Good morning. Welcome to the Q2 presentation. Both Birger Saville, our CFO and I, Jetho Holler, will walk you through the presentation today. As this is a virtual meeting, as we've done in the last few quarters, we will kindly ask you to stay on mute during the presentation. You can then mute the microphones during the Q and A session at the end of the presentation.
Will also kindly ask that you switch off the videos as well. This way we can maximize the bandwidth for the call. For those calling in by phone, you can toggle off mute, unmute using star 6. We also want to let you know we're also recording this meeting. And what we will do is we'll post it onto our website afterwards.
So that's far away in the usual fashion. And the agenda for today is we will start with the highlights where we go through the Q2 highlights. After that, we will then go a little bit deeper into the business update. Birger will walk you through the financials. And then for the outlook, we want to give you some updated financial guidance.
So for the highlights. What we've seen is, I think in the last few quarters, we have seen there's certainly a changing environment with respect to coronavirus. And that certainly creates some volatility in the sales. And in Q1, we had a spike, an extraordinary spike in sales and we had the expectation that Q2 sales would come in lower. And we came in at NOK21.4 million for the quarter.
And it's slightly lower than we originally anticipated. However, when you take into account Q1 and Q2 sales for the 1st 6 months, we're actually slightly ahead of the sales plan we set out at the beginning of the year. So, so far, when you look at the 1st 6 months, we're on CHF61.9 million. So Actually, even though we see the volatility between Q1, Q2, we are very much on track with our sales and our expectations. What we did not expect was kind of volatility that we're seeing at the moment in quarterly sales.
And we'll come back to that, the reasons for that in a bit. Despite the volatility we're seeing in sales, profitability continues. We've achieved CHF6 1,000,000 in EBITDA for the quarter. We've also reached a new milestone. We've actually achieved NOK 100,000,000 in revenue sales when we take into consideration the last 12 months in sales.
And I'll come back to that with respect to guidance at the end of the presentation. New innovations are important for future growth of the business. And the end of the quarter, we launched a new product. We launched our 2nd generation sought active nucleos enzyme, which recalls SAAN HQ2.0. We also conducted an internal innovation review.
And what we plan to do now is actually start investing at Morm and expand activities in serving the therapeutics segment. We'll come back to some of these things in a moment in the business update. So for the business update, start in the usual fashion, and we'd like to go through the segment sales numbers. And for sales in all three market areas we serve, sales were lower for Q2 than for Q1, and that was expected because of the extraordinary performance we had in Q1. So when it comes to therapeutics, Cordi sales were down 20% 26% compared to Q2 last year.
When it comes to contribution, Therapeutics made 40% contribution to total Q2 sales. And part of the reason for the development in the therapeutic space and this is we saw this as well some degree in the Q1 as well is that several of the custom manufacturing organizations, which are some of our largest customers we've been working with, have been prioritizing the manufacturing of 3rd party coronavirus vaccines, such as the RNA vaccines. And what that means is they've deprioritized some of the other projects they're working on, particularly like gene therapy and other vaccine projects using SAM products. We have been in discussions with these customers and they have indicated they are working on getting expanding the capacity to get those projects back on track. What's really interesting is actually one of those customers have actually indicated to us that they've actually made a strategic decision to develop their own COVID virus vaccine.
And they will they are looking to evaluate and incorporate our SAM enzyme into the manufacturing process as they develop that vaccine. Beyond that, we've also experienced some new early opportunities that have arisen with new customers. And this is for utilization of sand in the coronavirus development programs. And what is really interesting here is that we're seeing opportunities extending to new geographical territories such as Russia and focus on the provision of vaccines for developing nations. And I think we're all aware, vaccination programs are going on really well in Western nations.
