Okay. Welcome to the Q4 presentation. I'm Gesso Holter, the Interim CEO, and I'm joined here today by Birger Soviel, who's our CFO. And Birger will share the presentation with me today. Just having a problem with the slides here.
There we go. Now it's working. So the agenda today is what I want to do is we're going to start off recapping the new strategic direction. This is what we presented at the Investor Update Meeting on 10th December. We'll then look at the highlights.
We'll look at the Q4 achievements and then what we delivered in 2019. We'll then look at the Arctic Zymes business, Biotech beta glucans. Berger then will take you through the Q4 financials. And then we'll look at the outlook to see what to expect for 2020. So in terms of the strategy, the initiative direction, as mentioned, we had an Investors Update meeting on 10th December, and we sort of outlined where we're going to go in the future.
I'm going to touch base on key aspects of that meeting. For the company, we have one goal moving forward, and that is really about all about profitability. We want to drive this organization into profits and have sustainable profits. And the formula for doing this is really based on the model to the left. It's really about focusing on doing the right things.
And when you look at Bartek Pharmakon, for many years, we've had very strong ambitions. We wanted to do many things, and you see me doing many things. But to really realize that we need more many more people on board, 100 plus team, we need to put much more investment behind that. So what we realized is we really have to change what we're doing. We have to do fewer things and work on those things which bring the most value to the table.
And by doing the right things, doing fewer things, we can really focus on customer excellence because that's what business about, it's serving customers and if we serve customers well, not just with good products. It's also about good service. It's about high quality. It's about all the support. A customer is like a marriage.
You need to you have your ups and downs, but you're married, you're looking for that long term relationship. Then you get the reoccurring sales, you grow your business, that drives profits. The point is we want that sustainable long term profits, and that's certainly what we've been doing in building our business over the years. And that net what that does then it fuels shareholder value, and that's what it's about. We want to drive and build long term shareholder value in this organization.
And the best way of doing that is making this company profitable and growing that profitability. So to do that, we need to change course need to change course towards profitability, and that's what we've done. We made decisions in December to do that. Moving forward, the year we Ardeczymes is going to be main strategic arm of this business. And how do we do that?
I've always one thing is we changed the boat, we changed tack, where Arctic Zymes now is represents 80% of our efforts in the future will be towards Arctic Zymes. Also, it's about having the right people on the right side of the boat. So we have made gone through a structural reorganization in December, which is completed now. So what we've done is we've moved many of the people from some of those people from BBG into our from Biotech beta glucans into ALLEZymes. We've reduced scaled back the support for Biotech beta glucans to what is needed.
We've also let some people go and reduce some positions. So that we've lightened the boat to what's right for this organization, and we've balanced the boat for the people on the right side. The next bit is really about having full wind in the sails. You need wind to drive the boat. And so what we're doing is we're putting some more investment into Artaxymes so that we can extract the long term profitability, so we can accelerate some of the things we're doing.
And the last thing is really a clear destination, and that's important. You got to know where you're going. And we have a 6 year business plan for growing the Arctic Zymes business. And that's really key in growing that both organically and inorganically. Why?
Two good reasons. 1, Alexeym represents the best opportunities for this company to accelerate and grow the top line. Secondly, it is the part of the business which has the best margins, and we can certainly achieve the best sustainable profitability, which obviously translates into shareholder value. So that's really the essence behind the strategy. If you look at the different businesses here, again, I mentioned arms is the main business moving forward.
It's the most profitable part of the business today, and I think you see that in the results that we're going to talk about today. Moving forward, it's really about organic and inorganic growth for that business. When it comes to Biotech beta glucans, there's 4 as most of you know, there's 4 businesses underneath it. We have Animal and Consumer Health business. They're very similar businesses.
They serve commodity markets. It's low margin. It's the cash cows, but what they do is they do operate at a profit, and that's important. So I think here they do add value. So we will maintain those businesses while they're profitable.
The soluble beta glucan, SPG for short, today it's being used as an adjuvant in combination with a vaccine by Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital in clinical trials for kids with neuroblastoma. And today, it's a non commercial for us. We provide as a research service. But moving forward, we got to translate that into commercial value, and that's what we're really going to focus on in 2020. So we really want to drive that into a licensing deal moving forward with Sloan Kettering Hospital and a vaccine owner, Ymapped.
