if there are any questions.
Maybe if you can talk about.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. Maybe if you can talk about geopolitical situation, if you have seen any impact from war and, you know, rolling lockdowns in China and things like that, logistical or other risks to the business?
That's a very good question. In terms of the war in Ukraine, it has very little impact, I think, in terms of sales. You know, it has very little influence. Of course, last year, we did mention we had a distributor to help us to get into Russia. Of course, as a company, we've just suspended any activities there. Apart from just having some samples initially going out to customers, you know, that's all we've had in the past. 'Cause we just started out there. It wasn't something we had a lot of ongoing business. As a company, you know, we have this stance where, you know, we've just suspended all activities to those territories right now.
That's where we are on that. In terms of, it hasn't affected any other parts of the business in terms of suppliers. Of course, we have suppliers as well that supply raw materials and equipment and all these different things to us, and that has not influenced us. Of course, in general in the supply chain, you do see longer lead times generally, but that was even before this. Of course, we're very smart when we need something, is to be very much forward-thinking and order things that we need for manufacturing or R&D much earlier. That's where we are on Ukraine. In China, I think, you know, we have not seen a major impact there actually, positive or negative.
I think that also shows. You know, we would have seen it in our Asia numbers there, the APAC numbers which we presented. I think the Asia numbers came in as expected. We still see, you know, business going well in China despite what's going on with the tight lockdowns. Børge, tell it.
Hello, Per.
Yeah, just one question about China.
Mm-hmm.
How big is the figures, or the sales to China, last year?
Can you remember off your head? I don't have it on the top of my-
What? I didn't get it.
China, last year sales.
I don't have that number in my head. We haven't gone out with that particular number.
No, we haven't gone out with that number, but it's, I think there, you know, China, There's several million sales in China, and that's where we're doing very little effort. Basically today in China, there's a lot of potential there. Today we've been doing that through remotely. But of course we're very much monitoring that, and we want to eventually have our own person on the ground there. You know, I think, you know, how you do China even with one person on the ground, you know, what they need to do is build a network of sales agents around them to really develop that. We certainly see a lot of potential there.
I think what we've done there is really found our feet, you know, how to do business, how to get products into China, how to work there. Now we will eventually get somebody with feet on the ground there because we've seen that, you know, we can, that's scalable and from what we've done. Of course, you know, China is not easy, you know, to do business and get stuff into China and, of course, you've got to deal with IPR, and there's a lot of things you need to work on there. I think, yeah, we figured it out, and that's scalable. We can certainly see that could really have a good impact on the APAC numbers moving forward.
Thank you. Any other?
Yeah. Can you say something about price expectations in potential M&A targets? Do you see that coming down as a result of just general market financial market weakness, or is it too early to say?
No, when I say that there's several moving factors there, of course, you've got the war and things, and of course, now, you can speculate if you look at certain targets in Europe. That could make it a little bit. You know, depending on where they're located, you know, that could potentially have a positive impact in terms of negotiating a deal. I wanna be careful here because I don't wanna give away too much to who we'd potentially be negotiating with. I think, you know, what's really good now is we're at the backside of COVID. I think that's been a real thing that's driven valuation sometimes crazy. Now we can really see, you know, how companies are performing or potential targets post-COVID.
Of course, you know, and as you know, what you're seeing is some companies are very much, you know, dropped everything, run over COVID, and now they're paying for it. I think that's kind of what we're looking at there. I think it's a good time now to do the deal because you can also quantify and have an understanding what that COVID effect has had or will have in the future. A year ago, you could not do that because, you know, you're in the middle of a pandemic. Trying to separate what was real business compared to kind of temporary COVID business was very difficult when you're looking at targets. Now it's much easier.
Then you sort of see, you're starting to see that in quarterly results as well. It's interesting when you look at companies now and seeing how they're performing post-COVID. I think that's why it's sort of smart that we haven't actually done a deal yet. 'Cause, you know, of course, we wanna get the right target as well and pay a fair price. I think that's what's important as well. That's the best I can say. I don't know, Børge, if you have anything to add to that.
No, I think that's fine.
Mm.
I have, I think we have a question from online, Holter, that I can take here.
Mm.
With regards to last week's significant supply agreement.
Mm
Are you also in negotiating or in discussion with other large pharma companies regarding supply agreements?
I think in general, we're always in discussions with these large companies, of course. When you work with large companies, particularly one that's very significant, it is a slow process to negotiate. These types of contracts can, you know, take 1-2 years often, and this contract took way over a year to negotiate itself. It is just because, you know, with large companies, you have many layers. Things have to go through a chain, and any amendments or anything can take weeks for each one of those things to be discussed. It goes back through the chain. It's a painful long process. Yes, we're in discussions with many. We...
Again, it's also very much as we broaden the portfolio, we make ourselves much more relevant to get some of the big players we don't have today. You know, for instance, in Biomanufacturing, as we expand into RNA therapeutics and things like that, and as we expand out the molecular diagnostic portfolio, it allows us to work with some of the bigger giants out there we're not touching today. That's the point of our innovation pipeline now is to really build it out and get that complete workflow of enzymes because that will allow us to touch some of the giants we cannot touch today. Hence, that's why we're in a lot of discussions with those companies about our innovations.
One follow-up question on that was how frequently do you think you will have those kind of agreements, those larger OEM agreements with multinational companies?
Well, we have agreements, large and small. We have agreements signed quite often. Again, we will announce a very significant agreement. I think, you know, those types of agreements, you would hope to get, hopefully one to two a year, would be kind of what we'd like to see. Again, you know, they're always, even though it's large agreements, large companies, those are a starting point of a relationship. It's not like they generate huge revenues on the day it's signed. You know, it takes a few years for that to really ramp up. It's the significance of the companies and what they will do with our enzymes that's important here. As I said, yeah, maybe one to two a year.