However, when you look at the world, it is far from vaccinated. In order to vaccinate the whole world, it's estimated at 14,000,000,000 in those that are needed to vaccinate the world population. And in order to achieve that massive undertaking, more vaccines are needed. So that presents opportunities for our designs and to expand to new customers it hasn't worked with before in new geographies. Beyond the Sand Products, we're seeing interest now for utility of our other enzymes in other areas such as cell therapy, in particular for the isolation and preparation of cells associated with gene therapy applications.
For instance, we're seeing that our pros and ladies is now getting interest in that area. So we are working with some opportunities in that. In Research and Diagnostics, we had a 40% reduction in quarterly sales compared to Q2 last year. When you look at contribution of research and diagnostics, research contributed 20% to total Q2 sales. Diagnostics contributed 40%.
As mentioned earlier, lower sales were expected following the strong Q1 2021 performance. And we'll talk a little bit about research. And I think when you look at the research market and our sales there, We need to take a step back because when you look at how things were pre pandemic, we had molecular research sales. We had it's kind of a fluctuating business. We always had 1 dominating quarter for a calendar year.
And this dominant quarter has always been related to our largest customer where we had 1 large annual shipment. We had a large annual shipment of shrimp alkaline phosphatase to our main customer. And then and that was always in 1 quarter and not the other quarters, that's our shipment. So effectively, that shipment came in Q1 this year. We've already taken that large shipment.
So it was anticipated that research sales would be lower for subsequent quarters and return to pre pandemic sales levels. So what we're seeing here is not and we also see that with our other customers who are purchasing research products, those sales have reestablished. And now for 2 consecutive quarters, we see that the sales patterns we're seeing from the research base confirms that our research has established with our customers in all regions here. So that's good news for us in terms of research sales coming back online. And of course, it's about driving new opportunities too.
And we're seeing new opportunities now emerge here in this area with new opportunities in the next generation sequencing markets for our polymerases in research and clinical applications. When it comes to molecular diagnostic sales, we had and extraordinary performance in Q1, and that's due to customers stocking up. And it really mirrors what we experienced last year between Q2 and Q3 last year, we saw a stock in effect in Q2 and then lower sales in Q3 is exactly what we see now between Q1 and Q2 this quarter. We've also had we've had some tailwinds as well here with in India. And India has actually struggled hard with the corona outbreak.
We think we had it hard here in Europe, but India, it's been much tougher for them. So consequently, that's had an impact on our business and the business we have, those companies, they just have not been able to operate during the corona outbreak there. And however, I think we do expect these sales to gradually return during the second half. And the majority of sales there are related to the use of Cardioung in tuberculosis testing. And what's also interesting about that, there is interest now to expand the CRUD-nineteen into domestic corona testing.
And that will certainly be demanded in the future in India as well. So Okay. I want to move on to corona related sales. And when it comes to corona related sales, they had a 21% contribution to total sales. For the reasons mentioned before, Q2 sales were were lower compared to Q1 sales.
But what we see is the majority of sales we're seeing is reoccurring business from our main customers, from a core customer base. On top of that, we are seeing new customer opportunities come in as well. And that's reassuring and that's good to hear because it shows that there's still a demand for new corona tests and that's in different shapes and forms as well in terms of different technology in that box. So we are supporting those customers who want to develop a new corona test technologies. What we are seeing is also some competition within our own customer base for China.
We have several of our customers who actually stocked up in Q1 are actually competing against each other for selling corona tests into Asia. So this has had an impact on us and certainly lowering the demand between those customers when it comes to Cod UNG. Some of those pushed sales very well, others haven't. So that comes back down the supply chain to us. A bit more looking into the future.
In terms of corona test related sales, where we sell our cyan enzymes for diagnostic tests. What we do expect is the demand here to level off over the next 12 months. I think we all see that the peak of corona testing is slowing down, but it will reach a new steady state and there will be a kind of new normal post pandemic. What that level is, that will be determined. That's to be determined yet.
But we know that that will level off and there'll be a kind of some steady state sales will materialize there over time. When it comes to vaccine related sales, we do expect these to increase, particularly with customers like Riaterra. And actually they're progressing very nicely. I think it was recently published on the 12th July that the Phase 2 clinical trials they started back in March had a positive outcome and now they are progressing now to Stage 3 clinical trials. And of course, we are there to support them along the way.
