Okay, here we are. Welcome back again, for our second presentation today, I'm happy to have Edvard Hall here, the CEO of Bioextrax. Without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to you, Edvard.
Thanks a lot, Oliver, and thanks to everyone who's taking the time to watch and listen to my presentation. I'm Edvard. I'm the CEO of Bioextrax. Bioextrax is one of these smaller companies that Marcus mentioned, that decided or took the decision to become a listed company fairly early. What we are going to do today is that I will start by giving a brief overview of us as a company, our various business areas, and a few kind of background details about us. I will move over to talk about the bioplastic market, because, as you will hear during my introduction, our main focus is to develop processes for a certain type of bioplastic called PHAs. I will talk a bit about that market in general and kind of how we fit into it.
Then I will go over to talk about our technologies and the various customer projects that we are involved in. Second, or lastly, before the summary, I will present our upscaling facility. This is something that we recently invested in, and that is making a very big difference for us as a company. So I will focus, or I will dive a bit into that, and then I will end with a bit of a summary, the key, the five key things that I want you to take with you from this presentation. So if you're, you know, if you fall asleep during the presentation, that's okay, 'cause I will give you the highlights towards the end. And then, of course, I'm looking forward to the Q&A session at the end.
As mentioned, I will start by giving you an overview of us as a company. We do industrial biotechnology. That is different from medical biotechnology, which is the kind of biotechnology that a lot of people think about. Within industrial biotechnology or white biotechnology, as it's often called, you use microbes in different kinds of industrial processes, and in our case, we use bacteria. So we use bacteria in everything we do, and this we have been doing since 2014, when we were founded based on research at the Department of Biotechnology at Lund University here in Sweden. We did an IPO at Spotlight, actually, in 2020, and we changed listing to Nasdaq First North in November 2022. We work with a lot of different customers in different stages.
We have some very early-stage evaluation projects, and we have some very mature, licensing deals. We have a pretty broad pipeline, if you so will. When I talk about customer projects, I talk about projects where the end goal is a license deal. We are not a producing company. We're not developing technologies to produce and sell material. We're developing technologies to out-license those technologies. We have stayed in Lund. This is where we have our offices and our R&D facility, and also our upscaling unit, that I will talk a bit about. We have roughly 15 full-time equivalents in the company. We have more employees than that, but not everyone is full-time. Here to the right on the slide, you can see our different business areas. We have three different business areas.
Two of them are based on poultry feathers, so feathers from chickens and turkeys, and depending on how we control the process, we get two different kinds of materials from the feathers. It's a hydrolyzed protein, which can be used as protein ingredients into feed applications, for instance, and it's keratin microfibers, which can be used as an additive into bioplastics, for instance. So those are two business areas based on feathers, but our main focus is to the left, on this slide, and that's around PHAs or polyhydroxyalkanoates. PHAs is a group of polymer, and what they have in common is that they're bio-based, which means that there are no fossil material that goes into the production of the PHAs, and they are biodegradable.
If you throw them into nature, they biodegrade without leaving any microplastics or any toxic materials or anything like that. I think it's fair to say that we spend the vast majority of our resources on this left side of the technology overview, the PHA. The reason why there are two products marked out under the PHA business area is both PHA and its co-product, which is the hydrolyzed SCP. SCP stands for single-cell protein. That's because a unique feature of our PHA-producing technology is that we generate the co-product in the form of hydrolyzed single-cell protein, which is basically amino acids, peptides, oligopeptides, which can be used as ingredients into various kinds of feed. It can also be used for human consumption, but we're focusing on the animal feed market.
I will come more back to more details around this further on. As mentioned, I'm gonna start to talk a bit about the bioplastic market, which of course sits in the wider scope of the plastic market. I think everyone can probably guess that the conventional plastic market is very, very large. Roughly 400 million tons of plastics are produced every year. What may or may not come as a surprise to some of you is that the conventional plastic market is still growing very quickly. Plastic, as you have probably seen, is getting a lot of bad press, both when it comes to pollution of the environment, but also when it comes to CO2 emissions in connection with the production. Despite this, the plastic industry is still growing very quickly.
