Vimian Group AB (publ) (STO:VIMIAN)
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Earnings Call: Q2 2022

Aug 24, 2022

Operator

Good morning. Welcome to the Vimian Group Q2 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in the listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Fredrik Ullman, CEO. Please go ahead.

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

Thank you. Welcome to Vimian second quarter earnings call. I'm Fredrik Ullman, CEO, and with me here today, Henrik Halvorsen, our CFO. As usual, I'll go through the presentation and then open up for Q&A. If we move on to slide two. Before jumping into the Q2 results, I would just love to give you a brief overview of where we stand today as a group and what we've achieved in the last year. Today, over 90% of our group is focused on companion animals. At IPO, we were 450 employees. Now, a year later, we're about 700 in the group across the globe. Since the IPO, Nextmune, our largest segment, has added a fourth business area with several therapeutic areas.

We are now launching new innovation projects as well in the pipeline that are quite promising. Within Movora, we've actually become the number one player in the world through multiple acquisitions and integration of those into one commercial setup. Within VetFamily, we've doubled the number of members, and we've entered North America, and we've recently made our first investment in a digital platform to start digitize our service platform, which will also unlock more potential for cross vertical synergies. In INDICAL, in our diagnostics business, where we've had most headwinds, we have now recently launched a new solution within poultry, which we have developed with a strategic partner, Evonik, for the last three years, and that is now in the launching phase.

On top of that, we have added two new technology platforms into the diagnostic R&D pipeline, which I'm very excited about. All in all, we have broadened our geographic reach. We have strengthened our positions globally with broader portfolios in the segments that we are in. We have strengthened our tech and R&D pipeline while also doubling the company in the last 18 months. If we move over to slide three and we look at our current global footprint. In the second quarter, 40% of sales were in the U.S., versus 48% in the first quarter. That is due to the annual order program in our orthopedic business that drives a very strong Q1. 52% in Europe and 8% in APAC. Let's move on to slide five.

Moving over to the second quarter, I'd like to present a few key highlights before I hand over to Henrik for the financials. All in all, the group shows resilience in historically challenging macroeconomic times. In some geographies and segments, we are experiencing headwinds. Italy is one where gas prices have gone through the roof and families have simply less disposable income. The livestock diagnostic space is under pressure due to the Ukraine war and the situation with China closing their border for imports. If we look at 90% of the company that we own today, which is companion animal related, we actually grow and include all the companies we own today.

We actually grow double-digit in the quarter, and that is really comforting. Henrik will go through this in more detail. As you know, Veterinary Services entered the U.S., and I see that as unlocking more and more potential for us in the U.S. We've also started to work together across verticals in the U.S. with Vertical Vet that we recently acquired. The Heiland acquisition is a very strong tech platform for purchasing. So it's a platform that enables veterinary clinics to ease their purchasing through the platform. They have 1,700 clinics on the platform in Germany. We are already strong in Germany, but very little overlap with them.

This is something we see a lot of potential in, not just in Germany, but also rolling it out more globally. In MedTech, we continue to strengthen our leading position by complementing with more product portfolios and asset deals. We have started to roll out our commercial strategy with One Movora. Looking at the innovation projects in allergy and orthopedics, we have delivered strong results in the quarter. We've really taken an innovation leading position, especially in orthopedics, but I'll come back to that later. As you know, we work in advanced care, and education is very totally key to our business. We've been very active in the quarter. We have trained almost 5,000 veterinary professionals during the quarter at both online and offline events.

All in all, I'm satisfied with the progress on the operational side, and how the teams are working. They are starting to work also much closer together. Of course, we have some headwinds in some segments, but I'm very excited actually about the future that we have in front of us. With that, I would love to hand over to Henrik to walk you through the numbers.

Henrik Halvorsen
CFO, Vimian Group

Thanks, Fredrik. If we move to page six, we have strong revenue growth in the quarter of 70%. Revenues are at EUR 67 million in the quarter, and that's up from EUR 39 million last year. We had an organic growth of 1%, and if we exclude livestock, which has been facing headwinds globally, we are at 5.2%. Our organic growth only accounts for companies that we have owned for at least 12 months. It's actually less than half of this, of the company that goes into our organic growth definition. If we look at the pro forma organic growth, meaning all the companies that we currently own, we were at 7.3% in the quarter.

