Welcome to the Q3 presentation. Today, it'll be myself, the CEO, Jethro Holter, and Børge Sørvoll, our CFO, who will walk you through the presentation. For those of you who are calling in virtually, you can pose your questions via the chat function. Unfortunately, we cannot cater for you to pose verbal questions today. In the room, of course, you can certainly pose your questions verbally at the end of the presentation. Today, we have 14 people in the room, and we're also joined by our Chairman today, Dr. Marie Roskrow. The agenda today is usual procedure as always. We will start with the highlights for the quarter, then we'll go through the business update. Børger will walk you through the financials. I'll go through the outlook for 2020 and beyond.
With respect to the highlights, what we can say is the growth trend continues, but that's despite the expected slowdown related to corona-related sales. For the quarter, we achieved quarterly growth. We came in at NOK 29.3 million. That's equivalent of 16% growth. With respect to EBITDA performance, we came in with NOK 2.8 million and of course, we have increased our cost base there. We're gonna talk more about that, but briefly, this relates to firstly kind of project-related costs we have right now. In particular, we are working on a DMF project, so that has increased costs where we're using external support. We're also working on M&A, and there we've engaged external help as well with consultants helping us there.
We've also been working on ESG and other kind of projects. We have many projects in the works that are putting costs into the business. Those projects are very much about supporting the growth and moving into and expansion in the biomanufacturing area as well as inorganic growth activities that we're doing. Of course, we are investing in the team. We're growing the team a lot this year. I'm gonna come back to that and then what to expect for the future when it comes to personnel. We've also continued to grow the biomanufacturing business particularly following the pandemic and as I've alluded to in previous presentations, biomanufacturing is where the largest growth potential is for ArcticZymes. Linked to that, we've been very active in R&D with respect to innovating the RNA enzymes.
Today, we successfully achieved expression of some of those enzymes, and those represent R&D prototypes, which I'll come back to you in a moment. The last point here is really about inorganic growth. It's about M&A, and, you know, we're at the stage where we've entered discussions with a select group of international companies. What I'm gonna do is come back, we'll come back to each of these topics as we go through the presentation. For the business update, as always, we start with commercial sales. For the quarter, as mentioned earlier, we grew the business 16% for the quarter compared to the same quarter last year. It's really the biomanufacturing part of the business where we achieved the growth for the quarter. For this, we achieved NOK 15.9 million.
This accounts for 26% growth compared to the same quarter last year. Overall, biomanufacturing contributed 54% of total Q3 sales. What we've seen in the biomanufacturing space, particularly post-pandemic, is that, you know, we're certainly seeing an upturn in sales. That's to be expected because the attention now is really much on gene therapies and other vaccines outside of COVID. We see this across all geographies. In particular, what we see is it's pretty strong in the U.S. That's very much for quarter two. We saw that 72% of biomanufacturing sales came from the North American market. What we have seen also is we've seen a seasonal effect as well, particularly in Europe.
We saw that in biomanufacturing as well, where we saw customers were on extended vacations and customers were not naturally placing orders at that time. We mentioned it last quarter around about the Drug Master File or DMF for short. This is something that we're working on to put a Drug Master File in place for the Salt Active Nuclease HQ product, or SAN for short. We plan to submit that to the U.S. FDA, and that project is going very well. But it is a mammoth undertaking. We've had to reprioritize resources internally to support that project, and also we've had to engage quite a lot of external support on a project basis. Of course, that does add to our cost.
This is a very important project because at the end of the day, for many of our customers who want to take their therapeutic applications to the U.S. market, for them, they deem the Drug Master File as essential. As we keep that moving forward more into the biomanufacturing space, with new products, we'll also need more Drug Master Files down the road. With that project, like I said, is progressing well. We do expect that, based on the current status, that we will have that submitted to the FDA in first half of next year. When it comes to the molecular tools, remember, that serves both research and diagnostics. The quarterly sales came in at NOK 13.4 million.
Essentially, we had flat growth for the quarter. For the first nine months, it came in at with slight growth of around about 5%. I'll come back to the reasons for this in a moment. Overall, molecular tools contributed 46% towards Q3 sales. If you look how that splits up, 90% of those came from research and 27% came from diagnostics. When it comes to research, as I mentioned in previous quarters, the main product driving that has always been the Shrimp Alkaline Phosphatase, the recombinant Shrimp Alkaline Phosphatase or rSAP for short. This quarter, what we saw in Q3, there was a dip, and that's because we didn't receive any large orders from our key customers.