What is growing quicker, though, than the plastic market at large, is the bioplastic market. This is, of course, triggered by a lot of legislation. It's also consumer behavior, but the main trigger is legislation. We have a few examples. One is the Biden administration's recent decision to replace 90% of all conventional plastic with bio-based alternatives by 2040. There is a lot of legislation coming within the EU over the coming years. There is also more local legislation, both on a state level in the U.S. and in various jurisdictions in the EU. India is implementing a large ban, and so on.
So there are a lot of macro forces that are forcing the transition into bioplastics. And when I talk about bioplastics, I mean both bio-based, so a source from renewable sources, and biodegradable, meaning that it's biodegraded, it disappears if it's left in nature. But of course, Bioextrax is not developing technologies for bioplastics in general. We are developing technologies for a certain kind of bioplastic, which is called PHA. So I'm gonna do a bit of a deep dive into the forecasts for PHA. And what I've done on this slide is that to the left here, I show the data from the 2021 European Bioplastic Association report, and to the right, I show data from the 2022 European Bioplastic report.
What we can see is that while, of course, both of them forecast a big growth in bioplastic, in general, production and consumption over the coming four, five, six years, what is interesting is that the forecast for bioplastics, in general, are actually turned down a bit. So in the 2021 report indicates that by 2026, roughly 7.6 million tons of bioplastics would be produced, whereas the newer report says that one year later, only 6.3 million tons of bioplastics would be produced. So that's actually a reduction of the forecast, even though, of course, the growth rate is still expected to be very high. But if we look at PHAs share, we can see that in the 2021 report, it was estimated to be 6.4% of the total bioplastic production by 2026.
That has been increased to almost 9% by 2027. So what we see is that the overall forecast for bioplastics is turned down, but the forecast for PHA or polyhydroxyalkanoates is actually increased very significantly. And why is that? Well, that's because... Or to answer that, we need to go back to the actual problems with conventional plastics, and those are three things. This is not rocket science. This is obvious to most people. But it is about the pollution of plastic, the plastic pollutions in marine environments, but also in soil environments. It's about the massive carbon footprint of plastic production and consumption, and it is about the plan to use more and more, which I talked about before.
What is unique about PHA is three things: It's first of all, that it's bio-based, it's secondly, that it's biodegradable, but most importantly, is the third thing, and that's, that it's a group of polymers. So it's not one single polymer. It's a group of polymers that has characteristics that makes it suitable replacement for the majority of all conventional plastics. You have PHA types that are very similar to PP or polypropylene. This is, for instance, like this kind of pen. It's, it's a, it's a, a polypropylene-based pen. It's very rigid, but you also have PHA types that are almost like rubber, very soft.
So you have a very wide range of different material properties, and this is what makes PHA unique compared to other bioplastics, because each of those bioplastics can only replace maybe one or two conventional plastics, but PHAs can replace the majority of all conventional plastics that are in circulation. And for the ones who are a bit chemically interested or maybe even have some polymer chemistry background, to the right here of this slide, you can see some of the chemical compositions of different kinds of PHAs. So over to how we fit in to this very rapidly growing market. And I will focus here primarily on PHAs, but I will also say a few words about our feather-based technologies. But I will start a bit by a small biotechnology lecture to show you how PHAs are produced.
This slide should be read from left to right. This is the production process. You start with some kind of organic or carbon-rich materials. This can be sucrose from sugar beets or glucose, which is a co-product from starch production. It can be different kinds of waste materials from the paper and pulp industry, for instance. It can be waste from different kinds of food processing industries. It can also be municipal wastewater, so toilet water can be used to produce PHAs. You can also use different kinds of vegetable oils, like rapeseed oil, canola oil, or sorry, that's the same thing, but palm oil and so on as well. But of course, you want to avoid palm oil for a number of reasons.
