Thank you everyone for joining me. I'm Brian Pedlar. I'm the CEO of Covalon Technologies. Thank you to those in the room and those that are online on the podcast. Wanna remind you, we are covered by a safe harbor statement for everything in this presentation. Covalon is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol COV and in the OTCQX market under CVALF. We are around 55% ownership is with insiders. Our last reported balance sheet, we had about $14 million of cash on the balance sheet and no debt. At Covalon, we are not just another medical device company. Covalon is really focused on helping those patients who are at highest risk to heal better, heal in a compassionate way, and to heal in a pain-free manner.
Our products are really focused at helping them to prevent infection, to help wounds heal, and also to coat medical devices of big medical companies. We're really a company that has an incredible portfolio of intellectual property. Our mission is to provide innovative and cost-effective healthcare solutions that reduce pain, prevent infection, and promote healing. If you can see the picture on the right-hand side there, that's a patient that is taking the benefit of one of our antimicrobial dressings that just had open heart surgery at one of the major hospitals, children's hospitals in the United States. If we are successful in our mission, we'll become a leading provider of compassionate care products and solutions that help patients heal faster and heal better.
In 2023, and just to remind those of you who don't know, our year-end is September 30. We are just finishing up getting ready to report our Q2 of our fiscal 2023. So far, with our Q1 reported, we're off to a strong growth. We've been investing in our sales and marketing initiatives to drive aggressive growth in the United States. We currently have about 70 major hospitals in the U.S. that are using Covalon. We have three really strong in-infection prevention products that those hospitals are using. Our goal for 2025 is to reach 400 major hospitals in the U.S. So far, we've got a really strong footprint in pediatrics. Why pediatrics?
Those patients are very much at risk of infection, but also those facilities are the ones that seem to move faster to adopt new technology and products. We've got a pretty good foothold. We're in about 20% of the major pediatric hospitals in the U.S. today. And we see the opportunity to take a number one market share position with our product set in those hospitals. Right now we're in six of the top 10 pediatric hospitals, they use Covalon products. We also sell internationally in both our infection prevention and wound care products, and that we see growing about 25% through to the end of 2025 on an annual basis. Why does that matter? What does Covalon do? How does that impact the healthcare system?
Well, right now, infections. Think of... I'm sure everybody knows somebody who went into the hospital for a routine procedure. Maybe it wasn't so routine, maybe it was cancer treatment, ended up getting an infection while they were there and died. Those in the United States are called uninsured infections. If somebody gets an infection in the U.S. while they are undergoing a procedure, insurance doesn't cover that cost. That's covered by the hospital. What happened during COVID is all the monitoring was suspended for those kinds of infections, bloodstream infections, because people were focused on COVID. Naturally, when you don't monitor and measure, you end up with a problem. Infections now in bloodstreams in ICU units in the United States are up 63%. That's huge. That's a big deal. Those are they're uninsured.
The current standard of care products that are being used in most hospitals are just not effective. That's been shown time and time again, they're not effective at helping to prevent these infections, whether it's a surgical site infection or a vascular access bloodstream infection. To put that into some context, roughly 70% of the infections that happen right now in a hospital are preventable. The ones that are, again, you go in, getting a knee replacement, you're having some surgery, you have a cancer treatment, you have a central line in your bloodstream, and you get an infection. What does that mean?
That means that the hospitals didn't have to spend $20 billion of the $28 billion that they spend every year out of their own budgets to treat these infections, and about 70,000 people didn't have to die. Products like ours have been shown by major hospitals to help in the fight to reduce infection rates. I can tell you that clinicians and patients alike are asking, demanding better solutions. That's really one of the moving factors for us right now, is there's just a huge focus in hospitals on products like ours to try to help prevent infection. What they're looking for is a better standard of care. We think our product set can become that better standard of care, and we've been focusing on major hospitals to get there. The top 1/2 are some of our selected children's hospitals.
