All right. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the 2026 Bloom Burton Healthcare Investor Conference. We hope you enjoyed the Toronto Stock Exchange opening, if any of you had a chance to see that. Right now, you're in room 104B. This will be the kind of spec pharma commercial company room. We have five presentations this morning, starting off with PharmaCorp. Please give a warm welcome to Paul Dale, President of PharmaCorp. It is on, yeah. You also have the mic up there. Yeah.
Hey, good morning, everyone. I'm not sure if they're going to pull the door shut or. Yeah. Then everybody's trapped in here. Welcome. First, I'd like to start with a thank you to Bloom Burton. This is our second year here. We had a great experience last year, and we're excited to come back again this year. They put on a fabulous event, so we really appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to speak to all of you. Last year, we had the dreaded 3:30 P.M. time slots. We're kind of excited to be here first thing in the morning this year to speak to everybody when they're fresh. As mentioned, I'm with PharmaCorp Rx.
I guess a very simple explanation, we're in the pharmacy roll-up business, so we're here to buy pharmacies across Canada, and I'll give you a little bit more detail on that. Some of you may know our story, so I'll get into a little detail about how did we get here, what we're trying to get accomplished, and a bit of a view on the year ahead with our organization. I have some of my teammates with me here today, and I'll introduce them at the end, and they'll help with any questions that the audience may have. Once again, thank you very much. If we can take a minute, we're just going to review this. Well, it's a tough audience. Okay. All right. We're going to get past that one, and we'll get to this one.
PharmaCorp, I'm going to walk you through a bit about who we are and really our process on how do we buy, how do we integrate, and how do we operate pharmacies in the Canadian pharmacy space. I want to start off with a bit of, I guess I would call it the origin story of what is PharmaCorp, what do they do, what are we trying to get accomplished. I'll start by explaining PharmaChoice Canada. PharmaChoice Canada is one of the biggest pharmacy retailers in Canada. Probably a lot of you see PharmaChoice out there, a lot of small towns, smaller communities, but you also see some in Downtown Toronto as well. They're an independent group of pharmacies under the PharmaChoice banner, and PharmaChoice Canada is a co-op. As a co-op, they fully support their members.
It's probably one of the most lucrative programs in the country for members from a profitability standpoint. PharmaChoice really offers their members a huge suite of programs and offerings that they can simply choose what they want to do, how they want to operate, and be able to run their stores successfully as an independent pharmacy operator with support from PharmaChoice Canada. Now, they have about 1,100 stores, but as soon as I say that, the number's wrong because they're probably around 1,200, 1,250 now. There's a lot of people joining the banner each year. Typically in a year, they're getting 40 or 50 new stores added into the banner program per year. They also face, I guess, the opposite reaction where people are looking to exit the program, but probably more specifically, people are looking at their personal succession planning.
The typical pharmacist in Canada owner is usually mid-50s to 70 years old, and they're starting to get to that point in their life of how do I exit my store, how am I going to sell my store, and by the way, who's going to be able to buy the store? As much as they have stores coming in, they also have a trail of stores that are leaving, not necessarily the banner, but wanting to sell the store, and that's where PharmaCorp comes in. PharmaCorp in 2024 did a strategic alliance with PharmaChoice Canada, which really gave us access to the ROFRs on all 1,100 to 1,200 locations. PharmaChoice had a ROFR but had trouble activating the ROFR because as a co-op, of course, they didn't have the funding to be able to buy these stores.
We now work with PharmaChoice with the ROFR, and we try to set ourselves up in a position that we'd be the buyer of choice for members as they're looking at moving towards succession planning for themselves and their families. That's really what we do, is we have a very close relationship with PharmaChoice Canada, and so far, it's been terrific for our business and building our business brand out there. That's a little bit of background for you. Why pharmacy? I don't know how many people are very familiar with the pharmacy space, so I'll give you a little bit of background on that. Recession resilient. One of the things that we enjoy in Canada when you look at pharmacy and prescriptions being filled, about 50% of the prescriptions filled in the country are supported by government, so funded by government.