Worgan. Worgan is a product for wound healing. For the company, it's been a loss maker. There's a lot of cost that goes into that. We've put a lot of marketing efforts into this product.
But we've never been able to really grow the sales to our expectations. And we really looked at this in December, I'd say in Q4. And in December, we made a decision to divest that. And the reason for that is because we could see that we would the business could never be viable in our hands. We could never grow the sales to what was needed to really make that success.
We believe in somebody else, another's owners' hands with a marketing necessary marketing power. They can drive that much better than us, hence why we're divesting Wargan. So that's the strategy that we got in place in a nutshell. There's a lot more behind that, of course, and which we presented on December 10. That presentation is available online as well on our website if you want to review that.
In terms of the highlights for Q4, I think actually we are very proud to present our Q4. I think we've had a record quarter. And I think the top the EBITDA shows that. So we had a positive EBITDA with 4,600,000 and there's an asterisk there, and that's because we've actually these numbers exclude Worgan. We've done that since Worgan now is held is considered assets hold for sale.
So we've done that to align with accounting practices. So the 2018 numbers here in brackets are adjusted for comparable purposes. Also with this EBITDA, this was driven mainly through strong Artic Zone sales. But also behind that number, we have taken on extraordinary onetime costs associated with the restructuring. So we actually had $2,000,000 extra in costs of accruals related to the restructuring of letting some people go.
So I think that's why this is a very good result. Gross profits improved by 27% to 18,100,000 dollars compared to $14,200,000 for the same quarter last year. In Arctic Symes, we had 42 sorry, 52% growth in Q4, where we achieved a £16,300,000 compared to the same quarter last year. Net cash flow for Q4 was £9,200,000 dollars When it comes to myself, I was hired as Interim CEO coming in October to replace Christian And that's basically related to the new strategic direction of the organization, being part of Artic Zymes, leading that for 5 years and then Arctic Symes being the main strategic arm of the business. It's natural that you need I was chosen to take the company forward as Interim CEO.
I mentioned already, we have a new strategic a new group strategy. So now that's all we're there ready to go. We've done all the structural reorganization in Q4. So the organization is all ready to go on that now. And also, Arctic Syme has launched its MSAM, and this is a cell active nucleus.
And we've been this complements our existing Zoetis Nucleos portfolio. And here, what this does, it allows us to gain greater market access and accelerate the growth we've had in the therapeutic market. I'm going to come back to that in a bit. So deliverables for 2019, these are some of the things we delivered on. And overall sales growth in the group was 13%.
Again, these numbers are without Wargan. If you put Wargan back into the equation, we would have achieved 16% growth. Organic growth for Ardecimes in 2019, we grew 40%. We've also had significant reduction in our cash consumption. So we've really cut down on burning cash.
So effectively in 2019, we only burnt £400,000, which is I think that's a phenomenal achievement if you consider our past years. One thing we originally planned to do was to renew the clinical trial agreements with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. What we did, we've delayed that, because what we want to do is we really want to ensure that we have something that translates into the commercial deal. So it's something we to work on in 2020. I think it's much better to work on things and slow it down a bit, get what you really want.
So that's what we're doing now. And I think that's important. We have to make this commercially viable. So let's go into Aardexymes. So these are the commercial achievements for Aardexymes.
The quarterly performance, we had actually, in Q3, we thought we had the highest performance ever. In Q4, we have even higher performance, reaching 16,300,000. Euros So this is the best ever sales we've had per quarter. But of course, it's important to manage expectations because when you look at our business, the Arlyzymes sales fluctuate between quarters, and we do expect this moving forward as well. We expect fluctuations in both directions, up and down per quarter.
So one thing we know always is Q4 is always higher than Q1. So and that's always got to be expected. We're going to have this. And I've always mentioned this quarterly fluctuations. But on but what we do expect as we move forward is we will grow that business year on year, and that's a point.