What you do then is that you take this carbon source, and you grow bacteria on that carbon source. After a while, you cut the access to certain nutrients, including nitrogen, and you starve the bacteria, and you stress the bacteria. What the bacteria then start to do is that they start to take the carbon in the surroundings, in the bioreactor that you're using, and they start to synthesize that and store it inside the bacteria cells. This is conceptually, roughly how humans store fat. We do that to have a reserve for the future when we need it. After this step, which we call the fermentation step, you have bacteria that are filled with these plastic granules, and it's, it's... You can see a picture of what it looks like here.
Under the fermentation heading, you have bacteria. This is the kind of black shapes, and inside you have the white granules or white balls, and that's the PHA. And for this step, we have a patent that's been granted, including in the EU, but also in China and a number of other jurisdictions in both North and South America, and also in Asia. But after this step, you need a way to get the granules out of the bacteria, and this is really where the industry have been struggling so far because they have used methods that are extremely energy and chemical-consuming. So it really requires a lot of consumables, becomes very expensive, and you kind of also lose your sustainability argument if you use a lot of chemicals and a lot of energy to produce the polymers.
What we do instead, and this is very much the core of our company from a technical perspective, is that we add a second bacteria. This is not a genetically modified bacteria; it's a natural bacteria. What our bacteria does, or what they do, is that they release enzymes, which break down the cell walls of the PHA-producing bacteria. Basically, again, if you look at this picture under the fermentation heading, the enzymes that are produced by our bacteria hydrolyze, or break down, everything that's black in this picture, thereby releasing the granules. This has a number of benefits. First of all, it's completely bio-based, so we use no chemicals in the process, which is, of course, good from a storytelling perspective, but it's also good from an overall sustainability perspective.
It's a very cost-efficient method because there are no consumables that are consumed in the process. We don't need to add a lot of chemicals that are consumed, which also results in very expensive wastewater treatment. Instead, we only add our bacteria, and our bacteria use the biomass from the previous step as substrate or raw material to grow. A third benefit is that we generate a co-product, which is the cell walls of the PHA-producing bacteria, or the cell walls of the first bacteria, which is broken down into amino acids and peptides and oligopeptides. This can be used as a protein ingredient in feed because the cell walls are roughly 50% protein. Then the last benefit is that we leave the PHA granules completely intact, so we get no degradation or no loss of molecular weight. This is important for certain applications.
For others, it doesn't matter at all, but for certain applications, it is very, very important. That's more a technical question that I'm happy to discuss if somebody has some more, you know, come from a polymer background. But other, if you're not, it's just you know, enough to know that we leave the molecular weight intact, which is important for certain applications. But then we also have the feather-based technologies. These are very easy or simple processes. We take the feathers directly from the slaughterhouse, we sterilize them, we mix them with our bacteria. Again, these are non-GMO or so-called wild type bacteria. And then depending on how we...
We run a process that takes roughly 24 hours, and then out on the other side comes either the hydrolyzed protein or the microfibers, depending on how we steer the process. And this hydrolyzed protein is a water-soluble powder that can be used as a protein ingredient in animal feed. You can also, again, use it for human consumption, but it's a bit bitter in its taste. But the key thing here is that feathers are roughly 99.0% protein, so of course you want to utilize this in the best way possible. And the microfibers that we get, this is a material that only we in the world can produce. We're the first one to produce this kind of microfibers.
We're very, and I mean, that's of course a big, very interesting opportunity, but it's also a big challenge because we are very much in the early phases of trying to figure out what these microfibers can be used for. Actually, we had a very big breakthrough in our lab as late as last week, when we managed to upscale this microfiber production for the first time to pilot scale, which in turn means that we can generate some fairly large quantities of microfibers that we can send out for testing with different kinds of customers. Here we have a long range of different, different projects ongoing, including with H&M, with a number of large packaging producers across Europe, and so on.
