So good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the third quarter presentation from ArcticZymes Technologies. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us in the room and to everybody else, well, I hope that other people online this morning. Today I'm going to be making the corporate presentation, and then we'll be followed by Børge to walk through the financials, as we've done for the last few quarters. And then finally, as the highlight, we have saved Michael Akoh, our new CEO, is going to give some introduction to himself at the end and some very preliminary high-level observations that he's made about ArcticZymes Technologies. Michael's only been with us in post for, this is, I think, his sixth or seventh week, so obviously this is very early days, but we'll welcome Michael at the end. So let's kick off.
I'm going to try and be brief, if that's possible. So I'm going to walk you through a few of the highlights and things that we've been doing since we last spoke. Børge will walk through the numbers. We'll then finish off that section with any burning questions that you might have, we will answer at that point, and then Michael will take to the stage for a few moments at the end. So as you've already seen this morning from the press release, we've had a pretty solid quarter, and I think the company can be quite happy with these results. We had our quarterly sales of NOK 31.2 million, and when you look at the last few quarters, three or four quarters, that's pretty stable, give or take NOK 1 million or NOK 2 million, but it's in the same ballpark.
The EBITDA, NOK 7.3 million, and obviously Børge will walk through the details of those numbers when we get to it. Michael started middle of September. Thank goodness for that. So this is the last time you'll have to suffer me speaking, and then I shall be going back to my garden, and I'm throwing the baby to Michael. We've launched another product, which is, AZ Taq DNA polymerase, and we'll talk a little bit about the most important, really, project overall, which is the nuclease portfolio. I'll give you a little bit more detail on that, and that's been supported by this huge DMF project, which you saw from press releases, was formally filed at the end of June and accepted by the FDA in the middle of September.
So it was accepted without fault, which means that, we've done a pretty good job, actually, in getting all the documents that were required, that the FDA could tick all their little boxes and not have to come back to us at this point. And we'll talk a little bit about the pre-marketing activities that we've undertaken, for the launch of the SAN GMP product. So this is an update on the Plan 2023 editions that we've been showing throughout the year. We said we would launch or aim to launch four products this year. We've launched two, the Proteinase HQ, which is high quality, and the AZ Taq, which is a Taq DNA polymerase, which was launched 10th of August, middle of August.
The next product, and probably the most important product in our portfolio, both today and certainly moving forward, is the SAN HQ GMP. So you've heard, you know, for quite some time, because SAN has been on the market for many years, and it's been a flagship product for us. The GMP is the same product, but it's produced at GMP standard, and really, that's the very highest level of product that you can produce. And it's become apparent that certainly in the cell and gene therapy space, any product that's being used for human treatment these days, there is an increasing requirement that components are produced under GMP standard. So to support that product, we have the DMF, as I've just mentioned, so that's a tick. We have undertaken our and currently are undertaking a significant pre-marketing campaign.
So this has been online work, you know, and being out at conferences, talking to people, and I'll give you some statistics on what we've been doing with that a little bit later. To support the product, we've produced a brochure, a very extensive brochure, that gives a lot of the details of the spec of the product and also some comparison data with both the Merck and the c-LEcta competitive products, and that is available to download to people that are interested. And we're aiming to launch this product at the very end of this year.
It is going to be tight, the very end of this year, so that we're ready to go back out to people in the first quarter and say, "Hey, we have the GMP product ready for you to buy." The fourth product in the portfolio to be launched this year is the T7 RNA Polymerase, and this is our first RNA polymerase, so this is our first enzyme that's going to constitute part of the RNA enzyme strategy that we are, that we are developing. For those of you that are into that type of thing, you will know, obviously, that the RNA technology and the RNA development of new technologies is really cutting-edge now, and we believe that we have some good enzymes in the pipeline that we can utilize in that space. This is going to be produced in two grades.
One's a regular grade, and one is a high-quality grade. So the regular grade, we're aiming to launch at the end of 2023, end of December, and that will be used for basically in the lab, basic laboratory techniques, and then the high-quality grade, so that's one step up, we're aiming to launch in the first quarter of next year, and that will be used in a slightly different way. So when we look forward to next year, so this is 2024, what we are hoping to add to the portfolio, and we've basically divided it into our two main business areas: so Bioprocessing and Molecular Tools, and none of that is new, and then we've subdivided those business units just for ease of explanation, as well as anything else, into Bioprocessing.
The top two enzymes are the RNA group of enzymes, and that's a whole new group that we're building out. And then we've got the nuclease portfolio, which is the SAN, as I've just talked about, and the MSAN, which I will mention in a minute, and then we've got the molecular tools. So if you look, first of all, at the T7 RNA polymerase, as I say, the high-grade one, which will be used for RNA processing, will be launched in the first quarter of 2024. ET-N1, we're very excited about this. I think I mentioned it probably in the first quarter, that we'd filed a patent on this, and this is our first sequence-specific ribonuclease. So basically, it acts like a restriction enzyme, for those of you that are in the know on that type of thing.
A restriction enzyme is an enzyme that cuts DNA at specific sequences. This is a very similar thing, but it cuts RNA at specific sequences to make it simple. So ET-N1 is a novel enzyme. We've had this in the hands, the prototype in the hands of quite a number of significant players who have been testing it for us, which is how we go with prototypes, and there's been quite some excitement in the space with this. And the feedback from the voice of customer has been very positive. So we're hoping that that will proceed and get to the end game, and we'll be launching that next year. Obviously, I remember that Dirk talked at the beginning of the year about the sales cycles for new products. So products, if you please recall, that will be launched, many of...