That's understandable because, many of those customers are based in Europe and, what we're seeing is they had extended vacations. We did not get those kind of orders. We do see those seasonal dips from time to time. What's interesting is, when it comes to research is we did have strong DNA sales, and the DNA sales contributed 67% towards research sales. We also had an equally strong performance of DNases in the diagnostic side as well. What we saw in diagnostics, this is something we've been talking about and we have been expecting, is a lower contribution from Cod UNG. Of course, there is a back end of the pandemic, and now we see that demand for instance, Cod UNG is much lower, than it was during the pandemic.
Of course, that has an impact on sales. I think it very much aligns with our annual guidance that we do expect for Cod UNG sales from COVID-related sales will be lower this year compared to last year. The question you're probably asking right now, what's the prognosis for both of these business segments moving forward? When it comes to biomanufacturing, it is three things. One, we do expect the growth trend will certainly continue. With that, the two things go into that. Firstly, it's about geographies. We're really focused on expanding the sales of our SAN products across the geographies. Also, it's about customer reach. We've actually increased our customer base quite significantly since the pandemic.
I think I've always mentioned before we've had 100+ customers, but I haven't updated you on that number. You know, since the pandemic, we've got over 180 customers purchasing the SAN products today. Beyond that, we also have a pipeline of customers, potential customers who aren't purchasing yet, but are customers we will convert as we move forward. Also, the third part of that is also more products. Today, you know, biomanufacturing is propped up by just the SAN products and a lot of the investments we're doing, both project-based and increase in personnel, is very much linked to building out that biomanufacturing business, so we get more products on the table. But it's also about the documentation, such as Drug Master Files as well. In molecular tools, it's a slightly different picture.
From a short-term perspective, we've had the COVID, we're now out of COVID. Of course, that impacts our short term. We do expect a kind of short-term impact on the growth of sales over the next six months in the molecular tools business. Beyond that, we do expect the growth rate to reestablish itself. That's through the broader offering of products that we have. Also it's linked to the kind of activities we're doing in Oslo. We have the applications lab we've put together, and that's really about demonstrating utility of our products together as a synergistic offering to our customers. That really will help fuel future sales in molecular tools. This is a slide about geographies.
I introduced it last quarter, and the reason for that is there's always been a lot of questions, "Well, where do your sales come from? Which parts of the world?" We put this on the table last time and if we just take approximate numbers, what we see is in Europe we've always sort of had around about 50% of the business came from European customers. Around about 40% from the Americas. You can see that in last year, Q1 this year, Q2 as well. Then just over 10% in the Asia-Pacific region. What we can see for Q3, we've seen a different shift where we had majority of sales came from the Americas. Again, this comes to what we talked about, the seasonal effect that we've seen.
It was quite unusual actually in Europe to see it so quiet. What we saw during July and August, a lot of customers were away. I think since the pandemic, people just have not got away, and we've seen that our customers were literally out for a lot of the summer. What we saw is customer activity returned back to normal in September, so this did have an impact, particularly on European sales, yeah. This slide is about our product offering and our innovation pipeline, and I think it's important to look at this together and how this fits. The boxes in green, they represent the products or product lines that we have today on the market that have been selling for many years.
The boxes in gray represent some of the products in our innovation pipeline. Before I go into these in detail, it's important to understand, ArcticZymes is not a solution provider. We don't make kits for the molecular research market. We don't make diagnostic kits, for the diagnostic or tests for the diagnostic market. We're not making therapeutics for biomanufacturing. What we are is a component supplier at the end of the day, and that's important because, you know, at the end of the day, what it is about supplying bulk products to customers who will use our enzymes in their manufacturing processes or integrate them into their products and their technologies. Or sometimes we sell our products as OEM, and what that means is customers will private label our products and sell them alongside their technologies too.
That's why we actually invested even last year when we invested in the manufacturing facilities. We actually purchased a robot that can label tubes and fill tubes 'cause that allows us to leverage more in the OEM business. Of course, sometimes we have to customize enzymes. For instance, for enzymes that are used in, for instance, next-generation sequencing, there often they need a tailored kind of offering. This is kind of, you know, what we need to think about when we design and bring our products to market. When it comes to molecular tools, we've been selling enzymes since the 1990s into this area. There it's an attractive offering where customers will integrate our enzymes into their products and their technologies. We are missing. We don't have a full portfolio.