And we do in our quarterly reports, we give an overview of our most important projects that are currently ongoing. So but that's in Swedish. But it's still... I mean, with Google Translate, you can get quite a lot of information about those various projects. But here I, I taken out the, the absolutely most important projects that are ongoing. And we have, at the top, we, we have a very long-running relationship with one of the world's largest chemical companies. And what they are doing is that they are evaluating a type of PHA that only we can produce for applications in sunscreen.
So in sunscreen, you have a film that is kind of capturing the active ingredients and make sure that it sticks to the skin, that you really want to have biodegradable, because it's naturally washed out to the sea when you go for a swim or when you shower, you know, after you've been to the beach, for instance. So they are evaluating our PHA to be used in this kind of application. We have a similar kind of project with one of the world's three largest cosmetic companies. In their case, it's for lipstick primarily, but its function is the same, to work as a film former to make sure that the active ingredient stays to the skin. And, you know, for lipsticks, of course, you don't want to make sure that the lipstick is, you know, kiss-proof, if you so will.
I should also mention that this project with the cosmetic company is funded by the cosmetic company. We have a project with one of the world's three largest candy producers, and what they are investigating is the possibility to use PHA in chewing gum. In a normal chewing gum, you have roughly seven different types of polymers that fill different kinds of functions. You have one, which is the gum base, which kind of makes the texture and the feel of the chewing gum. This is what they want to replace with the same type of PHA, actually, that we're working with, with the chemical and the cosmetic company. Again, this is also financed by the candy producer.
Then we have a few other projects. We're working with one of the world's largest sugar producers in a very large project that also includes the six biggest compounders of bioplastics in Europe. The idea behind this project is to use the sucrose or the sugar from the sugar producer to produce PHA, and then we use the compounders as a go-to-market channel. For the feather technology, we have a very long-running collaboration with one of Europe's largest waste management companies, and they have currently an option for a global, eternal, exclusive license for one of the feather technologies, and that's the technology to convert the feather into hydrolyzed protein for feed applications.
We have also had a project with the largest bioplastic producer in the EU, and then we have a number of EU projects and so on, including one that's financed by the EU. I just want to mention that. One project that isn't included here, for some reason, I just forgot to include it, is that we recently signed a license agreement with an American PHA producer, and some of our team is currently in the US to install our technology at their facility. If everything goes well, that will be upscaled to commercial scale before New Year's this year. That's, of course, very exciting developments for us.
I will say a few words about our upscaling facility before I move over to team and then the summary at the end. We moved to new facilities in February this year. When we took over, it was used as a warehouse, for something completely different. The reason why we moved was that we realized during primarily 2022 that we had a large need within the company to demonstrate our technologies in larger scale. As mentioned before, we're not a producing company. We are a technology developer that wants to outlicense, but it's very difficult to outlicense if you have only showed your technology in small scale, because then the customer need to take the full risk of the upscaling. We made the investment in an upscaling facility.
It was delivered during the spring of this year, and it was installed during the summer. Now for the last 1.5 months or so, it's been running. Here to the right of this slide, you can see the upscaling facility to the left. It's, I will come back to what the sizes of reactors and so on, but it's circled in red, you can see the largest scale we had before, and this is just to exemplify what big step this is. And it has worked really well. We've had visitors more or less every week since this started running, here to see and you know check the you know to actually watch the scalability of our different processes.
Importantly, we can actually use exactly the same equipment for all our processes, regardless of whether it is for feathers or it is for this bioplastic called PHA. But it's important again to highlight that this is not a production facility. We can produce material that we can use for samples and so on, and we can actually make quite a lot of money from just selling these samples, but the main purpose is to demonstrate our technologies, thereby accelerating our license sales. The largest fermenters we have in this upscaling facility is two 1,000-liter fermenters. This is, of course, not by accident that we have chosen two, and the 1,000-liter scale is what we consider to be the last step before we go to full commercial scale.