Particularly something like ET-N1, you can't expect to see sales right off the bat. This takes time, but this is the first real novel enzyme, I think, that enzyme, ArcticZymes has produced for quite some time. Now, if you look at the two below that, the SAN ELISA kit. As you know, the nucleases, each of the nucleases is supported by a complementary ELISA kit. We do have an ELISA kit on the market, version one. It works perfectly well, but there could be improvements to it. So with the new SAN GMP product coming out soon, we are launching a new complementary ELISA kit, which is version two.
The difference is, in a very basic nutshell, we're using a different antibody pair in this ELISA kit, which we think is superior or is shown to be superior, and that will lead to, certainly more sensitivity, so a lower limit, lower limit of quantification, and also from an end user point of view, it is better because it's quicker, and scientists like kits that are quicker. And then we look at the M-SAN HQ GMP. So to date, we've been talking about SAN HQ GMP. This nomenclature is very confusing. We do agree. It confuses us, and we supposedly know what we're talking about. So for those of you that are not quite so familiar, it is quite confusing. But M-SAN is a similar product to SAN, right? It's a version of SAN, but the difference is, in a nutshell, it works at different salt concentrations optimally.
So if you look at the spectrum, in fact, I'll show you a graph in a minute, as to where this enzyme works optimally on the sodium chloride spectrum, as opposed to the SAN, and how that influences where it's used with respect to viral vectors. That is a very important product. We've had very significant feedback from customers who are interested in M-SAN. We've had customers come to us recently saying that they've tested M-SAN, they really like the properties of it, they want to use it extensively, but we can't because we need it produced GMP. So we've done quite some work on that and decided that there is enough voice of customer, and the market is certainly large enough that we're going to invest our time and energies, and obviously resources, into producing that under GMP conditions, and that's a goal for next year.
Then briefly, excuse me, if you look down at the molecular tools side of the business, the MDX molecular diagnostics package, we're not going to be inventing anything new for this ourselves, but we are looking externally to source a very good enzyme package, a number of enzymes, to complete that MDX workflow. Many of those are generic-type enzymes that we don't need to spend our time working on because we can bring them in from outside. We have, internally now, which is new for the company, moved a couple of people and hired a new VP of corporate development, and the main aim of that group is basically to look externally and to bring external opportunities into the company.
I'm not necessarily talking M&A, I'm talking more in-licensing, working with external universities and external companies to bring in sexy technologies that we don't currently have, and that's a big need for ArcticZymes, and that's something we really haven't done before. And then finally, we've got the IsoPol, which is—it's an isothermal, part of the isothermal portfolio that we have. We have IsoPol polymerases, we have the very basic one, and then this will be the third one that we have in that group. And they all have slightly different characteristics. They've all been generated from different hosts, so they have different backbones, and as a consequence of that, they have slightly different characteristics. For example, operating temperatures.
So anybody that wants to use a sort of an IsoPol enzyme, they basically will test out these different, sub-enzymes, let's say, to find the best one, that works in their workflow. For those of you that like graphs, and I do, here is one. Quite simply, I can't point, but Benzonase is that gray line. Across the x-axis, we have the concentration of salt, sodium chloride in millimoles, zero- 500, and as you can see, the lentivirus, and these are both viruses used extensively, in viral vector gene transfer, gene therapy, and manufacturing. You can see that the lentivirus, it works optimally, let's say, at a salt concentration of like 150- 200 millimoles, and you can see 150- 200, Benzonase is probably th...
You do different assays, 30%-40% active at that concentration. If you look at our enzymes, if you look at M-SAN HQ, so if you're looking up here, there's benzonase. Here is M-SAN, right? So you can see that the activity of M-SAN in that particular range is significantly higher than benzonase is. So if you're looking for something in a lentiviral workflow, that's very clear evidence that you might consider using a M-SAN as opposed to benzonase, because it's clearly much more active. Benzonase then, you know, you can see the activity decreases to zero when you get in the very highest adenovirus, adeno-associated virus range, and we've shown this graph before, and that's where our SAN HQ is working optimally at the higher concentrations.
So in the portfolio, if we've got M-SAN that's working optimally at the lower salt concentrations, and we've got, we've got SAN HQ that's working at the higher salt concentrations, you can see that we're covering the whole salt concentration sort of range. And that's very important if we're to compete with Merck, and as we all know, you know, Merck have Benzonase, and they've recently announced that they are putting onto the market something that is going to work in the higher salt concentrations as well. And people have said to us, "Are you worried about that?" No, I'm not worried in the slightest about that. And the reason I'm not worried about that is that the market, and I'll say this repeatedly, the market that these enzymes are working in, this whole viral vector gene therapy market, is enormous, ladies and gentlemen.
It is enormous. If you look at the Adenovirus AAV market right now, both in the gene therapy and in the manufacturing, the CDMO space, you're looking at anything, you can read various analysts, valuation right now, anything between $1.5 billion-$2 billion. By 2030, we're growing at a CAGR to 2030, about 12%-14%, and it's projected to be anything $10 billion-$15 billion. So why am I worried if there's one other competitor out there in a market so large? We're not. There's plenty of space, plenty of scope for multiple players, so that's how I would address that. And then the second part of that graph is very clear. Anybody that doesn't understand that, I think is not looking correctly. It's very clear to see there, the M-SAN advantage in activity.