I'd like to talk about innovation and operations. And we launched our salt active nuclease 2, as mentioned at the end of the quarter. And this represents the 2nd generation of the enzyme. And what we've done, we've really optimized this enzyme. So it has wider and broader compatibility with downstream biomanufacturing processes.
Is. And that's important because when our customers manufacture viruses, their processes are slightly different. And after they use SAM, the processes can be different. So what we've really done is really looked into that and made sure we have an enzyme that supports all those different processes. So what does that do for us?
Well, it increases our commercial risk sorry, reach within the viral vector market. And beyond that, it also broadens the utility into recombinant protein production. For instance, in production of antibodies, antigens, enzymes, all these kind of different protein products. In fact, prior to launch, Arlyzymes been working and developing an opportunity with a large international life science company who are looking to potentially integrate the SANHQ2 enzyme into their routine manufacturing processes for all their recombinant protein production. So it's a very exciting opportunity, a significant opportunity for us.
However, that will take time to integrate our enzyme into their processes is a mammoth undertaking. Taking. It doesn't happen in weeks. It doesn't happen in months. It is something we'll take a year or 2 to do so.
But of course, we're there and excited to support and hence why we developed SAN HQ to extend its utility into these other areas. The innovation pipeline is progressing with our products that we anticipate launching this year. This includes the Emsan ELISA kit. We're working on DNA type polymerase. Limerase is reverse transcriptase and other products that we want to bring to the market.
We also had 2 customer audits during the year and we really welcome customer audits. Here, we were audited by a prominent UK based cell and gene therapy company who audited us on did a cGMP audit. The other was our main customer who performed a routine audit for several of the products that it purchases from us. In both cases, Arty's Arms Technologies has successfully achieved and retained its critical raw material supplier status. And that's what it's all about.
And that's about securing the long term business with our customers. And that's what audits are all about at the end of the day. So what we did was an Innovation Review during Q2. And some of this you've heard before, some of this is new. So when it comes to Research and Diagnostics.
Our efforts are very much underway to build a complete offering so we can serve our customers with any enzymes they need for their workflow and technologies. And we're doing this via organic and inorganic growth initiatives. So we communicated that many times what we're doing now. In therapeutics, however, our current product offering and innovation efforts have mostly been focused on expanding the salt active nuclease product line. Moving forward, we plan to expand those activities beyond innovating the SAM products.
As part of future investments, the company now wants to integrate into its organic and inorganic growth plan, innovative enzymes, support 3 different areas. 1st, DNA RNA therapeutics. Here this is also about, so this ties in very nicely with synthetic biology, DNA synthesis, RNA synthesis technologies as well, which we have been working on as well, but there's a lot more we can do there as well. It's also we're going to look more into the gene editing technologies and start bringing enzymes to market that really will fit very nicely with those technologies and also other cell and gene therapy applications. I talked about it a bit earlier where we're working with customers now with our proteinates to fit into cell biology, so cell therapy applications.
And the timing is perfect for this. And we could since Artis Times has now developed they require GMP capabilities and that's important. You need those GMP capabilities in order to go down this space. And we're there now. We've built up that competence skill set.
And that's going to be very important as we build out enzymes for the therapeutic space. And of course, we're well positioned to leverage the greater market opportunity there. And how do we do this? 2 things. 1, several things here.
1 is about innovation bringing more innovation projects into the R and D pipeline, more than what we've already had on the map. We're going to start exploring in licensing opportunities. We haven't really explored that avenue earlier, but I think this is a new avenue for us and look at in licensing opportunities there. And then also, as we're doing in the molecular space, we will expand M and A efforts in this direction too. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Berge, and he will walk you through the financials.