And this can produce roughly 50-60 kilograms of material every week. But again, it's not a production facility, it's a demonstration facility. I want to say a few words about our team. We have roughly 15 full-time equivalents, as I mentioned, but a few of our management team is listed here on this slide. We have Per-Erik Velin. He has roughly 25 years of experience from various kinds of business development positions in large international chemical companies, including Perstorp, which is a large Swedish specialty chemical company, and Saint-Gobain, which is a... I think it's French. I'm actually a bit uncertain now. And he has, for instance, been the site manager for different production facilities and so on. We have Klas Ingstorp at the bottom right corner.
He's also from Perstorp, originally, which, or where he was, for instance, a plant manager and site manager at different, polymer-producing facilities, and he was also responsible for the engineering group within Perstorp for a number of years. Down to the left is Mohamad Ibrahim. He's the founder, he's the real inventor behind our technologies, and he has spent roughly 20 years within research focused on PHA, including in Münster, in Germany, where he did his PhD, focused on PHA, and then he founded a company back in 2014. Me, I have a legal background, primarily, but I've been the CEO of Bioextrax since 2017. Of course, I've picked up one or two things about biotechnology and microbiology during these years.
And I promise to kind of leave you off with a quick summary, the five most important things that I want you to take with you from this, presentation. And those five things are the following. First of all, it's that PHA is a group of polymer, that is bio-based and biodegradable, and PHA is generally considered to be the bioplastic with the largest potential to replace fossil-based plastics. In Bioextrax, we have developed a completely bio-based method that can produce high-quality PHA in a more sustainable and cheaper way than the competition. And in addition to our PHA technologies, we also have technologies to convert feathers into both microfibers and hydrolyzed protein, which can be used as a feed ingredient.
We have recently invested in upscaling facility, which is now operating, which is used to accelerate our licensing model by validating our technology in larger scale. Thank you.
Okay, thank you very much, Edvard. A very interesting, eh, presentation. We already have some questions there, but let me just start off with the license agreement. You mentioned that you signed a license agreement with a US company on the PHA technology. Is that your first license agreement? Generally, how would you structure these licenses?
So it's not our first agreement. But we were a bit unlucky. Well, I would say a bit unlucky. We signed a license agreement with the customer roughly 1.5 years back, but that customer went bankrupt. That wasn't our fault. But so it is our second, but it's the only one we have running at the moment. And the way we structure it is that we have three different streams of money coming into the company. So we have, first of all, one kind of running license fee that kind of gives the customer freedom to operate while they are implementing and upscaling our technology. In the case of this American company, that monthly fee is $25,000.
So of course, it's not a huge number, but it does make a difference for a company of our size, which has a you know monthly burn rate of roughly $150,000. So that is one part of the income stream. And then once they have started installing it in larger scale, we keep on taking a monthly or quarterly license for the right to use it in that scale. And then the last and hopefully the largest chunk is the royalty, which is per produced kilogram.
Okay, you mentioned quite a lot of projects. Sunscreen, the lipstick, the chewing gum, and so on. Can you say anything about kind of your feeling of the timeline on these projects, or is it too difficult to basically say when something might actually come your way?
Yes. They-- there are... Two of these three projects, the lipstick, chewing gum, and the sunscreen, they are financed by the potential customer here. Of course, you get some revenue from them already, but, I mean, that's not... It's small in comparison for what we're hoping for in the future. They are scaling up. If we take the chewing gum, for instance, after next phase is that they will get a couple of hundred kilograms of PHA, and after that, it's on the ton scale. For that, we can charge quite a lot. Kind of from now to full commercial production, it's roughly two-three years for those applications.
But importantly, since we are not producers, we're our licensors, we do, of course, hope to be able to out-license our technology and make significant revenue before they start production, because it's not us who will start production, it's a third party, and they will have to license the technology from us before they actually start production.
Okay. Turning to the questions from the auditorium. So the first one, I think you kind of hinted at one thing. Are you receiving any kind of public funding? You mentioned the EU project.
Yeah. So we have. We are in a couple of different EU projects. For instance, this one with Carrefour, and that generates, like, EUR 200,000 per year. And we are in a number of similar ones. We could probably do more here because, of course, this is a very hot topic within the EU. But we do also have. Well, we do see that it does take a lot of time, and it kind of moves your focus away from what really matters, which is customer relations.