We are missing two key enzyme classes, and that's the reverse transcriptases and the Taq DNA polymerases. Those are very crucial enzymes. They are used. They're essential for most molecular tool workflows. Our immediate priorities is to make sure we launch our first reverse transcriptase and Taq polymerase enzymes before the end of the year. Those will be the first. Later on, we will add more products to those product lines. What's interesting is that when we launch the reverse transcriptase and Taq polymerases, that really does fuel the activities that happen at SHARE Lab.
The timing of getting the Oslo lab in place very much fits with the launch of these enzymes because that laboratory will demonstrate the use of these enzymes in combination with the DNases, for instance, the Cod UNGs in a workflow environment. One of the immediate things the Oslo lab are gonna be working on is putting together a viral diagnostic workflow, showing our different enzymes working in that. That’s gonna be one of the immediate outputs we will have from the Oslo lab as we move forward. On the biomanufacturing side, you can see there's more innovations there, and that's certainly how it will be as we move forward because the biomanufacturing is the side of the business that offers us the greatest potential.
There are two ways of looking at this. When you look at the external market, you can see that, just by the sheer size of the market, it's 20 times larger than the molecular tools market. The second point is from our own firsthand experience. We've seen that, the biomanufacturing market is one that's growing rapidly. There's high demand, and we've seen this through SAN, through our SAN portfolio. You know, the market needs two things. One, extremely high-quality, well-documented enzymes, as well as novel enzyme technologies. So for us, you know, this is certainly an area where we can really bring these technologies to the market for this customer base. Our immediate priority right now is we're working on an ELISA kit, and that ELISA kit is linked to the SAN HQ 2.0 enzyme, which is shown here.
Why we need that is that for customers who want to use that enzyme for therapeutic applications, they need the ELISA. We plan to launch that ELISA either very late this year or early next year. Most of our efforts at the moment in this area is really around the RNA enzymes, where we're developing a suite of enzymes that will be used in a man-- which can be used in the manufacturing of therapeutic RNAs. You can see some of these enzymes listed here. And where we are today is, as mentioned earlier, we do have some R&D where we've got early prototypes where the first thing you need to do is clone the genes for the enzymes.
You need to put them into a microorganism, and then you've got to make sure that they express functional protein or enzyme. That's where we are today. We've got functional protein at low-level R&D scale. Now that's important because part of our innovation process now where we'll be testing those early prototypes with our customers, and then that feedback is very important because that will say, "Okay, these look good." Then that means we can put them into product development. Or if there's some things where no, you may need to go back and do some tweaking, we do the tweaking, we test with customers, then put it into our product development pipeline.
We really engage our customers through our innovation process here. With this, we, I think we're very much on track to launch our first RNA enzymes next year. A little bit about strategic growth initiatives. We very much remain committed to these. When it comes to organic growth, we have had a recruitment drive this year. Each quarter we've incrementally increased the size of the team particularly cross-functionally. A lot of those hires have been very much related to biomanufacturing. If we want to take that big slice in biomanufacturing, it is about investing in people today to extract it for the future. This year's really been about hiring. That won't continue. We're building that critical mass of people, and that's what we've done.
We certainly won't be recruiting as heavily as we've done this year going into next year, and that's kind of important to emphasize. Again, as mentioned, that's to support the biomanufacturing. You sort of see here, to the left, there's a photo of the team, and we took this photo in September this year. This is the global ArcticZymes team. We needed to be on two floors here to fit us into the photo. I came in the company in 2015, and then the enzyme business was supported by 18 people, and today we're 60+ people. Recruitment, it's been difficult. We've hired many of the positions, but some are difficult to hire. That's why we need to have an open mindset with respect to location.
That's why, you know, we, you know, some positions certainly we've hired in Tromsø, but some we can't. You know, that's why for instance we have the Oslo facility, you know, where we can get. We can hire people there, and also we're hiring people in other locations. What's really important is we hire the most relevant people to this company. So that means that extends to hiring international talent. It's also like commercially, industrially seasoned people as well. That's really important as we take the company to the next level. We also need industrially experienced people in this organization. Inorganic growth. Here we've been focusing a lot of my activities. Actually, almost all my time is spent on the M&A activities, and it's really intensive period for us.