Thank you, Gertrude. And as Gertrude talked about in his introduction, the Q2 this year never managed to achieve kind of the same level of revenues and profitability as we experienced in the Q1 this year and in the Q2 last year. But of course, after the 1st 6 months of 2021, revenues, profitability and cash are all improved compared to the same period last year. And also looking at the sales here. In the Q2 this year, we saw our sales decline by 36% compared to the same period last year from SEK33 1,000,000 to SEK21.4 million.
And Q2 2021 is actually on the same level now as we've seen in 4 of the last 6 quarters with the exception of Q2 last year and Q1 this year. And it is important to consider that Q2 last year was actually the Q1 where we experienced the full effect of the pandemic when we are comparing quarters to quarters. And also as Sjeto talked about, we saw a lot of stocking effect in the Q2 last year and also in the Q1 this year. As you can see, especially last year, the market and our customers were uncertain about the supplier's ability to deliver products when the world went into a lockdown situation. For the therapeutic segment, in the Q2, sales declined by SEK 3,000,000 from SEK 11,300,000 to SEK 8,400,000, which is also on the same level as we have seen over the last year.
But we are also still waiting kind of for a solid push in this market. But we are Biri Ingers, as Jester also talked about that potential and existing customers are prioritizing vaccine production rather than new projects. In the Research and Diagnostics segment, sales declined by 41 percent from SEK22 1,000,000 to SEK11 1,000,000, now to SEK13.1 million this quarter. And as most of you have suspected, this decline is primarily driven by lower sales associated with COVID-nineteen. If we take into consideration the 1st 6 months of the year, sales in this segment is actually up by SEK 10,000,000 from SEK 33,000,000 to SEK 43,000,000.
And this is of course explained by a very strong Q1 this year, where we experienced solid sales within the research segment. Combined sales in the therapeutics and the research and diagnostics segment for the 1st 6 months are also up by SEK10 1,000,000 compared to the same period last year. So we have moved from SEK 52,000,000 to SEK 62,000,000 this year. Moving into the COVID-nineteen sales and as Jesper has also talked about, this quarter gave us an estimated SEK 4,500,000 in sales. And this is also primarily within the diagnostics area.
And comparing it to the Q2 last year, we had SEK 11,000,000 and the first quarter this year, we had SEK 16,500,000 in revenues. It is, of course, significantly lower. But also, as you can see on the graph above here, it is hard to predict future sales as we experienced a lot of fluctuations from quarter to quarter. And it's also important to emphasize as that we do expect that sales to the diagnostics area will level off over the next 12 months As more and more people becomes vaccinated and also but on the other hand, we do believe that sales within the Therapeutics segment will grow moving forward, as Gertrud also mentioned a little bit earlier in his presentation. In the Q1 this year, we introduced a graph showing 12 months rolling average sales to eliminate so many quarterly fluctuations that we see now.
And also to say a little bit more about how the company is trending and how we are performing on the sales side. And as you can see on the graph above here, we've had continuous positive SEK7.5 million in quarterly sales. We are now averaging in excess of SEK25 million for the quarter when we are looking at the combined sales with underlying and COVID-nineteen sales. We also see that Trending sales in the Q2 this year was a little bit lower compared to the strong Q1 this year, but we are still on really high levels. And also, I think with Jethro's guidance a little bit later on now, we do expect to see this trend to grow moving forward as well.
Moving into the profitability side of the business. 2nd quarter was not as strong as the Q1 this year and of course, as a little bit as expected as well. And it gave us an EBITDA of SEK 6,000,000. And this is also lower than the SEK22.5 million we had in the Q2 last year. And of course, the reduction is explained by lower sales, of course, but also because we have some higher expense during the quarter compared to the same time last year.
