This call is being recorded. Welcome to Q-linea Q2 report 2023. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answer session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star five on their telephone keypad. I will hand the conference over to CEO, Jonas Jarvius, and CFO, Christer Samuelsson. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much for that. Welcome everyone who's listening in to our presentation on earnings and accomplishments during the second quarter of 2023. I will start by showing our disclaimer slide in case me or Christer would make any forward-looking statements during our call today. I wanted to start summarizing the key accomplishments during the first quarter, then go a little bit more into detail around those accomplishments and, of course, press releases, moving into more what we are doing with our commercial efforts. Then, of course, hand over to Christer to talk about the finance position. What we have been doing very actively since end of October last year, is really implementing our new commercialization strategy.
We have seen during the spring, and I will come back to that our commercial coverage has really expanded during the spring. Of course, we also know that it's very important to have customers evaluate ASTar before they buy it, and we're also, of course, actively participating in several of these evaluations. What we've talked about also earlier is that it's our belief that in order to support the sales of ASTar, primarily in the, in the future, is to have health economic outcome research data to support that you may be able to have a cost saving if you implement Rapid AST. Also have to say that we start our lifetime studies very early on this quarter.
Apart from that, we, of course, need to strengthening our commercial team, and we're also strengthening the board in this phase we're in now, moving into commercial activities more widely in Europe and also in the U.S. In the board, Finn Sander Albrechtsen and Karin Fischer has joined the board, and Franco Pellegrini and Jim Kathrein have joined our commercial team, to cover Southern Europe and USA, respectively. I'll come back a little bit more detail about these persons. Of course, very important for us, the U.S. market. We have the discussion with FDA. They required some more extended testing. They want to see more data on the platform. We have now completed all those data that we started off in February, and we are in late phase of preparing a submission to the FDA.
Of course, we then anticipate and hope that the submission would be considered complete, and of course, we can move on closer to come to approval and market clearance in the U.S. Of course, we're also in the middle of a rights issue that was announced 1st of June and approved by EGM, 3rd of July. It's a rights issue of approximately SEK 263 million, which is 99% coverage, which of course, make me very happy. It shows very strong interest in the company. The subscription price has been set to SEK 3 per share. Of course, all trading is actively ongoing right now, from 7th of July up to 18th of July.
We have seen a strong support from our current large shareholders, and of course, Nexttobe, being our biggest shareholders, have also, of course, going in to defend the pro rata, but the loan facility that they offered earlier this year will also act as a guarantee in the rights issue. We have not needed to have an external guarantee commitments, nor remuneration to Nexttobe for their guarantee commitment. Of course, this is an active period, and I look forward to see that transaction coming to a close. Another topic that we also announced earlier this year is, of course, now as we are progressing towards commercial, we put all our efforts in the commercial activities around ASTar. We have also accomplished a number of development activities. We initiated a cost-saving program.
We have now completed that program, it will really focus more on the commercial activities. Of course, still have some development activities left in the company, we do expect to save around 45 million SEK annually, we will see the impact coming out later this year. I'm also very happy to say that we have received positive feedback from staff and from the unions on how the program was implemented by the company. This is, of course, a difficult thing to do, but the right thing to do was. I also want to take the opportunity to wish all the persons that now have left Q-linea, hope they have a bright future outside our company, and maybe we'll meet again in the future.
If we then go into a bit more of the detailed news flow that we've seen during the second quarter, I will not go into detail here, but you have it for reference. I think, as you can see here, it's basically all about commercial traction. We want to cover more grounds in Europe, and we can also see that Prolab, our first distributor, has really made a tremendous progress in the United Kingdom, with not only ordering a evaluation system, but also implementing and starting their own evaluation. I think that is very promising for the rest of this year and primarily for 2024. You can see here that the coverage goes down, of course, beyond UK to Norway to France.
I think this is, of course not, and we will continue to add partnership in Europe, in other regions, and also, of course, for the U.S. That will be more news to come from the company as I expected. We had a couple of things which I wanted to include here after the second quarter, and that's really that we're now strengthening our commercial team, both in the southern European market and in the important US market. This news came out quite recent, actually. If we take a look at the persons coming into the company, we look at the board first. Finn Sander Albrechtsen, I mean, he has a very renowned and good knowledge in the field.
He was also active VP of R&D and business development for the microbiology division at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Of course, we met Finn earlier at that time at Thermo Fisher, and I'm also very pleased to see now that as our partnership ended, Finn would like to join us in the board and strengthen the board. Very happy about that. The same with Karin Fischer. She has a very good global experience from strategic and operative positions, and a very strong sales focus, and I think that is really gonna strengthening us now as we move along with increased coverage and also finding out more distributors throughout the world.