Okay. We have a question here. Do you see any stocking effect or early purchases now in the first quarter this year, like similar to what you had, first quarter last year?
No, I don't think so because when you look at how well Q4 was and Q3 and how things are, we have seen some differences in how the purchasing patterns are. You know, it's a bit too early to tell because you know, to see how we've seen the purchasing patterns vary, you know, for the SAN products, also for like the Cod UNG. I think, you know, we are on this kind of post-pandemic trend now where all companies are adjusting and the market's adjusting in the supply chain. I don't think so.
Okay. We have a question here, regarding a little bit about the annual report in some sales in geographies.
Mm-hmm.
We see that 30% of our sales comes from Lithuania. You also see that the sales from the largest customer is around 30% as well. Can you comment on this?
I don't. Where does it list the arena? Oh.
It's in the annual report on the geography.
I think in terms of how it's, you know, how it's split, you know, I think here, when you look at geographies, we also have large customers who are in all those geographies. Sometimes they also will purchase. They will change. Maybe we manufacture here in this country, another country. It does move around, but generally, it is pretty stable. You'll get typically, you know, 40% in the U.S., 50% in Europe, and sometimes that can switch depending if somebody moves manufacturing around. Then the rest in Asia, that's what we typically had. Of course, we are really trying to push geographical reach and expansion. Particularly in Asia as well, we really wanna expand there. We see a lot more opportunity.
We have a business developer in Japan. We're also, you know, considering putting feet on the ground in China. Since it is remote, we are using a lot more sales agents, specialized distributors to help us in Asia. You sort of see often we will announce, not through a stock exchange press release, but through our website and LinkedIn, that we're now got a new distributor sales agent to help us expand in that region. I think, you know, these things are pretty stable, but of course, as we push harder in regions, you know, we wanna see growth across it. It's kind of those percentages will roughly stay the same, I would say, because we're pushing much harder in all regions.
Of course, we are also hiring and beefing up the business development team as well in the existing territories as well.
Do we have any more questions in the room here that we wanna take? Or I have a few more questions online, if not. Okay. Take a seat. How is Q2 progressing so far?
Well, what I can say is, you know, I don't think Q2 will be as strong as the Q1. That's what I can say. It's still early days. You know, of course, Q1 performed better than we originally expected, but of course, we know how this business is, how it fluctuates. We have some good visibility, but the order book is not full yet, and that's just how it is, you know, as you start the quarter. If the order book was full now, then we're not doing a hard enough job. That's what I can say. That's all I can say on that. We do expect fluctuations quarter to quarter, and you've seen that.
That's the best I can say right now.
Okay. Can you say something about the M&A targets you are focusing on? Are any of those kind of? Do you expect them to contribute on the RNA side?
Yeah, potentially, that could. You know, we're looking at, of course, mainly what we're looking at is complementary products, and of course, some of those might have enzymes for RNA therapeutics, biomanufacturing in general as well, and enzymes that are complementary to what we have for diagnostics and research. Again, we just have to look at each target on its merits and see what it has, and we're prioritizing those and seeing which fits best. But yes, there are some that have potentially enzymes in that as well that could fit.
Okay. One more question. It's about innovation and the release of products here. How has the new re-released products done, and especially in the R2D Ligase? Can you say something about that?
Yeah, sure. The R2D Ligase is being received well by the market, but of course, it's a very novel enzyme. You know, remember our customers will have to implement and develop it into a product themselves, and for them to develop the product will take them several years. Of course, yes, you know, yes, we're getting a lot of interest, and people are testing and figuring out how they'd like to integrate into their technology. That takes time, you know. The real money comes when they commercialize those technologies. I think, you know, it's early days. As always, when we launch an enzyme, you know, it'll take several years until you see the revenue stream really come in and ramp up.
That's why, you know, how our business is developing now. That's a lot of that's come from the innovations we've done in the past and the enzymes we launched. Over the years, like the polymerases now, you know, they're gonna start gaining traction. You know, we launched those back three years ago, and now they will start gaining traction and start building that ramp. We talk about that NOK 350 million in 2025. That's built into those early innovations we launched. Things that we launch today, or let's say the RNA therapeutic enzymes we launch next year, they will have very little impact in 2025. The revenues will come after that because it takes time. There's a long lead time until you will realize those revenues since we're not selling to end users.
We're selling to companies who integrate it into their products, and they need to develop those products first. Of course, they need to buy enzymes for that. The real money comes when they commercialize.
Okay. I think we have at least one final question here. Costs are a little bit higher in Q1 compared to previous quarters. Is this a new level going forward moving into 2022?
I think what we talked about is, you know, the main thing we're investing in is personnel, and also we have some external costs as well. You know, of course, we're working on M&A as well, merger and acquisition. Of course, we have to use external support for that, so of course, that support isn't gonna last forever. There's some costs that will be transient for a few quarters. Of course, the personnel costs will continue to go up. You know, that's the biggest asset. That's what drives value, and we need to. If we wanna grow the organization and leverage, you know, biomanufacturing, we need to increase the team. We will see an incremental increase in personnel costs.
This year we're having a major recruitment drive, but then, of course, we will evaluate that at the end of the year, in terms of, you know, the you know, how we continue to expand that.
Okay. I don't think I have any more questions from the online audience, or I don't know if there is a last question here in the room or. If not, then I think we round it off.
Thank you. It's again a pleasure to see many familiar faces here and new faces, so that's good.
Okay.