So I think when you look at the quarters, it's always good to look at the kind of year trajectory as well. So then in terms of annual performance, I mentioned it before, we have 40% growth. And when it comes to EBITDA, we actually had a double digit EBITDA in 2019, where we landed on 14,300,000 and that's over double what we achieved last year. So it really shows that we are growing the profitability of the business. We're maintaining costs and growing the top line.
So the model, how we're driving our excellence is really working as we'd like. So when you look at the growth, there's some key contributors there. I think it's very good to break this down. So the salt active nuclease, that product line represents 25% of total sales. And if you go back just a few years ago, 2016, we almost had a big fat 0 in sales of SAM.
And I think this just shows how quickly you can grow a new portfolio of enzymes. Once you're in there, it grows nice. After a few years, you can see it starts accelerating up. And the launch of the new MSAN, which I'll come on to again a bit in more detail, just will help to accelerate that moving forward. With the Molecular Biology and Molecular Diagnostics segment, we've had nice growth there.
And also, we have a nice opportunity pipeline that we've been working on with customers for many years. As you know, when people start trying to use our enzymes, it takes them several years to develop products. But we've been there with our polymerases and also now with our new ligase and things we will also we're there working with our customers. There's 2 interesting areas we're looking at. 1 is liquid biopsy.
So to make this simple, when you go into hospital for looking for cancer, or something like a worm for prenatal testing, most biopsies are invasive if you have to stick a needle into for prenatal testing into the uterus or for cancers, you have to be opened up and a tissue has to be removed. Liquid biopsies does it the easy way. It just takes a blood sample and then you do a DNA test to look for that disease. And one of the things which is for us is there's a lot of companies who are developing these liquid biopsies. And the beauty of our enzymes work very well in developing the DNA tests associated around them.
So this is one of the areas we're really focusing on. And we have a lot of opportunities in the pipeline in that area. Another thing is with this in this world is there's a technology called LAMP. It's I won't even try and explain the technology because even for me that's complicated, but LAMP is a way of amplifying DNA. And until last year, that was heavily protected by patent, this technology.
But last year, some of the patents have started to expire. This year, all the remaining patents are going to expire with the use of that technology. And the beauty of that is there's a lot of companies looking to exploit that technology. So for Arctic Symes, we are looking we're working with those companies who want to exploit that technology. And we've actually our polymerases when we designed our polymerases, we intentionally designed them and engineered them for LAMP technology back in when we started to develop them in 2016.
So we are ready to start exploiting that, and that's really exciting for us. So in the next few years, we really expect to be growing our sales in those two areas in the molecular diagnostic field. And everybody's always asked about the main customer. I think it always has always been, oh, your main customer is the majority of your business. No, that's not the case.
At the end of the day, when our main customer today represents onethree of our business. So I think that sort of puts it in perspective. Going back maybe 5 years ago, it was certainly the vast majority of the business, but not today. So it sort of gives you an indication of how we've built the customer base out. We have a much broader customer base, and also we've had an expanding product range.
And all this help is what is helping the growth in the sales, and we're going to continue expanding that product base through new innovations. And I mentioned we launched MSAN, that's the 7th product we launched in 2019. And MSAN, as I mentioned, it's a salt active nuclease. And in a therapeutic world, in gene therapy, there's a lot of different types of viruses that are used. Today, our current SAM products only work for certain viruses.
The mSAN rollout will work for some of the other different viruses we can't tap into today. So we can take much more of we can take a broader market share moving forward and accelerate growth. And if virus is complicated for you, maybe I can talk about computers. I tried this this morning and it worked. So consider if you think instead if you think about the SAN as an operating system on a computer today, we can target all PC users, okay, but we can't target Android or Mac users.
So basically, MSAN is equivalent of like making a software that works on Android and Macs at the end of the day, so we can capture everybody. So that's the point is why we beefed up our portfolio in that way. Sometimes I like to look at everyday objects to make it easy to understand our technology. So I hope that puts some perspective on that for you. RDesigns also collaborated with cell and gene therapy Catapult, which is a U.
K. Academic institute. And this institute is a leader in working with companies to help them commercialize their gene therapy technologies. And we collaborated with them in presenting a poster with them at their Gene Therapy Manufacturing and Gene Therapy Congress in December in Amsterdam, and we got a very good reception there. I think our business, it's not normally we talk about who we work with because a lot of what we do is under confidentiality.