So a quick word from operations, and as you know, you've heard from Marit in the past. Marit is leading the operations area of the company, and with her team, is working on the GMP production of SAN HQ. As I said, we've never done anything under GMP before. This has been a huge learning curve for the company. It is a very, very complex process. You know, it's not just adding a few pieces of paper to the portfolio, it's a whole different level and not to be underestimated, particularly for a company of our size. Marit's leading this with her team, and obviously, this is complemented by Grete and her team, who are doing a great job with all the QA, QC, regulatory affairs paperwork. So this is proceeding as planned.
We're producing now three GMP batches, and we need all the paperwork, and that will also go into the DMF filing. So also, as I mentioned at the beginning, we've been engaging in pre-launch activities for SAN HQ GMP, and once again, this is something we've never done before at ArcticZymes Technologies. Before, we've produced products, and we've just launched them onto the market without any real support from this perspective. But we do have a marketing guru that works for us. I'm definitely not a marketing guru, 'cause they use very flowery language, which is not me, but they do a great job. So anyway, this is what they've been doing. So it's all... a lot of it, of course, is online these days. You know, this is all social media marketing.
If you look, just look at the sort of right-hand side. So we blasted 3,500 emails out to investors, to customers, to potential customers, everybody, all your relatives probably got them as well, about SAN HQ GMP that was coming. Apparently, 52% actually opened those emails. And so I'm told the industry average, when you receive that sort of email, is about 20% are opened. So a lot of people were opening the email, which I guess is a good start. And then when you open it, you can click through and get to links, specifically, with more detail, obviously, about the product. So 33% of those that opened it clicked through, and again, that seems to be very high as compared to the industry average.
I don't know anything about these figures, I'm just reading what I'm told. And then you get to a landing page, and there, from there, there's much more detail. We produced, as I told you at the beginning, a very detailed product brochure. And this is an impressive number, at least to me. 864, as of last week, so it's probably 870-ish brochures have been downloaded. These brochures are extensive, so it's only going to be people in the know, at least in my view, that are going to bother to download a brochure of that detail. It's not mom and dad that are gonna download those brochures, right? Well, they won't read them. So that is a huge number.
And obviously, this campaign is ongoing, so that we are prepared, and our potential customers are prepared, that when the HQ GMP has been launched onto the market, first quarter of next year, we're all ready to go. So according to our marketing people and Dirk, who's heading the sales efforts, as you know, these are very impressive statistics. So all we have to do now is convert all of this into sales, and we will be golden. And finally, which I hope you will all look at, we are launching a new website at the beginning of November. This has been, we've been working on this for most of this year. This is a completely new dynamic website. A lot more information than has been historically, a lot more professionally done, and as I say, we are launching in November.
So I hope you'll all have a look at that. It really will be quite impressive. And Dirk tells me I have to point out this little thing here, which, as you can see, is rotating. For those of you that haven't seen it, this is an enzyme, believe it or not. This is how it looks in 3D, and that's Cod UNG. So, on that point, I shall stop and hand over to Børge. Thank you very much. We'll take questions at the end of Børge's talk. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you for the introduction, Marie, and I think you did a great job on the marketing efforts here. I think you-
Thank you.
You sold it out quite well, so.
Actually.
I was really impressed, by the way. All right. I'm gonna go into the financial side of the business now a little bit more, and I will jump into the sales side. We will start off with a kind of molecular tools area, and we achieved NOK 15.3 million in quarterly sales, which is the same as we had in the second quarter this year. Compared to the same quarter last year, we actually had a 14% growth, up by NOK 1.9 million, from NOK 13.4 million last year. We are also now on the same level as we've seen in the last four out of the six quarters, as you can see on the graph here. You can see we've been averaging around NOK 15 million now on a quarterly basis now.
For the first nine months, sales are at NOK 47 million, compared to a little bit less of NOK 60 million last year. But it is, however, worth mentioning that the numbers are ain't that bad now, because last year, in the first quarter last year, we had an estimated NOK 14 million in COVID-related sales, and we had 1 million in Q3 for COVID-related sales. So that actually is NOK 15 million that is kind of gone from the business today. So if you're gonna compare the numbers, then you should say that it is actually... We take off NOK 47 million, and then our numbers are actually 6% higher this year compared to the same period last year, or 2.7 million. So they are, they are good, I would say. Molecular tools had a 48% contribution of total Q3 sales.
It's a little bit lower than the 54% we had in the previous quarter, and year to date, we've had a 52% contribution from molecular tools. Sales contribution in the third quarter, split between the molecular diagnostics and research area, was actually. It is 22% and 27% respectively, with 22% to the research side. And you can see research was, however, a little bit lower than previous quarters, as there were actually no major orders in the SAN side, on the SAN products, in the quarter. And of course, this is part of the business that we have. Customers do not buy on a constant quarterly basis here, and of course, this depends on their own projects and their demand as well.
Looking at the biomanufacturing side of the business, we had quarterly sales of NOK 15.9 million. It is actually up from the second quarter this year, where we had NOK 12.9 million, but it's actually on the same level. It's a 0% change compared to the same quarter last year. For the first nine months, sales are at NOK 43.6 million, and we had NOK 49.5 million at the same time last year, and this accounts actually for a 12% decline compared to last year.