Our expenses for the quarter grew by SEK 5,700,000, whereas SEK 4,200,000 of this increase is explained by an accrual related to employers' national insurance contribution or in Norwegian, Albesivra Ift associated with earned options for the Q2. Our personnel expenses on a general basis has also increased as we are investing in organic growth through new positions and especially within the R and D side of the business And considering the first half of the year, EBITDA is on SEK 31,800,000, which is similar to what we have experienced the last year. And also, as with previous cash flow, our cash flow position remains positive with a change in cash of SEK 13,600,000 for the quarter and we have SEK 36,800,000 for the 1st 6 months of the year, giving us now a cash balance of SEK176,000,000 per end of June. And as you can see from the graph here, we had a major spike in our cash during the Q4 last year. And for those of you who don't remember, this is associated with divestment of Biotech Beta Glucans, where we received NOK70 1,000,000 at the end of 2020, plus an additional NOK16 1,000,000 at the end of Q1 this year.
And also, as we have talked about in earlier presentations, we are investing in new premises for the production department. And after the 1st 6 months of the year, we have spent around SEK 3,300,000 on this project, which includes new equipment and a rebuild of existing premises. And I think with this, I will hand it over to Gjo, who will tell us a little bit more about what to expect for the remainder of the year.
Thank you, Berge. Thanks for walking through the financials there and for the outlook. And So what we want to do is give you some financial guidance here. And I think especially with the recent volatility we're seeing in quarterly numbers, it is a bit difficult sometimes for everybody to see where we're going. So what we want to do is to give you some context here to give you some financial expectations and some forward visibility here.
Last time we came with financial guidance was back in December 2019. And at the time, we had a goal to reach NOK 100,000,000 in sales revenues by 2023. And if what we've actually achieved over the last two quarters, we've achieved the NOK 100,000,000 milestone. When you take into consideration the last 12 month sales on a quarterly rolling basis. If you look to the graph to the right, the two green bars show this.
So for Q1, when you look at the last 12 months, we achieved NOK 115,000,000. For Q2, we achieved NOK 103 NOK1,000,000 for the last 12 months. So we're proud that we've managed to achieve that milestone 2 years earlier than we originally set out to do. But of course, it's really it's also about the future too. And for the future, what do we expect?
Well, we expect to maintain the last 12 month revenues above that GBP 100,000,000 on a quarterly rolling basis. This takes into account foreseen quarterly fluctuations in the business. Those fluctuations are unavoidable, but we're going to see that as part of the business, part of operating as a component supplier and as a B2B supplier. It is always going to be fluctuations quarterly in our sales, but that is unavoidable. But of course, we have factored in also what we expect from the corona situations as that progresses.
So long term, when it comes to revenues, we expect the growth to continue in sales. And we and this is leveraged by the inherent momentum we have within the business already. It's also about developing the ongoing and opportunities also will drive that as well as new products that we will bring into the mix and all the other initiatives that we have ongoing. So So the growth trajectory is set already. So when it comes to so with that, with annual revenue expectations and our goal for 2021.
Our goal is to achieve NOK 120,000,000 this year, and that's shown by the gray bar here. And for the 1st 6 months, we've already had a good start. We're halfway we're just over halfway there with SEK61.9 million in sales for the first half of the year. So I think that is a good place to stop and we're certainly happy to open up for questions here. And anybody calling in by phone, you can mute unmute using Star 6.
So thank you.
Yes. Hello, Berge and Jethro. This is Peter Osteen from Pareto. Can I start with 2 quick ones?
Please do.
Yes. Just going back to the last thing that you went through. Firstly, Okay. You have reached your 2023 goal already. Why don't you release a new 2023 target?
That's my first question. And how confident are you with the €120,000,000 in 2021?
Well, we are confident in that, that's why we're putting that guidance out for 2021. I think the good question is why don't we come out with a new target for 2023? I think what we want to do here, corona situation does make that a little bit difficult. So, you know, we want to see how that pans out before we come out with something there. And I think that is, That's the best answer I can get.
We're sort of seeing we want to see how that levels off and how things are going to be there before we come out with something there.
