Hello everyone and welcome to Lifecare's report for Q4 2023. I want to start with telling you all that this meeting is being recorded so that we can upload it on our website later on. I also want to encourage all of you to keep your video and microphone off to not disturb the meeting. Prior to the meeting we have encouraged all interested parties to send in any questions you might have. We have received quite a few and I will go through most of them at the end of the meeting. In addition, if any questions occur during the presentation feel free to forward them in the meeting chat and we will address any questions as long as we have the time to do that. The full Q4 report from Lifecare is available on lifecare.no/investors/financialreports. It has also been distributed today at the Oslo Stock Exchange NewsWeb.
I want to start off talking about the financial highlights for Q4 2023 and then specifically of course for the whole 2023 even though these numbers are not audited yet. What we have done throughout 2023 is that we have continued and also in Q4 continued our investments to reach our main strategic goal which is to automate production and ensure a product launch in the veterinary market in 2024. We have reduced our capacity for external work so that we are able to meet our internal needs. This has led to a reduced revenue in our subsidiary in Germany in Lifecare Laboratory.
I also want to mention that the costs related to our group employment share-based option plan has been transferred into the IFRS accounting principles and hence this has a significant negative impact on the result for Q4 2023 although this has no effect on the liquidity nor on the equity of the company. It is a booked cost which comes out in the finances as a quite high cost of NOK 3.7 million for this quarter. It's also important to highlight that our cash position and our equity is better end of 2023 compared to end of 2022 and previous years. This of course has to do with the development of the company adding value to the equity as is but also the fact of course that we managed to do a capital increase in October 2023 that impacts our actual cash position and equity.
In the following I will first talk a bit about the roadmap progress and of course in that direction also the outlook for the next upcoming months. I will also go through our operational highlights for the Q4 2023 as well as then to end this session with the Q&A session. This is the roadmap progress that we have introduced. We started at the semi-annual presentation in 2023 to define three avenues of interest. The first one being production and market launch, second one being studies, and the third one being the regulatory compliance. While our ongoing studies and regulatory compliance is uttermost important, the absolutely most important progress and strategic path for Lifecare is to meet our goals in terms of production and market launch. I want to just address this specifically because we have a good grip of our science and technology.
It has been proven both in clinical settings. It's also been proven in laboratory settings, and we are of course looking forward to continue our studies in dogs to get also confirmation of longevity in live tissue. Although we believe that production preparations are still the most important things we are doing currently and have been doing for some quarters. The reason for that is that without a functional production and manufacturing approach, we will of course not have any. It will not be possible for us to go to market. It will not be possible for us to continue our studies in a larger setting in a regulatory sense towards the clinical human market. Hence, the most important thing we are doing is the engineering and preparation towards production.
That is where we are putting all of our resources almost and that is where we also expect to see significant steps going forward in 2024 towards end of March and then after that towards end of the second quarter, end of June 2024. We met all of our trigger events or milestones in the third quarter of 2023. The same goes for the fourth quarter of 2024. First of all, we were able to place the orders needed to prepare for production. We continue to prepare for our longevity study that we are kicking off in dogs in a quite short time frame. And also we were able to do our ISO 13485 audit and as I guess a lot of you already know we were also able to achieve the certificate for ISO 13485 compliance. We received that in January 2023.
Our important milestone going forward, the big outlook for the company is to be able to do pilot production in end of March 2024 and then also to transfer this into an automated production setting where we automate the key components of the production in our own production facility. On this basis we will be able to do a market launch in the veterinary market and I hope that we will be able to do that before summer. Still I'm confident that we will do it this year. Related to the automated to the pilot production I want to share with you that as we also shared back in the Q3 report we are facing some issues related to our subsupplier in terms of the communication between the sensor and the outside readout.
To be a bit more specific on this, we are reading out as we expect, but we are not so far; we have not so far achieved the distance we want to read out to. This is, of course, an important part of a product development that we are producing and preparing the product with a significant distance of radio readout so that it can be used without any hassle for the users going forward. This is an engineering issue that we will solve, and we hope that we are able to start the pilot study in dogs by end of March 2024. If not, we will do it in April, but the plan is still to do it end of March 2024. Moving on to the operational highlights, I want to first of all tell you that we have a steady course on our manufacturing preparations.