Another 35%-40% are by individuals' personal plans, so a lot of us may have a health benefit plan. That leaves only about 10% or 15% that are truly cash-paying patients. Heavily funded industry, which makes it somewhat recession resilient, and that's obviously a good thing for us. Canada has a massively aging population. As people age, another thing comes with that is more need for healthcare and pharmaceutical products. Expanding scope of practice. In 2012, I've been in the industry for about 30 years, that was the first year that pharmacists could give flu shots. Really not that long ago. Since then, beyond flu shots, there's also minor ailment prescribing, and there's quite a few other things pharmacists can do. A lot of people don't understand that pharmacy is much more than just filling prescriptions.
It's providing healthcare services to patients, which really expands the scope of what a pharmacist can do. You may not know, but 57% of flu shots last year in Canada were given by a pharmacist. It went from zero in 2012 to more than half of the Canadians who get a flu shot, they actually get them in their pharmacy. We have this expanded scope that's constantly evolving in our country, and a topic we call patient stickiness. Is anybody helping or taking care of a senior in your family? Yeah, some people are. One of the best relationships your mother, your father have is probably with their pharmacist. My mom's 91 years old. She lives in a retirement home. She's on 13 medications. Her relationship is with her pharmacist, and she's been with the same pharmacist for 20 years.
They know everything about what she's taking, what interacts with other things, and that's a key part of their healthcare provider. As we look at our stores and we look at our business, a big part of what we try to do is create that stickiness with the patient, that they keep coming back. A very resilient sector. A little bit on Canadians and the age. More than 20% of Canadians are over 60 years old now. Okay. That includes me. All right. It's happening. For patients over 60 years old, you can see from the chart here that 52% are on three or more medications, 81% are on at least one medication. You can see that as people age, the need for medication keeps going up.
We're dealing with, like I said, it's not unusual to hear someone in their 80s, 85, 90, 95, and the number of medications that they're on. It's going to continue to be an evolving trend in Canada. It's not going anywhere. We all see it every day. We see that as being a good reason why it's good to be in the pharmacy space. Let's talk a little bit about PharmaCorp. We're a publicly traded company, as you can see in the booklet. We went public in 2025, so just coming up on a year. We have some very unique things to tell you about. Now, roll-up strategy in our industry isn't unusual. Lots of people do it. When we were looking at getting into this, we were trying to think about what will make us a little bit different than other roll-ups.
Why would PharmaCorp be different than some of the other people in the space? We want to talk to you a little bit about that. Probably first and foremost is the exclusive ROFR rights on 1,100 stores. Obviously you have a built-in pipeline there. You're building relationships with pharmacists that are looking to sell their stores. We are interested in the ROFR, but we're more interested in establishing relationships with pharmacists who want to sell their store as opposed to activating on a ROFR. That's what we are trying to do, and that's the type of stores we really want to buy. Growing pipeline, as I mentioned, 40 new stores each year, 40 or 50 stores turnover, so that's your natural pipeline opportunity within the business. Also, a retail collaboration agreement with McKesson Canada that we signed in February this year.
We have access to a lot of pharmacies in the country, lots of opportunity to buy stores right across the country. Now, a little bit about the pharmacy space. We really broke it down into four different groups here. We really play in group number three and group number four. As we're looking to buy stores, we won't just buy PharmaChoice stores, we will buy stores and other banners as well, and that's part of the agreement that we have with McKesson. PharmaChoice, Guardian, IDA, Remedy, and Pharmasave. Plus, there's about 2,000 pure independents, so that would be Brian's Pharmacy, and Brian does his own buying, he runs his own store. They eventually get to a place where they want to sell as well, so that would be an opportunity for us. It's a really big space that we're working with.
Lots of opportunities out there on things that we can look at and buy, and that's really where we want to be. A little bit about the type of stores we buy. We're really looking at sort of thresholds, and I'd like you to think of this slide as thresholds, that we need stores to hit a certain criteria where it makes sense for us to buy the store. Typically, we're looking for a store that has CAD 2 million in revenues, at least CAD 350,000 in EBITDA, 35,000 prescriptions a year. We have the funding to do it. The last block is probably one of the most critical on the slide. It's easy to buy pharmacies, it's really hard to run pharmacies. Staffing is really one of the key points that we look at whenever we're trying to buy a store. Is anybody in the room a pharmacist?
Yeah, there's a few pharmacists in the room. You can have whatever name you want on the building. That helps you. The real thing that works is the person standing behind the counter taking care of the patients. If we buy a pharmacy and we don't have the staffing model figured out and we don't have the talent to run that pharmacy, I can guarantee one thing, the business is only going to decline. We have to hit all these targets for us to consider buying a store or a location. Pretty critical for us. Why would owners come to us to sell their store? We want to build relationships with the pharmacists. A lot of what we do is conversations with pharmacists that may not come to fruition for a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. That's totally fine.