With that, you know, we're not doing it alone. We've engaged external support. Alira Health is really a top-notch M&A advisory is helping us in this process. You know, they know this market very well. They're doing an excellent job. They're steering this process for us. What's important to highlight is that this is strongly supported by the board of directors and the whole of the management team at ArcticZymes. We're united on this. Where are we? Today we are in discussions with a highly focused and limited group of international companies. That's where we are.
What's important to highlight here is that why any potential deal we do, we really want to make sure it's creative and it very much is in alignment with our growth strategies, both short-term and long-term. We think that's the most important thing. Of course, we've said, you know, we had a goal to have this done by the end of the year. Since we wanna make sure we have that right deal in place, but it, you know, it may extend into very early part of 2023 where we would announce a deal. I think it's very important where we focus on getting the right deal rather than this line in the sand of make an announcement at the end of the year.
With that, I'm gonna hand over to Børge, and he's gonna go through the financials.
Thank you, Jethro, for that introduction on the third quarter and the first nine months of 2022. Looking at the financial side of the business, we are still managing growth on a quarterly basis here, and also on a 12-month rolling basis. As Jethro talked about, investments in organic growth impacts our expenses. As there has been a need for both, you can see we have increased our internal resources and there's also been a need for external support on several projects in this quarter so far. Moving into the sales side of the business here. Our sales revenues in the third quarter have increased by 16% compared to the third quarter last year, generating now NOK 29.3 million in revenues compared to NOK 25.2 million in the same quarter last year.
For the first nine months of the year, total sales revenue now are close to NOK 110 million compared to the NOK 87 million that we had last year, and this is also an increase of 24% for the first nine months. Looking at the two different areas that Jethro also talked a little bit about, both areas show the growth for the quarter, but the biomanufacturing side delivered an increase of 20% or 3.3 million, going up from NOK 12.6 million to NOK 15.9 million. This is also that we continue to see an upturn in sales now following the end of the pandemic year.
We also see this for the first nine months, where sales have grown from NOK 31.2 million to NOK 49.5 million, or a growth of close to 60% for the first nine months here. Molecular tools sales are basically flat in the quarter, but we have, you can say, a small increase where we've grown from NOK 13.2 million to NOK 13.4 million in the third quarter this year. For the first nine months, we have sales have increased by 5% now, having gone from NOK 56.5 million to NOK 59.5 million.
This is also due to the fact that even though we do see a much slower contribution by Cod UNG and Gene now that we see that the pandemic are getting closer to an end now. Currency plays a vital role in our business here, and as you might be aware, so we work in a global market, and our revenues are impacted by currency fluctuations. Especially since our main sales currencies are USD and US dollars and euros. The Norwegian kroner plays only a small part when you look at the sales side of the business, but of course, it's kind of the main driver behind our expenses. Also in the third quarter, 73% of our revenues were in US dollars and 27% were in euros.
Even though, as Jethro Holter talked about, that we had around 50% of our base is now in the Americas and a lot more in euros. There are some of our European customers that have a U.S. dollar that we invoice them in U.S. dollars here. We also see that the fluctuation in the exchange rates that we've seen over the last year, this impacts our profit and loss statements. Based on the U.S. dollar and the euro that we have in our bank accounts, we have had a profit of NOK 0.2 million now on the financial side in the third quarter and a NOK 3.9 million positive contribution for the first nine months.
As a general principle, we try to reduce the amount of currency we have in our bank accounts to a minimum here. That this is of course to offset the risks of having too much currency fluctuations on the bank accounts. Our trade receivables are of course also impacted by currency fluctuations, and this will be seen under other operating expenses in our profit and loss statements. For the third quarter this year, our expenses were actually reduced by NOK 1.3 million now. For the first nine months of the year, we can see that our expenses have been reduced by NOK 2.7 million now due to the favorable currency fluctuations now, especially on the USD side.
We have also talked in the past about growth in the underlying business here, where we try to exclude the fluctuations in our currency, meaning that we have constant exchange rates. If we have constant exchange rates for 2021 and 2022, our sales would have actually been NOK 2.8 million lower in the third quarter this year compared to the same quarter last year. We see that for the first nine months now, we have had a positive contribution of NOK 6 million this year compared to the same year last year.