If you look at the bottom 1/2 of that slide, that's our acute care hospitals. Most hospitals in the United States have a pediatric department as well, which is a great in for us. If we're dominating all of the pediatric hospitals, we will also get into all of the regular acute care hospitals through the pediatric departments. Our products are not only for children and neonatal patients. They're absolutely made for any patient population. To take a look at our business, we have a pretty strong distribution channels in the United States and internationally.
Roughly 2/3 of our business is in the U.S., that's split between our own sales team that we've been investing in to go into hospitals, and our distributor channel, where we sell through major distributors throughout the United States, largely focused on the long-term care and home healthcare markets, which doesn't make sense for us as a smaller company to be going after those markets with our own sales team at this time. Internationally, we are in about 20 countries with about 20 distributors, but it's the 80/20 rule. We have some major distributors in some major countries where we have a dominant position. Taking a look at our balance sheet. We have a pretty strong balance sheet as of December 31, which was our last reported balance sheet. We had about $14 million in cash. We have no debt.
We have no funny equity instruments, so it's a pretty clean company from a balance sheet perspective. A lot of our intellectual property and our patents are developed in-house, so they don't show up on our balance sheet as well. Taking a look at our quarterly revenue growth over the last four quarters, I think the work that we did over the last 18 months to really position ourselves for growth is beginning to take take hold. If you can see there, we've been growing most of our market segments, whether it's the USA, the Middle East or Latin America, rest of the world, but a real dominant position in the United States. We see that growth continuing throughout this fiscal year. I think we should have a pretty strong top line in 2023.
We've also been doing a lot of work to help improve our margins. We've been bringing manufacturing in-house. We've been really tightening up our supply chain and looking at alternative ways to pull costs out of our products. Again, still some work to do there, but I think we've made a good down payment on that. What are our products and what do they do? They sort of fall into two buckets and two areas. One are infection prevention products, and they're targeted at some real serious infections. Vascular access bloodstream infections, they're called CLABSIs, they're called BSIs. There's lots of buzzwords that are used in the industry, but they're bloodstream infections. That means you put a device into your bloodstream to give you know, life-saving medication, and that device causes an infection.
That can come from the hole that's in your skin or that can come from the device itself. We have two technologies. One is we have dressings that go on a patient that protect that insertion site with antimicrobial products that help kill bacteria, so they don't get into the body. We also have a technology that takes that device and makes the surface of it actually kill bacteria instead of causing infection. That part of our business, the device part, where we put a coating on it, we work with big medical companies under contracts, development contracts and license agreements, on their portfolio products in order to bring those products into the market. The other part of our business is focused on wound care and advanced wound healing. It's not...
It's those real chronic wounds, those wounds that are at the point where it may very well end up in an amputation. We have a portfolio of patented products that really help patients heal, that have a long track record of saving people's legs from amputation because they have a diabetic foot ulcer that the only next step if they can't close that wound is to remove the foot or the toes. Really strong portfolio there. When we take a look at some of what we have, so in the vascular access arena, we have a new product that we launched last year in 2022, but it's really beginning to take off in 2023. It's a product called VALguard. It's designed to protect line-to-line connections, which are a huge source of contamination.
When you get an IV, they're usually connected to some kind of medication. That connection can be a source of infection. We have a really great product that a lot of the hospitals are taking up right now and using, called VALGuard, that's really helping in that area. We have IV Clear, which is a vascular access dressing. We are the only ones on the planet that I'm aware of that have figured out how to put two synergistic antimicrobials, so substances that kill bacteria, into silicone adhesive. Wherever that adhesive touches the patient, it kills bacteria. That's part of our deep intellectual property that's really interesting. We also have our antimicrobial coating, which is when you take a device and create an antimicrobial device, such as a catheter.
And for those of you who are here that have set up a meeting to visit me, I'd be happy to show you all of those products and the technology tomorrow during the one-on-one visits. Another product that we've got a really strong interest in from hospitals, from Texas Children's Hospital, from several large hospitals that do cardiac surgeries is SurgiClear. Again, we've taken this antimicrobial silicone adhesive and created a dressing to go on to patients after surgery. Texas Children's Hospital was able to publish a study that they did on 600 patients from age, I think two months up to 64 years of age, where during the course of that study using our dressing, they completely eliminated their surgical site infections. They had a pretty low rate to begin with.