You can say biomanufacturing, of course, accounted for 52% of Q3 sales, which is a little bit stronger than we have experienced in previous quarters, but we talk about marginal changes here, it's been evenly distributed between molecular tools and biomanufacturing over the last few years. You can say, even though we haven't seen growth in our figures now, especially for the biomanufacturing side, we still believe that the business is strong. As I think the reduction is that it is challenging market conditions out there, and as we said, we've talked about it in the previous quarters, and we'll also, I will also come back to that in a later slide as well. But it's not simple out there.
Okay, looking a little bit more about the trends in the business and taking away some of the quarterly fluctuations that we have. As you can see, from the graph here on the right-hand side, the growth has been flat to slightly negative over the last year, where we have moved from an average quarterly rolling sales of NOK 31.3 million, to now where we have NOK 29.4 million now, which is kind of, it's on the same level as we've seen over the last three quarters now. The trend is, as I said, it's flat for the last nine months, but I would say we're still positive with regards to the future and in the markets we play, because we have an attractive and novel products.
Number of orders are in the same ballpark as we've seen in previous quarters here. We have been balancing around 350 orders on a quarterly basis. You can see the third quarter was a little bit higher than previous quarter, but still, we talk about minor changes, but still, 350 orders per quarter, it's a good number. And also, what is also really important that we can see that there is interest in the market as well. Even though it is challenging, we can see that we are gaining new customers on a quarterly basis here. And in the third quarter, we gained 21 new customer, unique customers that haven't acquired products from us in the past.
16 of these customers were within Molecular Tools, and five of them were in Bioprocessing. If you remember to previous quarters, it's been around that 20, that 25 number. So year to date, we have, we are just shy of 80 new customers that has been buying products from us now, year to date. And of course, most of these customers are just buying samples to start out with, but hopefully they will get, they will grow and become kind of key accounts down the road. But also, as I said, as we said in this quarterly report, and we said in the last two reports, the markets are challenging.
There is economic uncertainty out there, capital markets are constrained, there are lower production levels out there, inventories are still on a high end, high note, product delays, as I said, continued destocking, and we also see that there's definitely a declining activity in the China region. All right. Talking a little bit about currency. Currency has a major impact on our business, and it has continued to have a positive contribution to the bottom line now. And of course, we play in a global market, and our revenues are impacted by currency fluctuations, especially since our revenues are primarily are in euros and U.S., USD. The NOK is only a kind of a fraction of our revenues.
For the third quarter this year, we had 74% of our revenues in U.S. dollars, and we had 25% in euros. Of course, based on these fluctuations and exchange rates we've seen over the last few years, this will have an impact on our profit and loss statements as well. You can say, based on the U.S. dollar, the USD and the euros we had in our bank accounts, we had a net zero result for the financials on this one, and we have a profit of NOK 0.4 million for the first nine months. This is kind of unchanged from the second quarter this year.
I think it's important that if you compare it to last year, we had a NOK 1.8 million gain for the full year of 2022. Our trade receivables from our customers are also impacted by currency fluctuations. This can be seen in other operating expenses in our P&L statement. For the third quarter, actually, our operating expenses was increased by NOK 0.6 million due to the strength in kroner, especially towards the euro in the last quarter. But for the first nine months, our expenses are actually reduced by NOK 1 million because of the currency, because of the weak Norwegian kroner for the whole year so far.
Last year, we had actually a gain of NOK 2.7 million, if you compare the periods to each other. We talked about this one a few times as well, and if you are to talk about the underlying growth in the business here, where we try to eliminate some of the fluctuations in the currency rate, where we have constant exchange rates for both 2022 and 2023, then our third quarter sales would have actually been NOK 1.6 million lower this year, compared to the same period last year. And also, if you look at year to date for the first nine months of the year, our sales figures would actually have been NOK 10 million lower with average currency rates. And of course, currency will continue to impact our business.
And it will fluctuate moving forward. You can see, as we've talked about, I presented in previous quarters as well, in 2021, we had a loss of NOK 11 million when we did the same comparator, and in 2022, we had a gain of NOK 8 million when we did the same comparator. So it is part of the business, but we try to reduce that risk as much as we can. We try to minimize the amount of foreign currency we have in our bank accounts, and we also try to limit the amounts of outstanding accounts receivable from our customers to minimize that as much as we can. And historically, you can say also, we've done a great job on that side. We haven't had. We've had a kind of insignificant losses on our accounts receivables from our customers also.
Looking a little bit about the expenses and a little bit on the profitability side of the business here. I've shown this slide a couple of times before now in the last few quarters, where the organization is one of the main drivers on the expense side of this business. Of course, it's grown significantly over the last few years, and this has been in line with kind of the organic growth initiative that we've had. You can say that we had a major increase from 2020 to 2021 to 2022, when we grew the organization with 30% to 61 people at the end of 2022. We had zero net new employees in the first quarter.
We had one new employee in the second quarter, and we had three people starting up in the third quarter this year, and this is also things that we talked about in the Q2 presentation this year. Currently, there are 65 people in the organization, and there are... We don't have any new hires in the pipeline now. So I don't expect this to grow moving forward now. So, I think all people are on boarded now, and I think so now the organization is set, and now we just need to drive that profitability and efficiency and drive an efficient organization here. Going into the bottom line here and talking a little bit about that one.