That's what the business is. But I think it's nice and we can sort of share and give you some flavor of who work with. And then in this case, we can because it's an academic institute. And a lot of companies are working with this academic institute. So I think that's safe.
This post is available, and information about catapults available if you look in the reports. There's links to these. So if you want to dig a little bit deeper. We're also growing our portfolio of new enzymes, so we have a nice pipeline. And one good example of this, we've had funding and been working on EU Horizon 2020 funding project called Virus X.
And now this project is entering the final stages. There's been a lot of prototypes being developed in this project, which is really exciting for us. We've now been selecting the most exciting prototypes. They're going into product development now. And I think over the next few years, we're going to really bring some very novel interesting enzymes to market.
So I think here we're going to see a lot of interesting stuff coming from Arnexyme over the next couple of years. So an essential part of growing our business is really operations. And I think the important thing is you've always got to scale your operations and to maintain security and supply with your customers. And also since we have an expanding product range, we have ensure we have the capacity to manufacture all these different products. So one of the things we did during Q4 is to implement a second production line.
So that's important. So that so going into 2020, it's important that they're fully operational. Also, it's also about scaling up. So several of our products are going through process development to scale up their production. So we're scaling up certain products being scaled up 10, 100 fold.
And that's important because at the end of the day, it's about meeting future demand. But also it's about economies of scale. As you grow your business with a customer, customers want more product, bigger orders, They expect a better price. So of course, what you need to do is scaling up. You improve your margin, and you get better.
You can pass some of those cost savings on to your customer. You can get a better margin too, so it ends up being a win win situation. You remain competitive. So we're working on those scale up projects and right now. The last thing is I'm going to talk about early signs is about organic inorganic growth.
You've seen how we've been growing the business organically. We also to move forward, we want to grow the business inorganically by doing M and A. And the reason for that is we want to become European's leading one stop enzyme company. And in order to do that, you can't do that alone. I think there's a lot of other small companies out with very nice enzymes, nice products and capabilities that we don't have.
So we don't have to reinvent everything ourselves. So by bringing another company together with us or several companies, we can really strengthen our brand position as that one stop shop with a broader and deeper offering. And that's important. We need to grow in both directions. And by doing that, having more of the expanding the value chain really helps us to accelerate our growth in sales, enhance our operational and innovation capabilities.
But very important is if you want to be a leading European company, you need a Central European base. I think here Norway is good. We have we'll always have our Norway base, but it's important to have a base in Central Europe. So I think this is one thing the M and A would achieve. The status, we are in advanced discussions with several companies.
We're getting very close and we do expect our first transaction to happen in the first half. Of course, that is all dependent, of course, on agreeing terms. But I'm confident we will do that. So I'd like to switch gears and talk a little bit about Biotech beta glucans. And when it comes to Worgen, as I mentioned, we made a decision to divest.
And we've, of course, spoken to all of our customers. And as we expected, there's been mixed response. Some customers are totally okay, but some are okay. But our position here is, it's business as usual. We are still going to provide product and the same service we have to our existing customers.
We're seeing positivity around Worgan with potential business development consultants. And what we want to do is bring a business development consultant on board to help us to drive the divestment process. And the consultants we've spoken to are very positive towards the divestment here. And we've had some interested parties already approach us as well about purchasing Wargan. So I think here, we're seeing a positive response to this.
From the commercial side, even though we've got growth in Worgan sales, it is for the quarter and for the year, these sales are far below our expectations. So again, that helps to support this supports our decision to divest Wargan. Germany still represents the key market and driver for sales for us. Majority of the sales of Wargan have been there. What is interesting, in December, we actually signed a new distribution agreement with a company, Biologique U, in the Netherlands.
And they were fully aware. We talked about that, about the divestment of Worgan. They're fully on board with that, but they still signed up. So that's encouraging. I think that is a very positive signal, but people still want to come on board even though we're going through a divestment process.