It's also when we look at this, of course, we don't have control of the currency rates, but it's also important to highlight that if you remember in 2021, when we looked at kind of these constant exchange rates, and when we compared 2021 to 2020, we had a loss that year of NOK 11 million in kind of currency here. So actually, our underlying growth was much higher than we actually did deliver in 2021. Moving into the trends of our business, where we've kind of taken out the quarterly fluctuations that are inherent in the business here. As you can see, we continue to deliver growth on a quarterly basis here. In the third quarter, we passed NOK 37 million in twelve-month rolling quarterly sales.
If you annualize this number, you can see that we are now up to 150 million now on an annual basis. This is just shy of the 155 that we aim for at the end of the year, this year. You can also see from this graph, we have taken out that, the COVID part of the business. We took it out in the first quarter this year, and this is kind of also in alignment with what we've been talking with over the last few quarters here, where we see that we're coming to an endemic state now in the pandemic and where the COVID part plays a smaller and smaller role in our sales figures. Look at the profitability side of the business and some of the expenses that we have.
We continue to deliver a positive contribution to the bottom line, even though this quarter is weaker than the same quarter last year and the two preceding quarters this year. Our third quarter EBITDA ended up on NOK 2.8 million compared to NOK 9 million the same period last year. For the first nine months, we managed to deliver NOK 40.8 million, or NOK 40.2 million now, versus NOK 40.8 million the same time last year. Of course, this is even though our sales have increased by close to 20%. Why.
The main reason why we haven't seen a significant impact in our EBITDA is, as we have talked about earlier a little bit, we have done several investments now in organic growth initiatives here. We are now more than 60 people in the organization, and this is compared to a little bit more than 40 people at the same time last year. We opened new facilities in Oslo, which has also had some set-up expenses associated with it. We have had several large projects ongoing now in the year and the quarter as well, but that has been driving expenses. This goes towards what Jethro talked about. We have the M&A activities where we've needed external support.
We have the DMF, the Drug Master File project, that has also required some external support. We've also had kind of a lot of, well, acronyms now, ESG, that we've been working on, where we had some support. We've also been working kind of on the ERP project now, where we need to swap out our existing ERP solution here. All of these has required a need for external support. Of course, these has driven our expense base in this quarter. These are also more of a temporary nature, and we expect them to end, I would say quite soon.
You can see from the graph here on the left-hand side, our EBITDA margin ended up on only 10%, which is of course weaker than we've been seeing over the last two years. For the first nine months, we are still driving a strong business, and we have a 37% margin now so far for the first nine months of the year. Looking at the cash flow, and the cash flow follows more. Oh, sorry. I'm gonna move that one.
Looking at the cash flow side of the business and the cash balance follows more or less the same trends as we've seen over the last few quarters, with kind of a steady improvement in our cash position, even though we have quarterly fluctuations in sales and profitability. Of course, the fluctuations that you see in our changes in cash, those follow kind of the EBITDA that we deliver on a quarterly basis. Normally, you can see the changes in cash is coming in the following quarter after we have. The Q2 or the Q3 cash change will be kind of dictated by the Q2 numbers we deliver on an EBITDA level here. For the third quarter here, we had a NOK 7.6 million positive cash contribution.
For the first nine months, our cash position was increased by NOK 38 million, and this generated a cash balance of NOK 239 million at the end of September so far this year. I think with this, I will hand it over to Jethro, where he will talk a little bit about what we can expect for the last few months of the year here.
Thank you, Børge. Okay, for the outlook and beyond, this mostly remains unchanged. This remains mostly unchanged, for 2022, the first thing we said, we had, with our guidance, is we have an annual target of NOK 155 million in sales. Where are we after Q3? We are 70% of the way there, as you see in the pie chart to the top right. Underneath shows the last 12 months revenues on a rolling quarterly basis. What you can see after Q3, the 12-month accumulated revenues were at NOK 149 million. We maintain and stick to this guidance.
One thing is, in Q4, we're gonna need a quarter similar to what we had in Q1. There's a key difference to Q1. You know, we certainly had more flexibility when it came to COVID-related sales. Of course, we don't have that in Q4. What I will say to that is there will be limited potential for upsides beyond NOK 155 million. I think that is kind of what we're looking at. Of course, as I've said in most quarterly presentations, you know, we do have quarterly fluctuations in sales, and we're always gonna have that.