If we exclude livestock, which faces these headwinds, then we are at 10.8%, so the double digits that Fredrik mentioned before. This double-digit growth shows the value that we can create through acquisitions. If we look a bit deeper at the reported organic growth, so it amounted to 1% in the quarter. There are some impacts in MedTech, for instance, where the annual order program, which was very successful in Q1 of this year, shifted sales to Q1. We also have some backlog following the integration of some of the acquisitions that we've done recently. This backlog, we expect to ship out in the second half of this year. In the Specialty Pharma segment, we saw lower growth in Italy.

Italy is a market that has really faced cost increases also in energy, and this is hitting the consumers quite hard. The Italian market makes up a significant share of Specialty Pharma in our definition of organic growth. In diagnostics, we continue to see the headwinds of COVID sales phasing out. On a positive note, it's very encouraging to see the strong growth in Veterinary Services, which have had a few slower quarters. That's very encouraging to see. The acquired growth in the quarter was 64.1%. That's mainly driven by Veterinary Services and Specialty Pharma, but also good M&A performance in the MedTech segment. We also had a positive impact from currencies due to the strong US dollar.

If we look at Adjusted EBITDA, we had EUR 17.7 million in the quarter. That's up from EUR 12.2 million, same quarter last year. We had a margin of 26.4%. That's down a bit from 30.8%, same quarter last year. Main driver of this is the consolidation of new acquired companies which have a different margin profile than the legacy companies. We feel confident that we will create a lot of value through these acquisitions over time. We've also invested in the organization in the segments to enable future growth, so strengthening the platforms. We also have a higher central cost compared to what we had in Q1, sorry, Q2 of last year.

Last but not least, we've also invested in growth, for instance, new markets in Veterinary Services, which comes at an upfront cost where the benefits come later. But we are happy to see solid margins in the legacy parts of Specialty Pharma and MedTech, also in this quarter. If we look at the sequential growth, it's down a bit from 67.9% to 67%, and that's mainly due to the annual order program in Q1 in Movora and follows the pattern also that we saw last year. If we turn to page seven, if we look at the pro forma performance of Vimian. We've more or less doubled Vimian over the last 18 months. At the end of Q2, we were at EUR 270 million of pro forma revenue.

That includes all acquisitions at the end of Q2. If we also include the acquisitions after Q2, for instance, Heiland, but also others, we are at EUR 277 million on a pro forma basis at the end of Q2. We had an Adjusted EBITDA end of Q2 of EUR 80 million and a margin of 29.5%. This margin is down a bit, and that mainly reflects the margin profile of these acquired companies. With that, I'll hand it back over to you, Fredrik.

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

Thank you, Henrik. If we move on to slide eight, and we look at our Specialty Pharma business. Here, we continue to strengthen our positions, but the Italian market is under pressure, as you heard from Henrik. This is in large part what causes the organic growth slight decline. We continue to grow our market positions in Italy, though, the market is down in Italy more than we are. It is challenging conditions, but we are focusing on gaining market shares, and we are. The margin difference between this and last year's quarters is Global One, which has a slightly different profit profile and of course, lower revenues in Italy.

We continue to deliver on our strategic ambition to shift from distributors to direct sales in key markets. In the second quarter, we integrated Dermoscent products into our direct sales forces in U.K., Scandinavia, and Netherlands. Over time, we expect that to create also operational leverage and improved margins. We've done a lot of progress on the innovation side. We reached the first milestone in our allergy vaccine development together with the biotech company, ANGANY. Laboratory dogs have been successfully immunized with our new vaccine without negative side effects and actually first positive signs. We expect the next milestone around year-end. This is to be commercialized early as 2025.

On the diagnostic side within allergy, still within Nextmune, we entered a new partnership with a human health diagnostic partner to get access to their diagnostic technology and transfer it from the human side to the veterinary side. I would like to give you a little bit more color around that technology on the next page. If you move to slide nine. We're actually developing the world's most advanced and accurate veterinary allergy test. This is a molecular allergy test, and that gives us the possibility to bring higher specificity, better ability to detect more specific allergens, and also an increased ease of use for general practitioners. Short- term, we see limited financial impact as it will initially replace existing allergy tests within Nextmune.