So when it looks when we look at the other biotech beta glucan segments, the adjuvant, the SBG, As mentioned, we really want to extract the commercial value moving forward. So we've had a lot of we've had discussions in Q4, and we're continuing those discussions with a vaccine owner, Y Maps and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. And really translating those research shows those clinical trials have been done over the last few years into that commercial value. That's really important now. Now we need to make sure that the work we're doing pays for itself and brings profit into this company.
So that's what we're working on right now. Consumer Health, we've got growth in the EMGuard product in Q4. And this growth is actually mainly due to bringing new cusps on board. We're seeing a nice expanding funnel of potential leads in the U. S, Asia and Europe.
For Animal Health, for the sales in glucans in the feed sector, sales are down for Q4. And for 2019, sales are down compared to last year. We also and I think some of the reasons for the sales are down is there are some seasonal effects when it comes to sales of these products, particularly in the salmon feed market. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Birger, and he's going to go through the financials.
Thank you, Jethro. As Jethro has talked about, Q4 was actually the best quarter ever we've had so far. And it's Q3 this year that was also one of the best quarters in history of the company. And it's also following a really strong Q3 this year. That was also one of the best quarters in history of the company.
So we have seen a really good positive trend in the second half of the year now this year. And even though some areas have over underperformed this quarter, other areas have definitely excelled and we've seen significant growth in the quarter. By combining sales and controlling our expenses, the Q4 and the full year 2019 turned out really good and as I said, the best so far. Looking at the cash flow for the year, it is easy to see that sales are generating good cash flow. And our 4th quarter changes in cash and cash equivalents were actually CHF9.2 million dollars and it's a really good quarter.
And of course, what is the explanation behind this and also I think we have to come back to Q3. We had really good sales in the 3rd quarters. We saw the revenues coming in, in the Q4 from those sales. We also had a really strong start in the Q4 in October, where also we see that all of the cash from those sales came in, in the Q4 as well. And there are tax grants from previous year are being paid out in October as well and that has also positive cash effect for the quarter.
And that gave us SEK 9,200,000 in changes of cash for the year. And even though we see that our cash flow was increased, our payables has remained unchanged, whereas our receivables are reduced slightly also. It's gone down SEK3 1,000,000 compared to the same year last year. So I would say we have a good situation here going into 2020. And as Jessel said, our cash balance at the end of 2019 was SEK 31,300,000.
At the end of last year, we had SEK 31,600,000. So our ambition to significantly reduce our cash consumption is we have exceeded that statement by far. And I think 2018, we had a cash consumption of around SEK 12,000,000 for the year, excluding the capital increase within June last year. Going over to sales, as Sveto has talked about, ARDEX HEMPS grew their sales by more than 50% in the Q4 compared to the same quarter last year and generated 16,300,000. Animal and consumer health, there we saw a decrease in that area by close to SEK 2,000,000 in excess of SEK 2,000,000 and it's primarily explained by reduced sales in animal health and that as Jester also said, we see some seasonality in that area of the business.
And we also saw on an annual level sales in that area were down by $4,000,000 for the full year. HURGEEN generated SEK1.1 million in quarterly sales compared to SEK0.9 million last year. And of course, our expectation in this area has been higher. We expected higher revenues. We expected higher growth.
So of course, both Q3 and Q4, it was a disappointment based on our own external expectations, even though we have seen growth in that area. But also I think it's not this is I think it defines or it's the correct decision to divest Bergan, because we don't have enough marketing power. We don't have enough resources to give this product the proper attention to get those revenues in. And also and as I said, even though it's an amazing product, but we don't have the necessary resources to get the sales here. Anyway, sales for the quarter, they were up to SEK 23,100,000 compared to 19,500,000 in last year.
And you can also see something if you look at the graph on the right hand side, you see that of course it's the Artesheim's business that is driving it and you can see there's a really nice trend from Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 now. And of course, we want to we said that we will have some quarterly fluctuations in this one. So we will not see kind of a continuous trend just going straight up. There will be bumps along the road here. But of course, we want to see the annual where we are, we want to see that annual growth in the annual figures for especially for audio science.
Looking at the profitability, it is the same as with sales. Of course, it is the best quarter so far. We delivered an EBITDA of SEK4,600,000 in the quarter. It is the numbers have been adjusted slightly. Both the Q4 2019 and the Q4 2018 numbers, they have been adjusted for IFRS 5, which is assets held for sale after we made a decision to divest Bouyguesn.