2023 as a year was fantastic in terms of our clinical achievements and our laboratory achievements. And then throughout the end of the second quarter and especially in the third quarter of 2023 we initiated manufacturing preparations and an increased focus on quality management. This gained additional speed. In the fourth quarter our direction and goal was manifested as planned. We were able to receive an approval to do the next study but most important we placed several purchase orders for essential components and equipment that we need for the upcoming pilot production and then also the upcoming automated production. The ISO 13485 certificate is a huge milestone for Lifecare. Some of you might remember that we earlier in 2023 around April were able to ISO to be certified after the ISO 9001 standard.
Moving from 9001 to 13485 is important because the 13485 standard is directly related to medical products. Hence compliance after this standard is essential for operations to secure to succeed with our core mission going forward. The audit was conducted as planned in November 2023 and it was conducted without any major findings. In January this year we received the official documentation for the ISO 13485 certification of Lifecare Laboratory in Mainz, Germany. The third operational highlight I want to address is the fact that we secured additional funding through a private placement in October 2023. On this basis we issued 17 million new shares at a subscription price per share of NOK 2.5. This is the same price that we had in our private placement in 2022.
I think that given the capital market and the tough capital market that has been throughout 2022 and 2023, I think the fact that we were able to meet the same price per share as we did in 2022 is a strength. I also believe that the fact that we were able to do this private placement with only a 15% reduction compared to the end price that day was also a great achievement. With these funds we were able to move forward in our strategic goals towards manufacturing, towards automatization of manufacturing, and towards the market approach to the veterinary market by end of year 2024. That's it for the operational highlights. I want to go through the questions that we have received. First one being a question related to the status and progress regarding the study on dogs.
I have noticed based on feedback that I received from shareholders and other stakeholders and also what I from time to time can see in social media that there has been an expectation or an understanding that the study at the NMBU has started. This is not correct and we have never communicated that this study has started. We did communicate in Q4 2023 that we achieved an authorization for the study but as I touched in earlier we are still waiting to solve some of the small issues related to the readout distance and hence we haven't started the study on the dogs yet. It's a longevity study and we still expect to start it within end of March this year.
So within 4-6 weeks we hope to be able to communicate that it has started and rest assured as soon as the study has started we will communicate that to the market. The next question is related to the cost of the 2 main pieces of production equipment that we have ordered. So we have ordered a scanning electron microscope from ZEISS and we have ordered 2 components, a BioScaffolder and a Nano-Plotter from the German company GeSiM. The price for these 2 for this equipment in total is just above NOK 10 million representing an automation of the core elements of our production setup. How much in total we are planning to invest in production equipment and facilities in 2024? We have most of it is related to the equipment that we have already bought.
In total we expect to invest around NOK 15 million-20 million in our production equipment and facilities in 2024. Looking forward to 2025 this will definitely increase because around mid-2025 we will take over our manufacturing entity, our new manufacturing entity in Mainz where we will be set up to do the volume production of our technology and our sensors. Next question is related to the software development and how much we have invested in software development in 2023 and how much will be invested in 2024. The software development is mainly related to the adopted software that we have bought from ZEISS to implement in our scanning electron microscopes. The cost for the software itself is about NOK 0.6 million. The major investment is the customization of the software that we are doing ourselves in our entity in Reutlingen at Lifecare NanoBioSensors.
It is still a bit unclear how much we will invest in software development in 2024. We do not expect to do additional investments related to software for the ZEISS machines. However, we are looking into how we can prepare the communication and the end to the end user of our technology, meaning the readout to a cell phone application. This is not a main task in our development because we believe that we will not be the ones that communicate directly with the customers, that will be up to the partners we will engage with when we go to market. But we still will develop a basic application for readout and in the first phase this will be of course related to the veterinary business because that's where we will commercialize the business first. We do not have a significant budget in that relation.