Okay. Do you expect just a quick follow-up. Do you expect it was COVID related sales was NOK 4 point NOK 5,000,000 in this quarter. Do you expect it to be on this level or lower going forward? You don't expect these spikes that you saw in Q2 and Q1 Q2 last year and Q1 this year.
If we don't get A new resurgence of the pandemic.
Yes. It sort of I think everybody's staring into the crystal ball, as far as we see with it, we sort of see it will continue to fluctuate. If you think over the last 6 months, there's been a rapid change. We've gone from with what's going on, you're going from lots of testing to people being vaccinated. There's a lot of shifting going on there right now.
And there's so I think here, as a supplier, we're at the front end of the supply chain. And then there's other and then we have the people who the companies that sell the kits and that do the hospitals and clinics and that. So I think here, it is a little bit difficult with Dick, but we do expect them to continue to fluctuate. And I think the best thing we I think we would do see and food discussions with customers, we see that it will people are expecting that it will our customers expect it to flatten off and reach that kind of steady state from in about 12 months. And with that as well, but what that level is, as mentioned earlier, that is difficult to determine and hence why I think we any guidance we give on COVID would not be, would probably end up being wrong.
So that's why I think it's, the pandemic is unprecedented thing. And I think it is difficult to predict what that's going to be. But it will reach 30 states. Yes.
Okay. I jump back in the queue then. Thank you.
Any other questions?
Okay. It's Peter, asking again. Do you mind if I ask
Please stay away. We appreciate that.
Within therapeutics, this Reprioritization that we have seen from your main customers. When it comes to Priya, going back to what they did before or more focusing on Projects related to your projects, how What's if you look at the index crystal ball, how opaque is that? Or what can you say when that sales could come back or they go back to focusing on the projects that They used to do.
We see that sort of cuts starting to come back online. And you appreciate these companies they've had tough decisions to make. And 3rd party manufacturer be very important to get some of the vaccines, particularly RNA vaccines as well and getting those out. So of course, these CMOs have worked and helped get that out. That's the right thing to do.
But of course they've deprioritized things. But of course they cannot do that. They can't just push away all their they've got a lot of our customers that they need to support. And so of course, they really want to get those back those projects back online. And certainly, they are building up capacity.
Capacity is equipment and people. So that's what they're working on. So they continue manufacturing those vaccines. But of course, that will not be there forever. So of course, they cannot they have to protect their other business.
So certainly, they're picking those things back up. And as mentioned in the presentation, one of them is very interesting because they're manufacturing a third party virus. I said, well, actually, we can make our own virus, and that's what they're doing. And of course, they're interested in using sand there. So it has opened up opportunities for us.
But of course, we're also looking at working with new opportunities as well outside of those customers. So we are getting new customers in as well for the COVID vaccines. But that's just part of the business. So I don't want to just get carried away around COVID. I think that in terms of our business, remember Q2, only 21% of sales was COVID related.
The 79%, which was non COVID, and that's important business for us, which we are, really wanting to drive as well. So I think it's important to put that in perspective as well.
Yes. Okay. Let's leave COVID for now and focus on you released a new version of your ZEN enzyme just recently opening up the market more broadly towards biologicals in general outside Viral vectors. Have you seen any what's the customer interest been Within antibodies or other biologics outside By all
vectors. Now with what we've seen here is a lot of the reason why we developed is based on feedback from existing as already or people have tried it, and it worked for that stage of the workflow, but for downstream processing, that they would like to see some improvements. That's what we did. Sands used to remove contaminating protein productions at the end of a day or biomolecules such as more viruses, things like that. So you can imagine, there's many downstream since you have chromatography techniques, that's what we focused on is to optimize the enzyme.
So it could be dropped kind of biomanufacturing process for protein production. So it fits with all the chromatography, different chromatography things such as a hitch trap, ion exchange, size selection, size exclusion, chromatography, all those different techniques we made it so it fits into. Also one thing that we've been told a lot, they want a detergent free solution as well. And that's important, so we made a formulation that's detergent free as well. And we made some modifications to the Ensign as well.