We basically had to take all the expenses related all the direct expenses related to Volcan. We had to take them out of the P and L and put them on a separate line basically. So the EBITDA here is excluding Volcan. So this is the EBITDA from our continued operations how the business would look like without Wurgan as such. But of course, personnel is still our biggest driver for expenses, but it's also the biggest asset we have in the company.
Without the highly knowledge and educated personnel, we will not be able to drive sales and we won't be able to generate new products either. So that is important. But also it is I think from an EBITDA perspective, as Sveto said, we took some restructuring costs in December, close to NOK2 1,000,000 that of course we have seen the cost effect. We saw that 1 in the Q4, but the cash effect will of course come into we will see that 1 in 2020 when we have the payables from those restructuring costs. And also I think it's important to say that IFRS 16 leases was implemented on January 1, 2019.
It's been implemented in all of the numbers, but basically it has an effect on the way we book our property plant and equipment, our rents, the housing, etcetera. So all of those expenses are now being booked on the balance sheet and depreciated and that has an annual effect around SEK 3,000,000 that has been taken out of the profit and loss statement. But all figures have been recalculated for comparison purposes. So this one shows how we have improved the business basically. Going into and some of the details in ARRIX and as we have said, I'm not going to say it's not better.
I think it's nice story. We have grown it from SEK10.6 million to SEK16.3 million on the quarterly sales, but even better, we also see on the annual figures, we have grown now Adesheims from $32,500,000 to $45,200,000 and that's a growth of almost 40% on an annual basis, which I think is a number that we are really proud of. Operating expenses have of course increased. We have invested more into this business. We have re reallocated resources from the BBG side of the business over to Adexxheims.
We have also now in 2019, we have the full effect from the BDs, the business developers that we hired in last year. So they are all in this year. And we have also taken on some expenses relating to M and A inorganic growth consultants. That is also part of driving some of the operating expenses at least for 2019. But looking at the bottom line, of course, Q4 was an amazing quarter.
We grew our EBITDA went from 3,000,000 to SEK9 1,000,000 close to 200 percent up. And also if you're looking at our EBITDA on an annual level, it grew by 100%. It went from SEK7 1,000,000 to SEK14 1,000,000 basically. So it's a good achievement on an annual level as well. And then going into the beta glucan side of the business.
And the beta glucan numbers are now they are based on continued operations. So the numbers here are excluding Volgen as such, all of the direct expenses and sales and revenues. But also I think you can see it from I have a net profit line here that's basically showing that what is Volgen contributing to the numbers here. But we see that our of course our sales were down. As we said, it's down to SEK 5,600,000 compared to SEK 8,000,000 in the same quarter last year.
We also see that annual figures are lower, but these numbers are actually better than our own internal expectations that we had when we started the year. So we have sort of exceeded what we saw. And this is it's not going to be a business that will grow a lot here when you look at the animal and consumer health. And gross profit is, of course, down as well. When you have reduced sales, the gross profit will go down, but we have also reduced our activity levels in this area as well.
So our expenses have gone down as well, especially if you look at the 4th quarter. And you also see that our EBITDA is worse than the last year. We go from minus NOK1 1,000,000 to minus NOK2 1,000,000. But when you look at an annual level, we actually managed to improve it slightly by NOK600,000 when you're going from NOK5,700,000 to minus NOK5 1,000,000. As I said, if you look at Volgen as a separate entity, 4th quarter, they had a net loss of 1,000,000 compared to a net loss of SEK1.9 million in the same quarter last year.
And on an annual basis, this year, we had SEK3.5 million compared to SEK6.9 million in the last year. And this, of course, also this is direct expense. So this excludes all of the internal hours that are used and then Jethro used and Christian used as well. And then of course, that is expenses that are going as well now, kind of it's not the expenses we had for Christian, but we won't see those in the future. So of course, we expect the numbers to improve.
But I think with that, I think Jester will talk a little bit about the future now and where we see that 2020 will go.