In the third quarter, we continued to deliver positive contributions towards the bottom line, and of course, third quarter was no exception to what we've done in the past. Our third quarter EBITDA ended up on NOK 7.3 million, compared to NOK 2.8 million in the same period last year. And for the first nine months, we have NOK 20 million on EBITDA level versus NOK 40 million last year. But of course, taking away those kind of one-off, COVID-related revenues we had, then our EBITDA would have been on NOK 25.2 million last year as well. So we are just shy of what we managed to deliver last year. And our operating expenses are slightly lower this quarter, compared to the same quarter last year.
It's down by NOK 0.6 million, from NOK 24.5 million to NOK 23.6 million, and the reduction is primarily explained by, by lower personnel expenses in the quarter. Even though we have more people in the staff than last year, our expenses are reduced, and this is due to the fact that some of the projects and some of the hours that we have, that we have, worked on during the third quarter have been capitalized now, especially so since some of the projects have moved into kind of commercial, commercialization phase. Year to date, our expenses, I would say, are more or less unchanged. They are up by NOK 1.3 million, from NOK 69 million to NOK 70.3 million total here.
It's also, as I, as I said, personnel expenses were at NOK 14.8 million now in the third quarter. This is 3.5 million lower than Q3 last year, and for the first nine months, our personnel expenses are at NOK 43 million, and this is actually a lot lower. I've said, I've said in the past that we were aiming at NOK 75 million, for end of the year in personnel expenses and, of course, doing a simple math, NOK 43 million after nine months, and how we're going to add up to, to 75? It's not going to be 75 this year. It's going to be a lot lower than the 60-- than the 75 that we, we aimed for initially here. I think it's going to be a lot closer to that 59 that we had last year.
There are several, several reasons why we end up on the... we are, will be a lot lower. And as I said, one of the, one of the issues is that we have done a, we have capitalized more projects than we initially planned for. There has been some reversals on options. There has been reversals on national insurance contributions, as we talked about, before, and that goes towards the options. That, and that goes together with the share price. If the share price goes down, the accruals that we make on the national insurance goes down as well. And also, we can see that we have also less accrued bonuses this year. We, we, we wanted to achieve more than we have, but still.
And also, as we said, capitalized on both the DMF project and some other projects as well. That'll be capitalized more than we actually planned for. Under the other operating expenses, we had NOK 8.1 million for the quarter. This is NOK 0.5 million higher than the same quarter last year, but this, I would say, is in alignment with what the, the guided reduction we have talked about. We said that we're going to be less than the NOK 32 million we had in 2022. Year to date, we are at NOK 23 million, so you can say I, I'm pretty confident that we will be able to deliver less than the NOK 32 million now on other operating expenses now. And also, you're looking at the graph on the left-hand side.
We have managed to get our EBITDA margin up to a better level again. We had some challenging first quarter. We had two challenging quarters here at the beginning of the year, in Q4 and Q1, but now we've been getting that margin up and running again. It's. We are on the same level as we had. Now in the second quarter with 23% now in the third quarter here. So looking a little bit into the cash and the cash equivalents for the third quarter, our changes. It's similar to what we've seen in previous quarters. We had a positive contribution of NOK 7 million, primarily influenced by sales and operations.
And you can say year to date, we only have a small positive contribution of NOK 2.6 million. And of course, even though both Q2 and Q3 were good on the cash side, the Q1, where we had a kind of negative cash flow. So we are only up by NOK 2.6 million year to date here. For end of September, our cash position was close to NOK 247 million, which we are kinda in this kind of market with rising in interest rates. I am really happy that we have a lot of cash in our bank accounts. It gives us a lot of freedom to operate moving forward as well.
So we're not, we're not kind of stressed that the interest rates are going up with a lot of debts that needs to be paid off, so I am confident in our current situation here. All right, and I think with that, I will hand it over to Marie, say a little bit more.
Yes.
Introduce Michael.
Thank you. So, I'm just gonna say a little bit about the outlook. I don't have a slide, and I'm not talking numbers. Looking into the fourth quarter, what do I think to expect? And I think in the fourth quarter, I will be standing here... Well, I won't. Michael will be standing here saying what I've just been saying. I think we'll have a flat quarter in the fourth. I don't expect there to be any significant changes from an external global perspective that might open the financial markets, for example. So, you know, we've been around NOK 30 million-ish each quarter this year. There's no reason to suspect that the numbers would be radically different than that at this moment in time.
You know, there's a lot of external factors, as we've talked about, that influence the sales patterns from our customers, and we're not immune to any of that. Particularly in the tool space, as I mentioned a little bit, you know, the results from many of those large tool companies in the third quarter were quite disastrous. If you look at Thermo Fisher, and in particular, who lost $10 billion of market cap in 1 day, they downgraded their forecast for the year based on the third quarter. They've done that for three quarters in a row. That's the first time in 20 years that's happened. You look at Danaher, who have just acquired Abcam, and that deal will go ahead, more than likely now. The rogue shareholder didn't get what he wanted.
You look at the other big players in that space, and they've all had a terrible third quarter. They are our customers, you know, so they're not buying as they were buying. That's just an example. Looking forward into the fourth quarter, that's not likely to change too much. So what about 2024? Well, at the moment, you know, with the global economic situation and the uncertainty in the markets, that's not going to change, in my view, for the first quarter, not significantly, at least. The destocking is reduced, is reducing, and I think most of that is out of the market right now. There will be a little bit of hangover, I think, in the first quarter of 2024, but nothing like we've seen this year.