We are doing this on an off-the-shelf basis to already expand and explore what already is in the market and see how we can adjust that into our quite basic needs in terms of application. Other than that there is not much software development going on in Lifecare. We are more into the industrialization and commercialization based on manufacturing. The total investment budget for Lifecare in 2024 is. I'm not sure I'm going to disclose that in specific details because it might be a bit misleading. The thing is that our investment budget is related to two things. First it is related to of course the manufacturing preparations that are already as mentioned that we in total will invest NOK 15 million-20 million in 2024. Then the next part of our investment budget is related to the upcoming clinical studies.
That depends of course on the regulatory bodies and the approving authorities' recommendations for how many patients we will use and of course also for the length of the study. So that can be anything between 10 and 20 additional investments needed in that relation. We will of course increase the focus on this as we in this quarter and the next quarter are continuing to prepare on our protocol to also be in contact with both European and American authorities, the FDA and the US. And these discussions will lead out to a better vision and a better overview of the total investments needed. So I'm not going to be more specific to that question than what I already have been. The next question is related to our product development agreement with Sanofi and the question is how many milestones we expect to reach in 2024.
First of all, and if these milestones will qualify for payments from Sanofi. First of all, I want to emphasize that the communication that we are allowed to do on the Sanofi agreement is on a strictly need-to-know basis. So, I cannot emphasize. I cannot elaborate very much around this agreement. What I can say, and that's the same as we actually communicated in the Q3 report, we expect to soon reach the next milestone, and this milestone will qualify for a payment from Sanofi. And other than that, I don't want to comment on the Sanofi product development agreement in any more details. The next question is also a Sanofi question related to the milestone payments and the size of these, whether they are equal, and I can say that they are not equal for each milestone.
This is the last question that has been sent in a previous meeting. The question is if Lifecare is planning on raising more capital in 2024 and if so when and how much. I can obviously not go into those details. This would be an insider information if I told anything about our specific plans and we do not have any tradition either to actually communicate that at an early stage. What I can see is that we are well funded now based on our last capital increase. Lifecare is still an R&D company without any actual revenue. Hence we are depending on capital to be able to take the next steps.
I think that one interesting thing for our stakeholders would be to have a look in the coverage document from RedEye where the analyst has made a consideration of our total capital need going forward. That was before we did NOK 42.5 million last year. I think that that can be an indicative information related to what we actually expect in terms of capital need going forward. But as of now we have liquidity to get well ahead of the end of the second quarter where we expect to be ready for market launch in the veterinary business. That, I don't want to give the impression that we expect significant revenues in 2024. Maybe on the contrary, we cannot expect any big revenues this year.
We do hope and do plan, however, for a new situation in 2025 where we hopefully can finally be able to earn money on the technology and the production development so far. Other than that, as I said, there are no additional questions, and as far as I can see here, there are no questions in the meeting chat. Yes, there are. I'm sorry about that. It's a question about if we can tell more about the go-to-market strategy for the veterinary product. The go-to-market strategy in the veterinary part is the same as we have in the human part. We are planning, and we are working for partnerships with big stakeholders in the industry.
We obviously want to avoid to go head on head on the existing pharma companies in that area and we also would like to avoid to invest a lot of money for any logistics, for any marketing and for any sales. So that's why we are looking into the partnership model. However it's not always that easy. You don't always get what you want. So of course we also do have a plan B and our plan B is to initiate sales based in Norway towards the Scandinavian market related then probably through the veterinary chains that already exist. From that point off we will continue. We want to continue from Scandinavia and down to the Dutch region. We have a big footprint taken into account that we have two entities in Germany.
The lion's share of our employees are in Germany. So of course you go from Scandinavia down to Germany, to Austria and Switzerland is definitely relevant. We also have some early planning around going directly to the UK market due to their high use of veterinary products and high, we expect them to have a quite high willingness to pay for this product. Okay, as far as I can see there are no further questions. So then I'm going to end this session in the same way as I always do. Please reach out if you have any questions directly to me either by phone or by email. My door is open and all of the owners of Lifecare of course are entitled to contact me to ask any question you might have and I'll answer them as to the extent I can do so.
Thank you very much for listening in on this report. I hope to see you next time as well. Have a great February day and a great day. Bye-bye.