Thank you, Barry. So I'd just like to give you a flavor of what to expect in this now we're in 2020. And I think the important thing is really it's it's about going full speed ahead with a new strategic direction. We're there. We're ready for that.
And of course, it's about executing the number one goal. It's driving the whole business into profitability in 2020. There's also going beyond that. We want to make ensure we grow that profitability, make sure we're sustainable moving forward. We've gone through order restructuring.
In December, we reorganized did a whole reorganization of the personnel, so that it really supports Allied Exams. As I mentioned earlier, Allied Exams is 80% of our focus now and will be the main strategic business. We also have been working and will ensure that we drive the acquisition process as fast as possible. We want to get that first acquisition in the first half. I think that's important.
We really see some very nice synergies with the target with the targets we're looking at, which will help us accelerate the growth. Of course, when it comes to the biotab beta glucans, it's important that we now operate that as a profitable business. So part of that is, of course, we've reduced the personnel there, but also how we work in those individual businesses are going to be different to how we have done before. It's the same thing when I came to Alexeym's 5 years ago. We had to look at the business and really be very smart and put a strategy behind how do we make those work.
And it's the same thing here with the BBG. Even though we've changed personnel, how we work will be different moving forward. It is about making that business profitable. And of course, when it comes to Worgan, this is obviously working on that divestment process. As mentioned, we have consultants who are going to help us.
We should be hiring a consultant very soon and get that process going. So I think this is really the recipe that we see. Tibert will drive long term shareholder value. So with that, we'll stop. And thank you.
And we open for questions. So in 3 years' time, what we did in the investor update in December, we sort of put a kind of outlook, more longer term financial outlook. And I think the goal is what we're looking at. What we set is in 2023, that is the goal to at least have the Arctic Sciences business bringing in NOK100 through organic growth. NOK100 million.
NOK100 million, yes. But of course, that's through organic growth. Of course, if we do M and A and we're successful with that, bring another company in, that will allow us to potentially accelerate that. And hopefully, you make that happen earlier. So that is the financial outlook we have, and we have very good visibility to our designs.
We have a good 6 year plan. BBG, that's a little bit more complicated. I think to have a kind of long outlook there, we have to take this stepwise. And I think the focus now is Wargan. And then, of course, I think the most when you look at in terms of the VBG business, I think the SVG, the achievement is the most exciting thing that we have there.
But the important thing is we need to translate that into a commercial value now. We have to get some license we have to get that licensing deal, whatever it is, to really get the value out of it. And as mentioned, the animal and consumer health, that we have to monitor very closely. That needs to pay for itself. And that is a commodity market.
And there's stiff competition. So I think that we take step wise as well. And like I said, we will maintain those, wider profit. But 3 years down the road, that is difficult to say how those businesses will look. Have you taken all the restructuring costs in 2019?
Or is there more to be expected in Q1? No, we're taking them all in Q4. Do you want to comment any further?
No, I think you're right. We have taken all the expenses in the Q4. We do not expect to have any more restructuring costs in the Q1 or in 2020 as such.
Another question regarding turnover. How much is recurring?
How big of a portion of
the turnover will be recurring? Neville, do you want to?
No, I think you have to as Jesro talked about, I think they said we have a marriage with our customers. And of course, we are trying to grow the business with them as well. So of course, most of it will be long term recurring revenues as well. But of course, there are isn't some of the customers are buying only in one quarter, where others are buying every quarter. But on an average level, of course, most of them is a long term relationship.
That is what we try to get with all of our customers here. So we lock them in for a long time when we have when they are part of their in their product range.
And that's particularly in Arctic lines because, of course, we have we are a B2B OEM business. So what that means is we serve companies who develop products. They have to go through a long time, maybe 1 to 4 years to develop a product. Safety and enzyme as a component that they integrate into their product. They've invested a lot of money to do that.
Some of those companies then have to then take their products and get regulatory approval in order to sell it if it's a diagnostic. So then you're really locked in. And as a supplier, and you become a critical raw material supplier. That's often the critical raw material supplier. So that means that you are locked in.
It's that marriage I talk about. So for a lot of the business, particularly in in Arctic Symes, it is all about that. It is that long term value. So we do get the reoccurring turnover. It's different to an end business if we were just having selling the end user business to universities, that's a very transient business.