We see this as untapped more potential and white space in allergy. If we move on to slide 10 and we look at our MedTech segment. In MedTech, we continue to strengthen our market positions in global orthopedics. We are clearly the number one player here. We see this impact on growth in Q2 as explained by the annual order program. If we look at the first half of the year, we're growing 10% organically, which is above the market growth. The margin versus previous year reflects the full consolidation of the three distributors in the U.K., France, and Australia, New Zealand, with different margin profiles. As we grow the business, we expect to see operational leverage also there.

The focus in MedTech in the second part of the year is really to roll out all products in all regions. Get all our companies access to all products within their sales organizations, and of course, continue to focus on our educational events to drive growth and drive penetration as the main bottleneck in MedTech is really access to specialized surgeons. On the innovation side, we've also completed the first surgeries with our new 3D-printed implants with successful outcome. I would love to show you a few pictures of what that looks like. If you go to slide 11, you have here three patients. The first one is Willow. It's a pot-bellied pig and who needed a left elbow replacement.

His owner flew him in from Long Island to the Midwest and got the first-in-the-world elbow implant that we have developed in-house and printed in-house that you can see in the middle, highly advanced geometry that cannot be done without 3D printing. So far, we're the only ones in the world who do this. The second patient is Leo, a Labrador, who needed a right ankle replacement. Here you also see the relatively complex implant in the middle that Leo got. Last but not least, Duncan, a miniature horse with a left hip replacement that we have printed also within our facilities. This technology really unlocks now completely new avenues that have never been really done before.

That's quite exciting and puts us on the forefront of innovation within veterinary orthopedics. If you move on to slide 12 and we look at our Veterinary Services, it's really exciting to see the momentum the new management has created here. We see strong organic growth of 22% in the quarter. We have implemented the new tiered membership model, and that has also attracted new supplier agreements and partners that are coming into play and having that positive impact. We have strengthened the team. Alireza has taken over as CEO, but we've also strengthened the team, his team. The platform is now also starting to develop into Eastern Europe and Latin America, focused on Brazil.

We expect to start recruiting new members in the second half of the year as we've created the infrastructure in the first half of the year to make that happen. Looking ahead, the key focus now of the team is really to continue to upgrade members to higher tiered membership plans, which creates more value for them and for us. It's also to leverage the heiland.com platform that we have in Germany, bring the synergies within Germany with the platform. Of course, we're in parallel looking to roll it out into more geographies and drive incremental growth, but also bring on our other Vimian products in the other verticals onto the Heiland platform for ease of purchasing to all clinics.

Quite exciting journey at VetFamily as well. Moving on to slide 13 and looking at our diagnostics business, which is 7% of the company, here we faced headwinds from COVID, sales phasing out. Since the Ukraine war, the whole livestock industry has seen unprecedented challenges. We expect that to come back as feed, you know, prices are going to stabilize or even come down. We remain confident in the segment's long-term attractiveness. I've spoken to a number of swine producers, and they said the last thing they will cut back on is really the animal health. Short- term, we're seeing this headwind.

We are refocusing our business a lot into preventive health to be less outbreak geared to outbreaks. We're focusing more on poultry, and here we have launched a strategic partnership we started developing with Evonik actually three years ago, and we have developed now a full product solution that goes into their precision farming software. That's very exciting as well and focusing really on the reduction of antibiotic use in animal production for the future. We're also launching a product range in companion animals for rapid tests in companion animals later this year. Moving on to slide 14, looking at our acquisitions to date, we have 12 acquisitions year- to- date.

In Q2, we welcomed Vertical Vet in the U.S. with John Wagner and his team, two product portfolios, those were asset deals from Everost and Spectrum, and we acquired two clinics within the group. Since the end of Q2, we have also signed an agreement to acquire BOVA Australia and we acquired the online platform Heiland, as I mentioned, and NGD, again, a product range in orthopedics. If we move on to slide 15, I'd just like to give you a quick some color on BOVA Australia. This is the sister company to BOVA UK that we acquired earlier this year, and that is focused on customized pharmaceuticals, which is a market that we're very excited about.

BOVA UK sees strong growth, and so does the Australian sister company. We're also very happy to deepen our relationship with Nick BOVA and his team, who are truly impressive entrepreneurs and a great addition to our group, both in terms of products and knowledge and innovation power. We expect this to be consolidated into Vimian during the first quarter of 2023. That will be around EUR 8 million in revenue, with margins roughly in line with the Specialty Pharma segment. What is also interesting to see is that when we have integrated the Australian business here, we will be at 40% prescription drugs within our Specialty Pharma business. Moving on to slide 16. Heiland is a platform that has 1,700 clinics purchasing through their platform in Germany today. It's Germany only so far.