They're quite a prestigious institution. In fact, they're the number one pediatric heart surgery hospital in the world. Really good, strong product. Again, our coating technology where we provide a coating to go on to medical devices. It could be any device that goes into the body, and there's lots of them, where we can actually turn it into part of the bundle that helps fight infection instead of one of those products that's used on patients that causes infection. Finally, on our wound healing, we have a biological product that is designed to really force the body to begin the healing process if you have an open wound that won't heal. Something like one in four families has a family member that's dealing with diabetic foot ulcers.
It's a bit of an epidemic, and it's tied to diabetes. It's one of the biggest drivers. There's a lot of people living with chronic wounds in the U.S. and around the world. It's a very, very expensive for the healthcare system. Any product that can help short-circuit that creates a good economic opportunity for clinicians, for the health system, but also helps save people from amputation, which is an incredibly life-saving step. We have a great product that's been on the market and has a lot of clinical evidence and clinical history for doing just that, helping patients heal their wounds. The other thing that's hard to know as an investor, when you research a company, how well is that company thought of in the industry that they work in?
We have a tremendous reputation with medical companies, medical device companies, whether they are large organizations, and we worked with dozens of them over the years, or whether they're smaller organizations, whether they're hospitals. We have a really strong reputation as a leader in antimicrobial technology and helping prevent infections in patients that are in hospitals or in a home healthcare setting. We also have really strong expertise in bringing products to market. For a small company, we've got a lot packed into an organization and a lot of assets and opportunity in front of us. Finally, I want to end on just putting it all into perspective. For those of you who fell asleep during this, if you could just remember three things. Number one, I'd say we have a financially strong core business.
We have really strong distribution. We spent considerable time investing in our sales and marketing and driving the platform that we see as the opportunity to drive our growth going forward. We've brought new leadership, some new leadership in key areas around marketing, sales, and a few other areas over the past year. We've got a really good team in Covalon. That combined with, I'd say, a very envious position from other companies' perspectives of our intellectual property and the, and the technology within Covalon. It's incredible what our lab has been able to develop. It's not only 'cause I think so, it's also because large medical companies continuously come to us to help modernize their product portfolios, along with the products that we launch in the market ourselves. We just have better, safer products for patients.
I firmly believe that wins out in creating a new standard of care where the existing legacy products that are on the market just can't compete anymore. I think we have a huge growth potential. The market is very, very primed for new solutions. Clinicians are demanding it. I get emails from patients looking for our products, looking, you know, to give us feedback on how it's really changed their course of care. Sounds kinda weird when you get a, an IV dressing and someone's willing to write an email to the CEO to tell them about their experience with it unsolicited. That tells me that we've got something pretty special. We're also in a huge market. I mean, the economic drivers for what we have is incredible.
Those are the three things I'd like to leave you with: financially strong core business, an incredible portfolio of intellectual property, and huge growth opportunity. Love to take any questions if there are any. Yes. Yeah, I've been investigating that, and there's a few steps that we need to take. Sorry. The question was, are we looking at up listing to a major U.S. market such as Nasdaq or New York, NYSE American? Definitely, I think that's an opportunity for us. There's a few steps that we need to achieve before getting there. I do see a great opportunity for us to really push forward on our outreach to investors.
We've spent the last several years really focused on building the core of the business and not really telling our story as well as we could and should. Going forward, I do see opportunities for us to expand our engagement, including investigating, moving to markets that are, that are other than where we are. That's a good question. Thank you. Okay. With that, I'd like to wrap up and say thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to present. I hope you follow Covalon and take a look at some of our progress.
We're very active in social media, so if any of you who, look there on, all the social media platforms, there's always news about engagements that are happening, patient stories, clinician stories, webinars, that we do, where you can see firsthand the reaction of clinicians to our products. Thanks very much. I appreciate your attendance.