We are a bit too far now to really focus on, for instance, EU funding, because they really want slightly lower TRL levels, or rather, they either want very low TRL or technical readiness levels, or they want to finance companies that is actually setting up their own production because they want to support EU jobs, as an example. We are neither. So this is not a focus. We join funding applications that others are writing because that's, you know, you can get some fairly easy revenue and good contacts in that way, but we are not taking initiatives ourselves.
Okay. The next question is, first of all, thank you for your excellent presentation. So I wanted to hand that along. What are the top risks in scaling your technology in the client setting?
So, I think when it comes to scaling in general, we have overcome the biggest hurdle now via this upscaling unit, where we have managed to scale it to the 1,000-liter scale. That's really where the biggest risk take place. There are... Well, I, I'm not gonna say no technical risks, but very small technical risks when it comes to upscaling from that to commercial scale, and that is regardless of where it is, because we use very standard biotechnology equipment. We just buy our equipment off the shelf, any supplier in China or anywhere else. So, that, there is very little technical risk in upscaling at our customers, actually. So, yeah, that is, yeah, that's, yeah.
Does it make a big difference what kind of feedstock you use? Because you mentioned you could use all kind of feedstock containing carbon. So, is that kind of a risk when the customer or the license taker uses different feedstock?
Yeah, that's a good, that's a good question. We use, within Bioextrax, what's called pure cultures. This is mono sugars. This can be, well, sucrose is actually not a mono sugar, but it is a well-defined, homogenous sugar type, so that we can use. The same thing with glucose or vegetable oils and so on. The waste-based PHAs, for that, we don't have a technology to do the first step, which is what I call the fermentation step, where you grow the bacteria on the carbon source. For those projects, we only supply the extraction. That is absolutely a very good point. In the current upscaling we are doing, or the tech transfer and upscaling we're doing to the U.S., sucrose is used as the raw material.
They could just as well use glucose, for instance, they could also use glycerol or something like that. But if they want to use waste water, then we will have to have a partner that brings the technology for the accumulation. As I mentioned before, our core competence is the extraction, the taking the polymers out of the bacteria. That is what sets us apart from the competition.
Okay, very good. So you mentioned the SEK 150,000 per month cash you use, and of course, you also have some cash inflow. Now the question is, what your current cash situation is? Probably also, you know, how long you could last without another capital increase, and how Spotlight has helped you with that?
Yeah. So first of all, we're not on Spotlight anymore. We were-
I see
... on Spotlight until, I mean, of course, it's a, I mean, being public, if we start there, has been a good way, especially in 2020 and 2021, to raise capital. Of course, the last two years or last one and a half years has been more difficult from that perspective. As far as I know, it's a fairly unique opportunity as a small company to reach a lot of potential investors being publicly traded. I think it has helped us. Our current cash situation is fairly good. We're not-- we have...
I don't think I'm allowed to comment on exactly how our current cash situation today, but according to the latest quarterly report, which was published at the end of August, and which includes the second quarter, at that point, we had roughly EUR 1.2 million on the bank account, if I remember correctly. I'm not 100% sure about the exact number. And then we got another EUR 1 million now through a warrant exercise program, which was utilized to 96%. So we have a fairly good cash balance, especially considering the income we have.
Mm.
We're not fundraising at the moment, to make that clear. What we are interested in, in general, is, is strategically relevant-
Mm
... investors. Of course, we want to, the wider investment community to know as much as possible as, about us as a company.
Maybe you could comment on the latest shareholder structure after the warrant exercises?
Sorry, again, can you repeat?
Could you give an insight on the latest shareholder structure of Bioextrax?