We have for a long period seen a need to digitalize our service offerings to clinics to make their lives easier. We have evaluated the different opportunities to do that with an in-house development or an acquisition. We, when we discovered Heiland and were able to also look at their software code, we realized that this is highly sophisticated and very well done. This gives us a stronger position in Germany, but also a very scalable platform that we can then roll out into more geographies in the future. As I mentioned before, bring in you know more products to that platform, which is of course very interesting.

With that, I would love to hand over to Henrik and speak about the financials in more detail.

Henrik Halvorsen
CFO, Vimian Group

Thanks, Fredrik. If we turn to page 18, as we mentioned, we saw strong revenue growth in the quarter of 70%, and 62% year-to-date. Operating profit of the group is up significantly, both in the quarter and year-to-date. We had a profit before tax of EUR 11.1 million. In this, there's a positive impact of EUR 3.2 million from net financial items. The breakdown of this is financing costs of EUR -2.5 million. Adjustments to earn-outs including discounting effects had a positive impact of EUR 6.6 million, but we maintain a conservative approach to this. We had a negative impact of EUR 1 million from currencies. Profit for the period came in at EUR 10 million.

That's up from EUR -3 million, the same quarter last year. If we look at year- to- date, profit is up by around 160%. The tax rate year- to- date was at 23%. We still have a conservative approach to deferred tax assets. We will review these deferred tax assets going forward, but we will also maintain a conservative approach as always. If we turn to page 19, we saw a big uplift in cash flow from operating activities before changes in working capital. This was up by EUR 6 million. This is then balanced by increases in working capital, and this mainly relates to inventory buildup in MedTech and Specialty Pharma to secure supply and lock in prices.

Cash flow from investing activities mainly reflect acquisitions, as do financing activities. You may remember that we drew the funding for Vertical Vet at the end of Q1, but paid out to the former owners in Q2. That explains sort of the imbalance in the second quarter. We had a cash conversion of 32% in the quarter and 55% year- to- date. This is down a bit, and that is mainly driven by the impact in the inventory buildup in Specialty Pharma and MedTech. If we turn to page 20, we had a cash position at the end of the quarter at EUR 61.6 million and a net debt of EUR 340 million.

This increase in net debt reflects the very strong M&A performance that we've seen over the last few quarters. Leverage came in at 4.3x . That's up from 3.6x at the end of Q1. Leverage is higher than our long-term target, which is 3x subject to flexibility to finance acquisitions. But we do have headroom to our covenants. We also see that leverage can be decreased through organic cash generation if needed. We do also have very strong support from our core owners, and we do also have a mandate from the AGM to use shares to finance attractive acquisitions. We are confident that we can also continue to finance attractive acquisitions going forward. With that, I'll hand back over to you, Fredrik.

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

Thank you, Henrik. Looking at slide 21. July, August summer periods are usually a bit slower. For the group, we see positive but single-digit organic growth in the summer, but we continue to strengthen and grow our market positions across the globe. Overall, we see that the animal health market continues to grow despite challenging macro situations. I think long-term, the industry trend with humanization of pets and advancement in veterinary medicine remains intact. For our part, we stick to our strategy agenda, you know, to give more pets access to advanced care, educate veterinarians to be able to treat those animals with new technologies.

We've built now a platform in the last 18 months that is far stronger than it was a year and a half ago, bigger with more technology, more possibilities. What I find extremely exciting, I was in the U.S. just before the summer working with all the teams from Vertical Vet, Nextmune, Movora within Companion Animals, and looking at how they see the synergies between the verticals and how they're starting now to work together, and addressing the market together is very exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing that potential being unlocked also in more geographies.

I think that we are very well positioned actually in this environment since we are only focused on advanced care, chronic diseases in an aging pet population and with a great team and great products. With that, I would love to open up for questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your questions, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from the line of Kristofer with Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Kristofer Liljeberg
Head of Research, Carnegie

Yeah, thank you. Good morning. It's Kristofer Liljeberg from Carnegie. I have three questions. First on your commentary about the market organic growth in the summer. How should we interpret that? Is it so that we should assume Vimian to grow in line with the market or do you see possibilities for you to grow faster on an organic growth basis? Secondly, what should we expect when it comes to working capital in the second quarter or in the second half of the year? Do you expect to release some of the inventories or will you continue to hold them maybe higher than normal inventory level? My last question, if you could quantify the COVID impact on diagnostic sales.