And of course, that's our trade secrets. We're not going to share what those are. But what we've done is we've missed out on we haven't been out tap into the broader opportunity that is like the antibodies and the antigen type business and general enzyme production as well. And certainly that's what we're reaching now. As mentioned, we have that large we're working with a large life science company who are looking to integrate it into all their process for their protein production and adding that includes enzymes and other molecules, antibodies, those types of things as well.
And there has been a good publication recently on the use of sand for cleaning up antigens that are used in diagnostic setting as well. So there is a need for these nucleases. And
at the
end of the day, that's why we have worked on making San H2 so we can tap into the broader market opportunity there. So hopefully that puts a bit more kind of granularity on the technical some of the technical advantages of this and the broader utility out there in interest.
Okay. Thanks, Jes Tro. I jump back into the queue and let somebody else ask questions.
Can you hear me, Jerome?
Yes, I can. Yes.
It's Kenneth Dailersson calling. I heard for First time you're talking about in licensing this time. Can you talk A little bit more about that. And I think you mentioned it in connection with the therapeutics and Gene editing. Can you also talk more about that?
Thank you.
Yes, I will do it in licensing is kind of an angle we have not explored before. Yeah, we've gone to look at doing M and A, or developing our own. But I think in licensing another road, but we can look at and there are some companies that are sitting there with kind of technologies, which we can potentially in license. And when we've made in licensing, we want to in license and own the manufacturing and the rights to certain rights to how that product is taken to the market. So I think for many company, for many other companies out there, that could be a nice win win situation for us to do that.
So that's what we want to do in therapeutics. And what we want to do is We want to get to the therapeutics faster. And if we do, if we try and develop everything from scratch ourselves, that takes a long time. So I think here you have to explore different you have to do things in different ways, things you develop from scratch yourself, and that takes time. In licensing is one way as well because sometimes M and A isn't the right option because there are some companies that may be one thing you're interested dinner not the rest.
So in licensing is another good way to get access to those technologies. Then of course, M and A is a third approach where everything's in there's a the majority of the company is interesting or there's certain assets that you're interested in. So I think we need to open our minds a bit more and explore the different avenues there. I think in a molecular enzyme, in the molecular space for molecular research, molecular diagnostics, that's much more black and white, I think that's much easier to go out and do M and A and do organic growth. The therapeutics, certainly in licensing is certainly much more important in that area to use it be in licensing route as well.
So hopefully, that helps give you some reasons why we want to look at that and why it's come on the table now.
Is there an acquisition on the table for the foreseeable future?
It's certainly something, it's a very good question. And one of the things we are now in what I call going to acquisition mode where And that's part of why we did the innovation review is that we want to now go expand the kind of scope for also M and A. We've said for a long time we're going to do it and now we've done that. So what we will do now is really go out and ramp up our efforts in the M and A area, and that's and we're looking at 2 areas. 1 will be the molecular research, molecular diagnostics, and there are kind of targets there that we've had and we've been talking to already.
But of course, we want to expand that even further. And therapeutics is something we haven't started to explore until now. So that's something we will now start working on and look in the therapeutic space as well. So now it really is now we're going to increase activities and now in that area and really be fully focused in look and doing something there. And the timing is right now.
It certainly is. We can now soon be getting on planes and seeing people. And that does really help if you're buying, if you want to buy some high technology out there, you need to go and see it and we can start doing that now. And we are also going to open our scope into other geographies we weren't looking at before for acquisitions as well. So basically, our searches are going to be our scope is going to be much more open than it was before.
I see. Certainly, it's exciting to watch. Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
Unless there are any last questions now, I think we'll Basically wrap it up now. Okay. Thank you, Anders. Then we're wrapping up, and I think we thank everyone for your participation at this second quarter presentation. And we wish you all a great day.
Thank
you.
Have a great day.
Have a great day. And as mentioned, we will post this After we process the video, we will put it on the website as well. Thank you. Have a great day.