If we look at the more the commercial team, the day-to-day operation, Franco Pellegrini joined, and will cover basic Italy and the southern part of Europe and also into the Benelux area. He has also had senior roles in Thermo Fisher Scientific over the last 13 years. Franco has seen ASTar during his Thermo Fisher year, and of course, after that, he wanted to join the Q-linea team and continue developing the commercial efforts around ASTar. I'm really happy about that. Likewise, in the U.S., we saw Jim Kathrein coming in here into July. Jim has really a solid background in infectious disease, microbiology field, both in BioFire but also bioMérieux.
Of course, on our agenda now is before we have an FDA approval of our product, we really want to prepare the market before doing evaluation studies, assessing customers, and try to build a pre-market value for the company, basically. We then move a little bit briefly into what we're doing, and of course, the first product is focused around sepsis or bloodstream infections. As you know, it's the most common cause of death in our hospitals, the number 1 cost driver in the U.S. healthcare system, and time to correct treatment is critical. Of course, these patients have, if they have a bacteremia, we want to fight that with antibiotics, and to find that correct antibiotic as fast as possible, and this is where ASTar comes into the picture.
When we look at the traditional workflow, on the top part, it's a multi-day, multi-step process, and that means that many of these patients are on inappropriate therapy for sometimes several days, and that results in very poor outcome for these patient groups. What we want to do with ASTar is enable that answer to come much faster, but also at the same time, reduce the workload for the staff in the lab. Simple, less than 2 minutes to start in ASTar, and then you have the answer within 6 hours. This is really our focus, and now we start seeing customer using it, and we got a very, very good response from early doctors and from early customers. Not only that it's easy to integrate in the workflow, it's easy to use, but also the coverage of our panel is very, very high.
The likelihood of if you load a sample into ASTar, we will act upon it, is very high, above 95% in these studies. We think this is a very good base, having a system that delivers high quality data, that it's simple to use, and now also, of course, extend our coverage with our distributors to be able to provide ASTar to several customers in Europe and in the future in the U.S. We look at the market overall, we believe it to be around 20 million blood cultures. There will be a selection of these blood cultures, maybe around 4 million tests initially for these unique, positive blood sets.
When we look at the market, we see there's a handful of credible companies, that we see as colleagues, or maybe competitors, depending on if we find the same customers. That gives an indication of maybe a yearly market of 1 million tests only for blood. We do see that this market grows with around 4%-6% CAGR. If we then move on to our updated growth market strategy, we really see it as 2 phases. Where we are today is build a foundation for future commercial success, and that's what we are doing this year and plan next year. Then, of course, we want to accelerate growth and market expansion, both with new expansion, but also expanding their product roadmap. Today, we're really focused on customer experience, doing evaluation studies.
We want to build a strong health economic scientific evidence for the product, which I think is gonna be important in the future. Of course, we need to have a broad commercial coverage in Europe and in the U.S. We are actively involved in trade shows, doing this type of evaluation studies, and now running our health economic studies. There's a lot of activities, but I think they're all served to have a very successful 2024. On the health economics and outcomes research study, our lifetime study, we could enroll the first patient now in mid-June. It will be around 160 prospective ICU patients, tested for gram-negative bacteremia. It will include both adults and children. We have four major Italian hospitals participating in the study, and we approximate it to run for approximately one year.
We do want to see interim data coming out maybe end of this year, beginning of next year, to give an indication on the study. Of course, we want to investigate how ASTar impact times optimum therapy, ICU and hospital length of stay, the duration of the hospital stay, and of course, cost of antibiotic therapy. It's a multicenter study, and I'm really happy that it finally got started. I was just sort of wrapping up my part of the presentation, really wanted to go into our focus right now, it's really focusing on ASTar for this year, I will look forward to extend panels.
We do have, of course, technologies such as Podler and others in late stage development, and of course, that's something we want to come up with back again into the future. That will conclude my part of the presentation, and I will now hand over to Christer, who will go through the financial numbers for the second quarter. Please go ahead, Christer.
Thank you, Jonas. First, I just want to repeat it, two important milestones we reached during the second quarter. Jonas has already talked about them, but they are important financially. The cost saving program, very positive now that we have concluded these activities, and we have also taken cost in Q2, as we have said in the report, and we will see impact on this already from Q3. Secondly, obviously, the ongoing guaranteed rights issue, which will strengthen both equity and liquidity. I will get back on that one. Now, on some details, as you have seen, we have a small tailspin in Q2, which is really positive, although lower than in Q2 last year, but still.
The result in Q2 is better than last year's quarter, but in line with first quarter this year. Going ahead with the balance sheet items, we had SEK 25 million on the bank account as of June 30. That includes a loan, where we have a loan from our principal owner of SEK 87 million. Also the inventories are in line with the quarter last year. All these numbers are as planned. There are no things that stick out as we didn't expect. Looking at the cash flow activities, we had a positive development of the working capital in Q2, which explains the better quarter number as compared to last year and also as compared to first quarter this year.