I guess it must have been quite a bit lower than what we have seen in recent quarters. Thank you.

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

All right. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Kristofer. On the organic growth, knowing that we don't know what the market will do within the quarter. We don't have data on exactly how the market develops in the quarter, but we expect our organic growth to be in the single digits, you know, mid-single digit, I would say, organic growth. On the inventory levels, as Henrik said. The two reasons why there is higher inventories, one is really to secure supplies, especially in Global One, we had issues to actually supply. We had supply chain issues to feed the growth of Global One in the first half of the year. I don't expect that to continue to grow, but rather to start to decrease.

Within Movora, we proactively increased the inventory to secure pricing ahead of inflation of nickel, which we expected to drive cost increases in stainless steel, which is a primary material we use in the implants. That was a proactive decision. We expect that to go down. We only increased inventory of products that are high turnover products to not have the risk of sitting on any inventory. That I expect also to progressively go down. Those are the real the main drivers of inventory increases or and net working capital. You asked about COVID. The impact in Q2 was much lower than in Q1. We are now pretty much out of COVID sales.

The sales of INDICAL is now relatively stable over the last few months. We're actually seeing some growth in the core in Germany here in the third quarter, and I mean, we expect to see growth coming in next year, but this is. We're still kind of comparing to quarters last year that had higher sales, both in COVID and in livestock that have not come back. There's the China effect of ASF, so African Swine Fever diagnostics last year. And also same thing in Thailand, where they had an outbreak last year and a lot of the swine population has died, and now there's lower demand.

Now it's relatively stable, and I expect innovation projects to launch here in the second half of the year to start to drive growth into 2023. We also, as I mentioned, have two very interesting technology platforms in the pipeline that I also expect to start to have impact next year.

Henrik Halvorsen
CFO, Vimian Group

Kristofer, to put some numbers to the COVID impact. Last year, we were at around 20% of diagnostic sales into COVID, and this quarter we are at around 5%. We did see an uptick around New Year this year when Omicron hit. As Fredrik mentioned, we are more or less zero COVID sales at the moment.

Kristofer Liljeberg
Head of Research, Carnegie

Okay. Could I ask on this topic of cost inflation? What's your visibility and what have you done to increase prices and what have you done so far?

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

In Nextmune, we've increased between 5% and 7% the prices. In Global One for instance, there will be a mid-year increase. In Movora, we increased by 6% end of last year. We did a price increase of another 5% here, first of August, and we expect to see another one at the end of the year. VetFamily, I mean, they benefit from the pricing power of their partners. That doesn't. They don't have to increase prices since they get a provision also from our partners based on their revenue. In INDICAL, there we've had relatively high prices, and that's where the competitive pressure is higher coming out of COVID.

That's where we haven't passed on really price increases, but we also haven't had any cost inflation there.

Henrik Halvorsen
CFO, Vimian Group

Obviously inflation is on everyone's mind for good reason. We obviously monitor and talk to our companies continuously about this and the opportunities to pass cost increases along to customers with midyear price increases. One area where cost has increased over the year is logistics of transportation costs. Where we can, we also try to invoice that directly to the customer, so pass that through.

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

Another thing I just want to mention is that, of course, now that we've done a lot of M&A, we've done more than 30 acquisitions over the last year. We still look at M&A, of course, for strategic deals, but the focus I have at this point is really on bringing those companies more together, and as we go into 2023, be smart about where we can also drive growth synergies and cost synergies. Are there things that we're outsourcing today that we could bring in-house and do it cheaper because we now reach scale? So those are all initiatives that we have. We haven't even scratched the surface as to what the size of the group we have now actually enables us to reach.

Kristofer Liljeberg
Head of Research, Carnegie

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. A reminder to all the participants that you can press star and one to ask a question. Once again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. The next question comes from the line of Patrik Ling with DNB Markets. Please go ahead.

Patrik Ling
Senior Analyst, DNB Markets

Okay, guys, just a short question. Could you just remind us on how much COVID sales you had during the second half last year? I mean, Henrik, you said that you had approximately or less than 5% of sales in diagnostics this quarter was related to COVID. Can you just remind us how the comparables look now when we move into the second half of the year?