So that's one issue which is off the table, but that's only one issue. And next year, of course, we have the added complication, however you look at it, of the U.S. presidency race, and that always sends jitters through the global market, and you look at who's stumping up in the U.S., and it's not a great positive, in my view. We also have increased war in the Middle East, unfortunately, and that is not going to go away in the next few months. So some things will improve. Will that open the capital markets? I don't think so, imminently, in a major way, at least, and I think we need that to happen before companies loosen their purse strings and start to spend more and feel confident that they can spend big and therefore be able to go out and raise money if they need to.
I don't see that quite yet. So that's the situation. I think from a macro perspective, it's not very positive. Some analysts will say they're seeing green shoots. You know, there have been a few secondaries gone out. There's been a couple of IPOs, but absolutely minimal, and, you know, I think the situation will continue for at least another quarter, if not two quarters, but it won't go on forever. And I think from ArcticZymes, specifically our perspective, you know, we are in a very solid, fortunate situation. As Børge has mentioned, and you've seen from the numbers, we've got a significant cash pile we're sitting on, which gives us great freedom to do what we want to do and what we need to do.
So we're in a position that we can prepare the company and spend what we need to, and if we need to spend relatively big, we can do that, because we're not worried about that. So, you know, my management team don't have to think every morning: "Oh, God, can we buy this? Can we do this? Do we have the cash? Will that, you know, affect our position?" We don't need to think about that. We need to think about, which is what we are doing, in building the business so that we are fully prepared for when the market's to open, the floodgates open, we will be right there, and we feel very confident about that.
So I think as compared to many of our, you know, colleague companies out there, we're sitting pretty, as they say in England, in a very good position. So I'm very confident about the future of ArcticZymes, both in the short term and obviously, in the longer term. So with that said, I think we'll answer a few questions, and then we'll introduce Michael. So we'll start with the gentleman in the room, because they're the ones that bothered to show up. Thank you. So if anybody has any questions from the floor, we'll take those first. John?
Yes, how many active customers do we have this year?
Well, let me answer that, because that's a seemingly simple question, but it's not really. We've added about 78 new customers this year to our customer base. But if I'm just gonna make it simple. If we had 200 last year, and we added 78 this year, how many customers do we have? Some of you are saying 278, right? But that's not quite the case, of course, because not everybody of those 200 from last year is buying this year. So when we... And we looked at this yesterday because I didn't want to get the impression that, you know, therefore, the customer base just builds and builds and builds. So when we looked at it, our customer base is still up slightly, which is a very good thing.
So the majority of the customers that we've had historically are still buying, and we're adding more in, but not all of them. So it's not 200 plus 78, it's 200 minus X plus 78.
We don't know anything about the X?
Yeah, we do, but again, it's not a meaningful number in a way, because a customer counts as a customer, even if they only spent NOK 25.
Okay.
So we can look at it. If we look at it, and I'll just throw out one statistic, 'cause we looked at it yesterday, you can cut it how you like. So we've cut it for, say, customers that have bought more than 50,000 NOK in a year, and you look at the number of customers in that bracket last year versus this year, and the number this year is slightly increased.
Okay.
That's one way to look at it.
Yeah.
So you can cut it in many ways.
Other questions?
Good question. Yes, please.
Regarding some, I wonder how much of the sale is for commercial products and how much is for product development? Is some commercial products going to come in the coming year?
We don't know the exact answer to that because we don't know often what our customers are using it for. You know, they don't fully divulge that in many cases. But we do know for a fact that the SAN HQ GMP product that is coming will obviously be used in the therapeutic space. So it's not a product that people are going to buy to just use in the lab, for example, because of the quality of it and the expense of it. So if we've got customers asking for the GMP product, then we know that they'll be using that, you know, in human clinical trials, for example, preclinical trials. And that's what we want to get into, obviously, because that's where the big market is.
And we want to lock customers in early into that development process so that the big sales will come as those clinical trials develop. So we still have the SAN HQ non-GMP, which will be produced for people that just want to use it in, you know, other areas, but it'll be the GMP that drives the sales, I think, moving forward for the SAN.
I just have a follow-up question on that one that I received online here.
Okay.
And that's a little bit on. Can you say a little bit about what kind of expectations you have for 2024 on the sales side for the SAN HQ GMP?
No, I can't.
Mm-hmm.
'Cause someone's looking for a number. You know, no, we can't. We've had significant demand, and as I say, if you look at the pre-marketing figures that I showed, there's clearly a lot of people that are interested. We have had, and I can't obviously, can't name names, but we've had a lot of big name, I would say, big name customers who've been testing SAN HQ ready for the GMP production. So we know there's interest, we know there's people, a lot of people testing it, and it's... You know, that's how it works. People start by testing it, and if it works in their workflow and it satisfies their internal specs, then they're likely to start buying it. So it's difficult to say because it's an ongoing, evolving process, but we are hopeful because we've got a lot of interest.
Just one more follow-up on that one. Talking about a little bit about the Sigma, Merck's and their salt active nuclease now.
Yeah.
Do you plan to do a comparative study on that one as well?