Our investing activities are in fixed assets in our production and development, we do not invest in any financial assets this year, so far. A cash flow from financing activities of plus SEK 60 million is due to our loan in the second quarter from our main owner of SEK 62 million, there are some IFRS 16 activities as well that lowers that amount. Again, I want to highlight that the rights issue, together with the funds available today, will make us have run the business for 12 months ahead, which is very positive. Also, obviously, the equity will be strengthened very much. Looking at the rights issue, the liquidity will be strengthened by some SEK 175 million before transaction costs. Jonas, please go ahead.
Thank you very much, Christer's. With that, we'd like to conclude our presentation. We'd like to open up for questions and answers.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Johan Unnérus from Redeye. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my questions. Johan Unnérus here. I hope I, you can hear me reasonably well.
Of course, it's good, Johan Unnérus.
Excellent. Yes, and we noticed that you have this testing order from the U.K. distributor. Is there something to be said about the outlook and pipeline of further ASTar tests and demo orders?
Thanks for the question, Johan. Well, I mean, I think we signed up Prolabs in March, so I think to see these first 2 orders were very positive. Of course, what's happening right now is that these systems are put to use at British hospitals, and of course, being an evaluation. The purpose, really, of the demo evaluation system is, of course, to be able to move them from 1 hospital to another, so you can have sort of more customers test and try it out. I would not say I would expect for more evaluation system this year. I think they have enough for a start.
What we do, of course, look forward to is if we can see some of these evaluations turn into customers this year. Then, of course, we would see more commercial orders. That would probably be my outlook for this year.
Thanks, that's useful. Your sort of, guide and, yeah, you can call it guide, I presume, of, sort of sales and roughly in line with last year, given the rather soft start of this year with, testing and building this framework for further growth and experience in the market. It's slightly challenging to meet this. You have to make up for the first half of the year now.
Right. No, I think what we said was the guidance was to expect similar numbers this year as last year, and we still are firm according to that. Of course, now, when we do sign distributors, it will take some time for training before we see an effect of that coming into sales. As we also guided early on this year, was that it will be a backloaded year for many reasons. But so far, I think we see good traction. We also responded to our first tender in Italy. We did that a couple of months ago.
I would say that, yes, it's gonna be a backloaded year. A lot of the activities we're doing now, is really to have a strong 2024, when our distributors are, of course, more to the number, but they're also much more active in their respective markets. I still look, similar as next year is our... We don't make any change there.
Also a related question, then you see the good momentum in signing additional distributors and of course, U.K. and France is very important. Spain is included, I presume, and you're very active in Italy. Have you got a pipeline and discussions of additional distributors?
Yes, we do. We have a pipeline of distributors, and we are in discussion with several. What we want to do is we want to make very sure that the one we do select are properly qualified for the process. To us, it's really important to find the right distributors, and we have a very good level of interest in being partnering with us and distribute ASTar in Europe, but also elsewhere. We do expect to see more news and more distribution partnership being announced during this year as well. We have not stopped, but I think we have covered a couple of real key geographies in Europe for early adopter size and, of course, problems with A, AMR. I'm happy where we are, but we are not sitting still.
Excellent. Finally then from my part, our part, U.S. is, of course, very important, and you're in the process of compiling analytics and, some additional tests and supporting the application process. What can we expect time-wise on that side?
We are now sort of in late stage preparing of the, the new application or updated application. Of course, we want to submit that. We expect that to be in the near term. Of course, we do assume that after discussion with FDA, that they will consider the submission as complete. Of course, we want to see us move into the autumn in discussion towards approval. To give a guaranteed timeline, is, of course, very difficult because we know that FDA has been very busy and very occupied. We have a good discussion, so I'm very positive about that. I would more like to say that if it's on this end of, New Year's Eve, I would be very, very happy to see, to see the answer coming out in the U.S.
Nothing we can guarantee, of course, as we are dependent on availability of the FDA.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thank you very much, everyone.
There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Thank you very much for that. I would like to thank everyone who's listening in, and perhaps someone will listen afterwards on the web. I would just like to summarize this quarter as a very active commercial expansion quarter, both regarding staff, evaluations, and reach. I do look forward to see the next quarter being a bit more positive on sales. As I said, you should expect it to be a backloaded year. I think we are moving quite fast in the water and in the right direction. Of course, if you haven't subscribed for shares in the rights issue, I would, of course, encourage everyone to do so. I think we want to conclude that on a positive note.
With that, I would say thank you from me and Christer, and wish you all a great summer. Goodbye.
Thank you.