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

Sure. In the second quarter of last year, we were at around 20%, and that was trending down a bit. In the fourth quarter when Omicron hit, we also saw an increase of those in Q4 and Q1. Down a bit from the 20% in Q3, I would say, and then up a bit. It's really after, should I say, midway through quarter one this year that it really declined.

Patrik Ling
Senior Analyst, DNB Markets

Is it fair to assume that on average between 15%-20% of sales in second half last year would be related to COVID?

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

Let me check. I'm checking it as we speak, Patrik. Yeah, assume order of magnitude 20%, a bit more than 20% of sales in Q3 and Q4 to be conservative.

Patrik Ling
Senior Analyst, DNB Markets

Okay, great. Thank you. Also a follow-up on the previous question from Kristofer regarding your comments on mid-single digit organic growth now during the summer period. Was that during Q2, or does it include August, or was that actually your expectations for the?

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

No, that was July, August.

Patrik Ling
Senior Analyst, DNB Markets

July, August. Your expectations for the full second half of this year, is that to remain on the same, given sort of the macro uncertainty and the way the world looks right now? Would you say that mid-single digit is a reasonable organic growth rate for the company as it looks right now?

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

I mean, that's not our ambition, but this is what we're seeing, I think, in July, you know, as we've moved into Q3. As I said, you know, there are some markets that are more affected, like Italy, by the inflation. As things stabilize, I don't, you know, I think that we will start to grow faster again. That's for sure our ambition.

Patrik Ling
Senior Analyst, DNB Markets

Could I also ask, I mean?

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

There's also just so you understand the dynamics, there are some products that are sold through wholesalers in Mexico as well. That when wholesalers have held a lot of inventory within throughout the COVID time because of supply chain issues, and you know, as the consumer climate is becoming a bit more nervous, some of these wholesalers are reducing inventories. That, of course, creates a bit of a bullwhip effect in the supply chains and in the value chains and of course impacts us in certain areas short-term. That's kind of a reset of inventories in the value chain.

Patrik Ling
Senior Analyst, DNB Markets

Okay. Last question. I mean, also coming back to countries like Italy, where we've seen, you know, gas prices go through the roof and a little bit like that. I mean, Russia invaded Ukraine six months ago today, and I mean, this, a lot of the changes came quite rapidly, both on inflation and war and the gas prices and so on. Have you seen any change in the consumer behavior that they are, you know, have a knee-jerk reaction to cut back on this type of spending, but over time that they are actually coming back? Are you still sort of in the territory where you don't really know where the consumers will end up in the end?

Have you seen any trend shift now when we're moving into August, for example?

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

It depends a bit on the country, but when we look at clinic visits, for instance, they are down in certain countries, so people go less to the vet. You know, I think Italy was 2% down. Alireza, is that right? Roughly. That is, of course. I think that people are a bit more selective as to, you know, are they going for more urgent care or more severe things than they might have done before. I cannot give you a global view on that at this point. We think that among the sectors within animal health, we are relatively well-positioned because we still see long waiting lists for surgery, for orthopedics, for instance.

We're not seeing, you know, a negative trend in the core. I mean, it's lower growth, but it's still strong.

Patrik Ling
Senior Analyst, DNB Markets

Okay, great. Thank you very much, guys. That's all for me.

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. As there are no further questions, I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Fredrik Ullman for closing remarks.

Fredrik Ullman
CEO, Vimian Group

Thank you. I just wanted to make sure that you, sorry, Patrik. 22% in H2 was the number for COVID, so you know that. Thank you very much everyone for having attended this conference call. As mentioned before, I think I'm very excited about the progress of the company. Of course, a bit disappointed by the 1% organic growth in the quarter, but it is for explainable reasons. Actually, factors that we cannot control. We are now focusing the company on bringing the companies together that we own, getting the teams to work together. I'm very excited about the future, actually, both the mid and long- term.

I think we also show strong, you know, high level of resilience in also a very complicated market that is highly volatile and hard to predict. I think we have a fantastic company and we're all excited about continuing our journey of building one of the best animal health companies in the world with also very strong support from Fidelio and the board. With that, I would like to thank you so much for attending and have a great day.

Operator

Thank you. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may disconnect.

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