As a component supplier and our business primarily being B2B, it's always gonna be that way. I'll always urge you more to look towards the annual targets and more of the longer-term targets than the quarters. You've sort of seen this already in the presentation, but we said, you know, with the we will get a lower contribution from corona-related sales this year. Of course, we've seen that. We're experiencing that now, particularly since the performance of Q1 and, sorry, Q2 and Q3. The next one we've ticked off, and this is really our expansion into Oslo, where now, you know, the Oslo Facilities Applications Lab is up and running. We have the people there.
We're now working hard to build that workflow data, to build that application data for our customers. I think Oslo is also something we're really looking at in detail because we can certainly expand and do other activities there. We said we're gonna launch products this year. So far we haven't, but we plan to have product launches at the end of the year as mentioned earlier. It is about we are investing today for tomorrow, particularly with the team. The most important asset for us is talent acquisition. Of course, we've had this recruitment drive, and that's to drive both short-term and long-term growth initiatives. As mentioned earlier, you know, we're not gonna be hiring as many people next year as we've done this year. Since we've got that critical mass we need.
The important thing is, when it comes to talent acquisition, some of our costs actually have been using external support as well for this as well. Of course, some of that, some of the cost is fixed, some of it is also using consultants and specialists when you need, and we've even used that in even in our innovations. We are also sometimes using external support who have better knowledge than us in the product development. Some of those costs also wrapped up here in Q3 as well. Also when it comes to talent acquisition, it's also about inorganic as well. I think, you know, certainly talent acquisition are very much linked to M&A activities as well. On that note, as mentioned, this has remained a priority for us.
We have set this goal to announce a deal this year, but as mentioned, this could extend into the very early part of 2023. When it comes to more long-term outlook, that remains the same. We have a goal to realize NOK 350 million by 2025 through organic growth. That's both from the molecular tools and the biomanufacturing business. I think that's a good place to stop, and I'd like to thank you for your attention today. We're here to answer questions, Børge, myself, and our Chairman, Marie, as well.
Okay. Maybe I can take one question now that we have received from some of the online viewers here, Jethro. Regarding the enzymes to be launched now in the molecular tools business, the technologies of reverse transcriptases and Taq polymerases are not new innovative as such. How can you compete on this market with a range of large players offering these types of enzymes already?
Sure. It's the same with all our product families. There's all generic versions of all of our enzymes. Of course, when it comes to polymerase and reverse transcriptases, you know, we're just launching our first enzymes. Beyond that, it's really with those enzymes, you're not gonna win with one. You're gonna need to build out a portfolio of those. Two things, one, you want novel enzymes, and the second thing, you need really high-quality enzymes. Also you want to show them, and of course the point with reverse transcriptases, for instance, you can marry them together with our other enzymes. What a lot of companies are doing, our DNases actually are what other companies do. They buy our DNases and marry them with reverse transcriptase. We can do the same. We can marry reverse transcriptases with our DNases.
It will also enhance the sale of our other products too. That's a point when I'm talking about workflow. Sometimes you need first we'll start with generic, high-quality generic reverse transcriptases and Taq polymerase. We will go deeper in terms of making those more novel enzymes in that space. It's not just gonna be one enzyme, we're gonna build those out. Again, these will also help sell our other enzymes. It's similar to the SAN products. Today, we make ELISA kits. Those are support products intended to sell the SAN products and of course. We've got to start somewhere. We need to get the first reverse transcriptase and polymerase on the market, and then we'll build those out.
Okay. Maybe I take one more question here before we open up here. In the second quarter 2021, you mentioned an opportunity with a large international life science company for a potential integration of SAN HQ 2.0 in the routine manufacturing processes for all recombinant protein production need. Can you elaborate a little bit how that's going and the potential impact on the business this has?
Yeah, sure. That, as I've always alluded to, that's gonna take time. You know, you've gotta. If somebody's gonna integrate something into all their manufacturing processes, they've got to update all their document systems and things and do that stepwise. That's gonna be a long project. Of course that's progressing, but that will take time.
Do you guys, any in the room who has a question here or? I have more questions here. Anyone? Okay. Can you say anything about the costs related to the M&A activities during the third quarter this year?
Maybe Børge, you might want to answer that one. It's probably gonna be
Yeah.
Um.
Hang on.
Oh.
Speak up.