We're there to help them as best we can. If there's an opportunity to buy and it makes sense, we will. If there's an opportunity to create a relationship for down the road, we will. We're in it for that reason. We provide flexible exit options. What does that mean? Well, the most important thing when you're buying a pharmacy is really taking the time to listen to the pharmacy and their family of what they're trying to do. These folks have worked in that pharmacy for 30, 35, 40, 50 years. They're selling part of their entire life to somebody, and that relationship you create with them is so critical. We try to listen to what they want to do and provide as many flexible options as possible. What does that mean? It could mean that they want to slowly step away from the business.
Maybe we're buying 60% or 70% of the store, and then we'll buy the remaining portion three or four years down the road. It could be that they want to, let's call it, cash out of the business, but still want to stay engaged in the business. We want to allow them to do that, too. Right now, we're working on a potential acquisition, and the gentleman has a huge business with long-term care facilities, and he loves helping the long-term care facilities and helping the patients. He wants to sell his store, but he wants to stay on and maintain that relationship. Well, that's a win for everybody. It's perfect for us, it's great for him, and it allows that individual to kind of walk their way into retirement and what their plan is. We want to be able to do that. Portfolio exit plans.
Many, many owners own more than one store. They could own four stores, five stores, 10 stores. Often they get into a situation that they want to slowly start selling off their group of stores one or two at a time, and we can work on a plan that may take five years to be able to buy all the stores, which makes sense for us as well, and it makes sense for them. If you can keep the owner engaged with you and be a sponsor for you're going to have a much better business long term. We definitely want to be able to do that. We want local continuity of ownership, so we've created a very popular co-ownership plan, giving us the opportunity to put, let's call it a junior pharmacist in ownership in a store.
Often an owner may have somebody that might be in their late 20s, early 30s. The cost of entry to buy a store is extreme. Students now are coming out with a lot more debt than a lot of us did at the time. We give them an opportunity to take a co-ownership loan with us and get an immediate share in the business. That's proved to be very, very successful, and it helps answer that first thing I mentioned about people and talent to run the store. That's a big part of what we do. Equity upside and tax deferral, that could come from selling 60% of your business today, 40% down the road. It could come from taking part of your purchase price in PharmaCorp stock, which might give you a much better return over time than just taking the cash.
We do that, and we are all about preserving the legacy. We're successful if a patient comes in three weeks after we buy a store, six months after we buy a store, a year after we buy the store, and is still enjoying the experience. We're making some nice changes to the store to make it better for the profitability of the store, for the customers, and the patients, and the staff. That's really what we want. We want to maintain that legacy. If you're selling your store in a small town and you're going to live there as an owner, you don't want to go to Tim Hortons and have all your buddies ask you, "Why the hell did you sell my store to those guys?" We want to maintain that legacy and make sure they're proud of what we've done.
Integrate. How do we integrate stores? We try to look for early opportunities of what we can do. The most important thing is keep the store stable when you buy it. If you've been involved with any roll-ups, one of the big risks you have is you're buying a store at profitability here, you make too many changes, and guess what happens? Profitability dips down, and then you're fighting through the first few years just to get back to normal. We want to be able to buy the stores and make nice modifications, nice integrations, and one of the big things with our relationship with PharmaChoice Canada, we become banner members. We run the same program, so there's no change to the customers or the patients. We try to maintain as much as we can, but also bring innovation to the store.
In front shop, what we see is many of the owners are very focused on the pharmacy and don't spend a lot of time taking care of the front shop. Typically, we see some big opportunities to expand the growth of front shop sales, and we try to take advantage of that right away. Excuse me for one second. We also see a lot of opportunities in pharmacy. We bought a store a year and a half ago, a huge volume store. To give you an idea, the average store might do 50,000, 55,000 scripts a year, which is pretty solid. This store is doing over 100,000 scripts per year. Okay. A tough market, hard to staff, hard to fill. We just added a ScriptPro in there, which is full automation in a pharmacy.