Not a formal comparative study, of course, but we always do comparative studies for our own interest, and sometimes we publish and show them as we have done with Benzonase and DNase. So we will be looking at it once it's available, and we'll see how in, from a lab perspective, that compares. But again, we do very basic comparisons, and we don't know necessarily what our clients' absolute needs are. So if there's a new product, that new product, for example, anybody that needs a product that works at high salt concentrations, you could very well imagine, will be testing both the Merck new product and our product in a side-by-side comparison, and that's what people do. So there probably will be differences, although, you know, they're claiming that theirs works at high salt concentrations as well.
There will be other subtle differences because there always are between different products. Sometimes those differences are very subtle, but it does make the difference as to whether a customer will use A or whether they'll use B, and it very much depends on how they're conducting their workflow and what the end game is for them.
All right. One more here, regarding thinking strategy.
Yes.
Does the M&A remain part of our strategic roadmap? Or, and if not, have you considered a buyback?
A what?
Shares.
A buyback?
Yeah.
No.... That's the answer to that part. We are not considering a buyback. There's no reason to do that. Desperate companies do buybacks, and that is certainly not us. What was the first part? I'm sorry.
What is your, our M&A strategy?
Oh, M&A.
Have we de-emphasized it, or?
I wouldn't say de-emphasized it. It's on the radar, and now, as I mentioned earlier, we have a more dedicated corporate development team who are working exclusively on external opportunities. So not just M&A. If a good M&A opportunity comes along, we will certainly be ready to look at that. But we'll also be looking at in-licensing and collaboration agreements as well as M&A. So depends what comes along.
All right-
I see there's a question from, Mr. Zutterland on there. Perhaps we take that one.
Yeah. You have also said something about the Benzonase market is selling for $400 million, and now you talk about $1.5 billion and could go up to 10, 15, fif-
No, no.
$10 billion-$15 billion by 2020.
That's not what I said, actually. Yes, I did say that the Benzonase, market was selling, so we hear, 'cause it's never officially been published. They were selling about $400 million worth of that. What I said today is the AAV market, right? Benzonase is a component in the AAV work stream. The AAV market is not the Benzonase market, right? Because to produce... Put it very simply, to produce an AAV viral vector product from start to finish, it's a workflow that has probably got 100+ steps in that workflow. We are one component or the, you know, the nuclease is a one component in that workflow. So in that workflow, Benzonase is selling $400 million worth. If that workflow currently, let's say, is worth $1.5 billion, right? You can do the math in your head, right.
They're selling $400 million out of a workflow of $1.5 billion. If that workflow is going to be valued in the future at 10x that, let's say, then it's not unreasonable to say that the Benzonase or the nuclease component is going to be 10x higher, right? Because that makes sense. So if they're selling theoretically $400 million at this point, then if that market is tenfold bigger, they're going to need tenfold more of the nuclease. So I didn't say that the Benzonase market was $10 billion, I said the AAV market. So I hope that explains it, but irrespective, the market is enormous.
All right.
Thank you.
I have one final question here, and then I think we would have, we'd leave it-
We'll head for Michael then.
Head for Michael then. How is the market for the products AZT is producing looking ahead? Is it unchanged from what you have previous? Is it unchanged from what you have previously communicated, looking through your eyes? A little bit hard to understand the question here, but
No, it's not hard to understand the question.
All right.
I know exactly what they're asking me, and I'm not going to throw out any numbers on that. But things have changed, right? The product portfolio has changed. What was projected three years ago, even looking at the product portfolio, is different because we've adapted to what the market is asking for. You know, and the nuclease portfolio, looking forward, is a very, very, the most important thing that we have in our hands right now. On top of that, we have, as I mentioned, as an example, and that's not the only thing, we have a new sexy-looking enzyme called ETN-1. We didn't have that a few years ago. So the whole dynamic of the portfolio has changed slightly.
The emphasis of the portfolio has changed slightly, and also we're in a very different macroeconomic environment than we were two or three years ago, right? That was pre-COVID, I think is what the reference times were. Then we had COVID, and now we're sitting here with the situation that we have. So it's a very different world than it was three years ago. So I think, you know, what people thought they might be doing three years ago, today, looking forward, is very different, and we are no exception to that. So am I going to comment on revenue projections? No, I'm not. I'm just going to say that we remain very optimistic that we have the right portfolio to address very large markets as we move forward.
Thank you.
Okay, so is that it for the burning questions? Okay, good. So for the next few minutes, I'd like to introduce, ladies and gentlemen, Michael Akoh, our new CEO. He's been at the helm for six weeks, so not very long. And he's going to... I asked him to do a short presentation to introduce himself, to talk a little bit about his background, how it's relevant, and basically, this is why we appointed him, and some very preliminary observations on the company. So thank you, Michael, and I leave it to you.
Good. Thank you, Marie-
Thank you
... and Børge, for a very nice,
Yes
... presentation of our Q3 results. How much time have we got?
About 6.5 minutes.
All right. It's going to be a very brief introduction to myself and my initial thinking. First of all, I'm extremely excited about having had the opportunity to join ArcticZymes. It is a great company with great products and great people. So there's a great platform for future growth. A snapshot of who I am. I'm a commercially focused life science executive. I've worked within life science for the past 24 years, and I've been within IVD diagnostics, medical devices, and biopharma drug development services, as well as diagnostic clinical services. I've had the opportunity to be in very large corporations as well as scale-ups and also start-ups. In terms of my leadership experience, then that actually comes very much from a similar setting as ArcticZymes. I have led scientific teams.