Research at the bench will sometimes they will use the what's the flavor of the month, they might buy this product now for a few months for a project, then move on to something else. So your sales are with individual customers are very transient in that world. So I think that's the kind of difference. It's really about understanding the dynamics we have with our customers. And finally, regarding Volcan or the divesting of Volcan, have you started this activity?
Has there been any interest? When do you expect things to happen? Yes. I sort of talked about that. So one thing is we're working with hiring we're hiring somebody who it's their day job to divest.
This is what they do. So we're hiring a consultant. We're very we're in this process right now. We've spoken to several consultants right now. And now we're selecting the one very shortly who we think will be the best to drive this process.
And I think everybody we've spoken to is very positive about this project. These people you hire on these consultants, they won't take this project on unless they think they believe they're going to be successful here. So I think what we're seeing is we're very positive and they're positive to what we're seeing now is deciding who is the best one to hire moving forward. So that's where we are. And we have had already some parties come to us directly about interest in buying Wargan.
So I think it is positive out there. Any value assessment on WALGAN? That's something is not at this stage. And of course, that's something we would it would be foolish to disclose that publicly because we have a there's a negotiation that needs to happen with interested parties. So I think it's not smart to put something on the table anyway, even if we did know
it.
So just wanted to say that prospects for Artiscience is looking even better. And just wondering the sand products, the lifespan of this product, is it for many, many years to come? Or how is that?
Most definitely. Very good question. So and thank you for that. When you look at the gene therapy market, it's actually been around for a very long time. It started out in the 1990s, where there was actually, there was an experimental gene therapy that was done, but unfortunately, the patient died.
And it actually stood to market for many years. But since then, the kind of technology and the understanding has improved. So now I think we're at a different stage of different thinking. And I think the regulatory authorities are also important here because they really control what you do and they have a different mindset. They really see that they're changing the way in how they regulate that.
So I think here we have all the stakeholders, the regulatory, authorities have a different picture of this. The investor community has a different picture. The science has advanced. We understand more about making good quality safe products. Remember, our SAN is used to make that product safe.
SAN, when you make the virus, SAN is used to clean up the contamination on the new. New. It's sort of when you look at growth of some of the new companies out there, they're growing over 100% annually, some of these. And now we're starting to see the real commercial, real life examples coming to market. Spark Therapeutics was the 1st company to commercialize a viral based gene therapy.
If you have a look, they've been acquired by Roche. And we're just seeing every day new companies coming up. I think every week, we have a new customer who wants to try sand. And so I think the momentum is there. I think there will be up and bumps in the road.
There are going to be like with any even in traditional medicine, when developing drugs, there are patients have adverse effects, some patients die, that's the nature of developing a drug. It's the same it's going to be the same in this, in the gene therapy area. But it's not going to be like the 90s where one patient died, everything stopped. Here, it's accepted, this technology. The only thing right now is in the early stage, it's very expensive.
It's $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 for therapeutic. But there's but of course, that cost is being driven down, and that's what makes it accessible. Companies like Ulster Biomedica, they've already said, look, in future, our technologies, what we want to do is bring this down to 200 $1,000 per treatment, eventually get it down to maybe $20,000 And these things are achievable because these happened in the sequencing world. In the sequencing world, it costs 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars to sequence the first genome. Today, it's under $1,000 to sequence the genome.
It's going to be the same in the gene therapy space. So I think we're just at the beginning. Here. So I believe future medicine in 20 years' time or 15, let's say, 10, 20 years' time, new era medicine will be genetic medicine. So that's my phrase for it, genetic medicine.
But I think now you're modifying your genome is going to be something very acceptable in 10, 20 years' time. Today, it's a bit Star Trek or science fiction, but really, it's this is a reality we're in. So I think, long story short, we are at the beginning and that's why we're there. Why we're developing more products. We see where this market is going, and our sales is demonstrating that.
I don't see it going away.
Thank you.
Any other questions? I didn't have anyone online either. Any questions online? I don't think we have any more. So I
think we'd Nice. Thank you.
Thank you for today and have a good day everyone.