The ScriptPro now takes about 40% or 50% of the script volume and gets filled automatically in the store, which helps the customers from a timing, a speed standpoint. That's a CAD 300,000 investment that pays off in about three years. We're looking at how do we make the store work faster, better, and more efficient. By the way, as soon as you do that, it opens up all the opportunities for those other services you now have time to provide your patients. We're looking for those types of wins in the store that obviously improve our profitability and improve the experience of both our customers and our staff members in the store. You really want to try to do all those things at the same time.
We try to look for those type of opportunities, and as we buy our stores, we're very committed to that initial stabilization period. Like I said, we don't want anything to go wrong. We do a very, very exhaustive due diligence on the stores. We know as much as we can. We don't want to lose any traction at all, so we really want to make sure we stabilize the store. In the first six months, we start looking at those optimization opportunities. My approach, I'm very focused on the financial statement, like everybody here in the room is, but I really feel on a roll-up, spend your time in the first year at the top half of that financial statement. Can I drive sales? Can I drive script count? Can I drive services?
Improve all those revenue features before you spend a whole lot of time on the expense line.
Not saying there's opportunities there, but you do not want to go in, from our experience, and start slashing expenses, and then you create a whole new problem. We want to drive the top-line performance of the store. We really look at that in the first six months. We try to take advantage of all the programs a company makes available to you, and we try to be the best in the business of running those programs and driving the store and driving the business. Then after a year, in the first year, if we're successful, if the store was CAD 500,000 on normalized EBITDA, and we move that up to CAD 525,000-CAD 530,000, that's success for us. We're not trying to go from CAD 500,000 -CAD 600,000. You can do that once.
The second year will be a problem for you. We're just trying to stabilize and start moving the profitability year over year as the natural growth in the business comes to us. I think a really staged approach, and as we're analyzing the stores, we're looking at stores that we think we have the opportunity to be able to do that. How do we operate? A little bit of information. We have seven stores right now, and that probably doesn't sound like a lot to you, but we're trying to take a very, very staged, steady approach. I can tell you this is going to be a significant year for us. We have a lot of opportunities in our pipeline. We hired a director of acquisitions, Sophia, right up here. Sophia joined our company in December, and we're going to get very busy, very fast.
We have a credit facility with CIBC, which helps us buy stores, and it also funds our co-ownership loan program that I spoke to you about. That's part of what we did with CIBC is kind of the underpinnings of our business. We're well-capitalized. We have CAD 100 million base shelf prospectus, and currently we have CAD 23 million. We did a raise back in the fall, and we expect to fully deploy those funds shortly. We have a lot of activity going on right now.
What did you raise at what price?
CAD 0.42. Warrants attached or no? There's warrants attached. Yeah.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Yeah. No problem. That's a little bit of our background, a little bit of a map on where our stores are right now. We're starting to cover the country reasonably well. We have a very small file buy that we're doing next week, and we had bought a store a year ago, and there was another small competitor in town. We're now buying the small competitor, rolling it into our store, and obviously the value add from doing that is quite significant, and that owner from the other store will be working with us, so we end up with a very good situation. A little bit on our results so far. As I mentioned, driving KPIs, sales script count is very, very important to us. That's really where we want to start our business off.
That gives you an idea, through our first three quarters, on our script count growth, some very nice momentum on script count growth, and you can see good momentum on overall sales growth as well. In the retail space, those are pretty solid numbers. You're trying to continue to drive that top line and really evolve the business. We've had quite a bit of success with that, and you can see our adjusted EBITDA results as well. We're going to post Q4 on April 29th. That will give you another touch point next week on our overall business results. What's next for us? A few things. Well, I mentioned that we had CAD 23 million available to us. We expect to deploy that very shortly, so that's a big move for us.
We're going to continue to work on our platform, the type of stores we're buying, heavily engaged in our pipeline to try and drive our business forward. At the same time, we're looking at our overall team and really filling out our team to be able to be even more successful in the future. Okay. As I mentioned, I have some team members with me today. So I have Grady Brown, our CEO. You have to stand up, Grady. This is Grady. We have Terri Tatchell, our Chief Financial Officer, with us today, and we have Sophia, who's our Director of Acquisitions. So that's part of our team, and we're looking forward to a very exciting year. We'd like to thank you all for attending our presentation.
We really appreciate the interest, and lots of people ask us questions as we're out there, and I hope you keep an eye on us because I think you'll be pretty pleased with the story over time. Thank you.