I have established new market segments and also been involved in actually establishing companies within a very tightly regulatory environment, both from the ISO standpoint, which is the MT tool segment to GXP, GMP, and so on. I also have experience from the AMN-- AM, M&A field. And last but not least, I have extensive global commercialization experience. I've been fortunate enough to drive and launch several successful solutions to various life science segments. Then the last point I would like to point out about myself, that is, I am a true Scandinavian, as you see. I am born and raised in Denmark, actually. I live in Sweden. I've done so for the past 18 years, and now I work in Norway.
But I've always had the global perspective and I also, as you can probably see, have roots outside of Scandinavia. What attracted me to ArcticZymes? Well, it is all in the subheading. I think that ArcticZymes is a great platform for future growth in a very attractive market space as well. Both the MT tools segment, as well as the biomanufacturing tools manufacturing area, hold great potential for us going forward. If we look at the company as well, then we have extremely talented staff. We also have a very healthy good culture in our company. One of the other things that I looked at, really, was I able to work together with the board?
I needed a board that was strategic thinking, a board that was decisive, a board that could make decisions fast, and that's what I've met so far during the first six weeks in ArcticZymes, as well. All of you know Marie. She's very ambitious. I'm ambitious as well. I want to be part of a company that has growth ambitions, and that's what I've also met at ArcticZymes. Last, it's important for me that I'm able to make a difference. With my background, having worked commercially within the life science segment, I feel that I'm positioned well to add value to ArcticZymes in the current state of where the company is. Then I also have some initial thoughts about ArcticZymes after six weeks.
Again, if you look at the subheading, there are two words I want to take out. The first part is 'focused,' and the second part is 'partner-driven.' We are a relatively small company, so we need to ensure that we focus. We need to also establish what are we not doing, not just what we are doing, because else it becomes too much and then we're not going to be successful with anything. We also need to collaborate with other companies all through the value chain, from the innovation part up till the commercialization part. You've seen examples of that so far. We need to do even more of that. But the mission is clear: we want to create a global leading specialist enzymes company, and we want to be a catalyst for innovation and also progress for our partners. Nothing strange about that.
You've heard a bit about our thoughts about inorganic growth, so I'm not going to comment on that. If the right opportunity comes along, then we're going to look at it. But the focus has really been on organic growth and establishing a strong R&D team that can drive that growth forward by providing unique enzymes to the marketplace. I have three different pillars that we are going to be exploring, focusing on, using as leverage. Innovation is the first part, and here I'm really thinking about: How do we expand our biotechnology toolbox? There are so many new technologies out there today that we can leverage, and we are working together with already today, some interesting companies, and you're going to hear more about that in the future, so we can provide more innovation to the market, also faster.
Commercial excellence, that's basically my home turf. We have to ensure that we become even more market-driven. We have to ensure that every part of the value chain actually knows what is expected from the marketplace, from R&D, all through to the sales and marketing people. The first step has already been taken in that aspect. We have formed a new product marketing team in order to ensure that we drive a strategic portfolio going forward. Last part is infrastructure. Infrastructure is important, especially in regards to compliance. We have to ensure that we live up to the requirements that our customers have. You've seen the first initiatives that we have taken in form of the DMF, and we're going to continue down that route by strengthening our infrastructure.
Ensuring that we can deliver according to our customers' needs, and also ensure that they're confident that they have security of supply. What is really positive for me as well is that we have a good starting point. We have a good base, we have some very good products, some great enzymes, and we have a very strong reputation in the marketplace as well. Last week, I was in Brussels at a large cell and gene therapy conference, and I had the opportunity to talk to some customers. And that was a very positive experience because customers want to work with us. The customers or partners that know us, they want to work with us. Not enough people know us today, so we have to expand that.
We have to work more with all the marketing tools that you've seen early on, to ensure that our reputation, our products, our way of working, get out to more. And then there are also people that would like to work with us, but don't work with us currently due to compliance, and we are addressing that at the moment with the DMF and also with the M-SAN HQ GMP version that is up next year. So, I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to meet you for the first time. I'm sure that I'm going to have the opportunity to interact with all of you a lot more going forward. This was the first taste, and I would like to thank everybody for coming today.
I don't know whether you have some final words you want to say, Marie?
No, I just again want to reiterate: welcome, Michael. We're very happy to have you. I think the board, we really lucked out. We had a lot of great applicants for this position, and again, the reason for that is they saw how solid ArcticZymes is. They saw that we had good cash reserves and that we're not one of those struggling companies. So we had many strong applicants that we could pick and choose from. So obviously, Michael's background, as he's talked about, was critical, I think from the commercial perspective in particular. Michael's not a scientist, but we don't need any more scientists. We have more than enough of those. So, you know, it's all about the commercial drive.
You know, in addition to that, it was—did we feel, the board feel that Michael's personality would fit with the culture and the personality that exists within ArcticZymes? And it was very clear when we came to the final round that that was what was outstanding also about Michael. So we're delighted to have you. We wish you all the very best of luck.
Thank you.
And, thank you very much to the senior management team, to Børge in particular, and our colleagues and everybody in ArcticZymes Technologies who's working extremely hard, to make this a success. So thank you very much for coming and for your attention. Thank you.
Thank you.