Yeah. Well, as Jethro said, we've hired a group called Alira Health, who are a global company, and we've hired a group based in Munich who, personally, myself and other, a couple of other people have a long history of knowing. These are world-class people. We pay them on, and I won't give the exact figure 'cause that is confidential, but we pay a monthly retainer to these people, which we negotiated heavily on. I think if you look at other groups of a similar caliber, we've got a very good deal with them, and I think that was because we got a little bit of a mate's rate. But also, of course, when you do a transaction, if we're successful, we do pay a success fee, and this is a market sort of level fee.
The retainer that we've paid on a monthly basis will be deducted from the end success fee. Overall, the costs incurred so far with that project are certainly on the lower end of what you would expect to pay for such expertise. Is that true then?
Yeah. That works fine. Okay. I can take a question here. Is the company considering currency hedging, given the cash balance is in NOK, and likely an M&A opportunity would be in euros or US dollars? How are you investing the cash for it to keep up with inflation? And how do I say? I'm not sure if it's correct to say that the transaction would be in US dollars. We have said already. I think we've said in the past that we're looking at the European area. I would say it is probably more likely it would be in euros rather than US dollars. Because at the moment, we haven't done any hedges since we don't.
Nothing has been signed, and there are no agreements here in place, so it's a little bit difficult to hedge towards that as well.
It's not in British pounds, you know.
One more question here. Maybe you can answer this one, Jethro.
Mm.
How do you see the speed and progress of product development, versus your competitors going? Are things taking longer than expected? Are developments in line with client expectations, or is there a risk of clients moving away due to slow progress now?
No, that's a good question. That's the part of the reason why we're growing the organization now. You know, focus for us in molecular tools is something we know very well. We've been doing, you know, since the 1990s. Of course, biomanufacturing is new, relatively new to us, and that's the important thing is really to build out the team to get that speed in place. No, I do not see that we're behind by any means. I think that's a point we want to be in front. That's why we're investing in people right now and having that big recruitment drive. It's to ensure we can actually get ahead of everybody else as well.
Okay. Your 155-22 outlook, is that in constant exchange rates now or is the FX tailwind included in the outlook here?
Yeah. You know, we don't look at, like, you know, when those goals are set, we don't consider the currency. Yeah, it's not adjusted for the currency though.
We can only control-
Yeah.
We can control.
Exactly.
Currency markets.
That's it. That's it.
All right. Let me see if what else we had here. Were there any non-recurrent costs in Q3, mainly related to personnel?
It wouldn't go under personnel, but external expenses, and that's related to. We are doing some of our innovations, as mentioned. Sometimes we need to hire external support. You know, sometimes, you know, we don't have all the knowledge. We're a small team, and the world's big, and sometimes we will lean on others to help us in our development. So, from our external costs, yes, we have some things related to R&D activities, paid.
Yeah. I think it's also fair to say we have also had. We did some change. We had a new position that started. We actually had in the third quarter, we had double up for a time period in as with one of the senior positions. We got a new VP of the commercial side. You can see in the transition period, we had double up on the expenses, but of course, that one is taken out of the equation now, today. That one not there moving forward as well either. Yeah.
We've had a bit more reliance, at least this year, on headhunters because you know, sometimes it gets difficult to hire. Of course, there are fees associated, one-time fees that you have with recruiters. Of course, we've had to use them a bit more now, to get that, the most important talent into the organization.
Okay. Let's see. In regards to SHARE Lab, will they publish their findings to a wider audience, or will they be kept on a kind of client level?
Two things. One, it will support marketing data. It also support what we do out in the field. It allows us to build the knowledge, what we need. Firstly, it builds data to say, "Hey, look, you know, our enzymes work together." It's like a toolbox for you to develop your workflow. As opposed to buying a screwdriver, hammer and all those things, you can buy the whole toolbox together to go and build your molecular workflow, or your house if you think about hammers and that. It's about showing that data that our enzymes can do that for you.
The second thing is it also gives us our knowledge to go out for our technical team to go out and work with customers directly, where you put scientists to help them integrate our enzymes into their product developments. This very much worked well from, you know, when I was doing that job many years ago. That's how we managed to grow sales very well is having that application development and also to demonstrate, then also go out in the field with technical people to implement it into customers' technologies. It has two parts to that.
Okay. I think I've covered the majority of the questions here that I received online. Anyone in the room here that wants to speak? Have a question? We thank you for your time and that you had availability to show up to our quarterly presentation. I think we wish you all a great day.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.