Yes, sure. So we have, so our largest shareholder is, Mohamad Ibrahim, who is the founder, who I mentioned, before. And the second largest is Rajni Hatti-Kaul, who is on the board, and who was the professor of, well, at the department where Mohamad was when he developed the technologies. And then we have a number of, or we have two or three individuals that's been following the company for quite some time, including one, the first external investor we have, who continued to buy shares. And then we have me and a few other kind of people who are involved in the company, and then we have 4,000 others. Yeah, that's... But, our largest shareholder, Mohamad, he has roughly 8% of the company.
The market cap roughly is?
So the market cap is around EUR 10 million.
Okay, very good. So we have one more question here, and that question is, why you switched from Spotlight to Nordic, Nordic Growth? You have to be careful, I think Marcus is still listening.
I have nothing—no, I have nothing bad to say about Spotlight. The main reason was that we made the assessment that in order to attract international investors, in particular, international institutional investors, being on Nasdaq is helpful, and it also gives a larger, a bigger credibility.
Mm
... to have that brand name. Because of course, in Sweden, Spotlight is well known, and I think Spotlight is a very good place to be, but it's not as well known international.
Okay, very good. I think we're done with the current questions. So just as a reminder, if you have any further questions, please put them in the chat. And you can also put them in German if that makes you feel more comfortable. So let's just wait a minute or two to see if there's anything else coming up. Do you think we missed anything important in terms of questions or points of discussion, Edvard?
Nope, I don't think so. I think yeah, I think I managed to convey what I wanted.
Yeah. So maybe just one final question from my side. So the origins of the company, this, was it first the feather-based protein thing or the PHAs? And, you know, where did it come from? Was it a spin-off from university, or maybe you can just say something, how you originated?
Absolutely. Yeah, so the main, the original technology was the extraction of PHA from PHA producing bacteria. And that was based on, you know, Mohamad spending a lot of years developing various PHA-related technologies, including he did a project for BASF, for instance, around PHAs. And he noticed that what always become the, the kind of what stopped companies from really-
Mm-hmm
... kind of pursuing PHA was the extraction. Because the methods that were available were extremely expensive and very environmentally problematic. So that was kind of the origin of the company, that they found this method to extract it in a better way. He had done actually his master work on feathers. He, you know, once he had a company, he decided to do both, in parallel. It's always been PHA extraction, that has been our main thing. The reason why we keep it in the same company is that it is, you need a similar kind of equipment to do the work. There are a lot of synergies from an equipment side, and you need very similar competencies to develop the technologies as well, so therefore it makes sense.
But I think further down the line, there will be a point where we will spin out either the feather part or the PHA part.
Okay, makes sense. Maybe finally, the question from my side is, do you actually feel that the interest in your company has increased, since the public awareness on this plastics problem has, you know, become more acute?
Yeah, I think public awareness matters less. What it really matters is legislation. So there you can see, so there is a coming EU ban against what's called intentionally added non-biodegradable microplastics, and that has made all the difference. The day after, you know, you, you saw completely different interest from, you know, cosmetic or companies like the cosmetic company, like the chemical company, that is desperate to find solutions to that. So legislation matters much more than, you know, consumer behavior or public opinion. But of course, there is a, you know, there, there is a causal link in both directions between legislation and public opinion.
Yeah, and actually we do have a last-minute entry in the chat room. When do you plan to break even? You have some high-end customers. Are they potential strategic investors?
Yeah, to start with the last, then, definitely yes, either directly into Bioextrax or in a production facility using our technology. Because for instance, the chewing gum company, the amount of material that they will need will be far more than you can produce from one production facility. So of course, there will be a you know interest from them to support the production. We don't publish any financial forecasts. So, now I'm coming back to the question about when do we plan to break even. One industrial scale customer is enough for us to break even. So that, that's what I can say. We're not, you know, we're not selling 1,000 licenses, and that's enough to make us break even. One full scale production using our technology is enough.
Great. Excellent presentation. Thank you very much, Edvard. I'll hand over to you for finishing words, if you want to have any.
Nope, I think I've said enough.
Okay, great. Thanks a lot, and see you, everybody, in five minutes for the next presentation, which will be Hans Tino Hansen on Risk Intelligence. So thanks again, Edvard.
Thank you.