Welcome back, everyone. We have an update from Citizens, Inc. Trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CIA. It's a diversified financial services company providing life, living benefits, and final expense insurance and other financial products to individuals and small businesses in the U.S., Latin America, and Asia. Welcoming back, President CEO Jon Stenberg and CFO Jeff Conklin. Welcome, gentlemen.
Thank you.
All right, floor is yours.
All right, great. You might notice that we're a little bit more casually dressed than normal. We're having our only, I think it's only the second offsite the company's ever had in its 50-plus years of experience, and we're just kind of getting away from it all so we can focus on making sure we button down our coming year's strategy, on our domestic U.S. growth strategy, our South Central America, South America, Central America, and Caribbean growth strategy, and then, very importantly, our emerging Asian growth strategy. Quick introduction to who we are. We're Citizens based in Austin, Texas, and we have a location in Puerto Rico where we get a lot of our premiums from our international business from. We do a lot of business in South America, a lot of business in Taiwan.
We've got about 250 employees that represent, I think at last count, like 27 different countries of birth. We understand we're in a lot of markets and a lot of different cultures and languages, and we have our employee force that represents that level of diversity also. We have clients in 75 countries, as a matter of fact. Now, the number of independent agents that can sell us is over 8,000 now, and the number of producing agents is 3,000, which is a dramatic growth over just two years ago, and I'll talk a little bit about that. $1.7 billion in assets, and our in-force revenues from all of our in-force block of business from the last 50 years is about two-thirds international, one-third U.S. domestic.
It's really interesting, in 2024, two-thirds of our sales came from the United States, and one-third of our sales came from international. The reason is a good reason. It's not because we had a bad year internationally. We actually had a great year internationally, but we were actually the fastest-growing mature life insurance company in the United States in 2024, with tremendous, tremendous growth. I'll just mention real very quickly, our goal is to make ourselves a tremendous opportunity for investors by providing kind of the best of both worlds: the stability, safety, and predictability of a life insurance company in the United States with a company that has years and years of tremendous growth opportunity in front of us, with international reach and tremendous opportunity to grow here in the United States.
We feel that's kind of the best of both worlds in terms of an investment opportunity. I think I'll wrap it up there, and we can open it up to Q&A unless, Jeff, you want to say anything. Go to Q&A.
All right, Jon, thank you. All right, talk about your most important drivers of growth. What are they domestically and internationally?
Internationally, we changed our strategy a little bit to really reinforce our deep relationships with long-standing partners, and it is really paying off. They were up 16%-18% last year, and they're already having a great year this year. Domestically, though, as I mentioned, is where the growth was, and that's been from the dramatic expansion from a few hundred agents to thousands of agents across the United States. We're in 43 states so far and the District of Columbia. That'll eventually be 49 states. We entered the domestic final expense market, and that's where our growth has been in 2024. There are other areas of growth in the United States looking forward in the future. We can go certainly up market to upper-income markets and broaden our product portfolio into investment products, and also perhaps health and living benefits products also.
Domestically in the United States, we have a lot of growth opportunity.
Wonderful. Speaking of growth, despite this 49% growth in first-year premiums and continued agent expansion, your first- quarter net income was lower relative to the year-ago period. What are your operational priorities to increase revenue and margin expansion, and what's that timeline?
That's a great question. We have a growth imperative. We're a small company with the desire to be a large company in the future. In life insurance, if you enter a new market, you have to incur the expenses in that first year to service that market, to add the agents, to appoint the agents, to build commission systems, to build the products. I call it build the factory. You have to build the factory to service this new market that you were never in. In your first year, you only have the revenue from sales in that first year, but you have the expenses of the factory. In 10 years, we don't have to build a new factory. It's the same factory. Our expenses shouldn't really have to go up.
In the 10th year, you're going to have the revenue from sales in the 10th year, plus nine years of renewal premiums that you'll have the advantage of getting. It really grows and stacks on each other. I would say that another reason is we had great success in selling endowments 20 years ago, and it's 20 years later, and we're very, very happy to make good on our commitments that we made to those clients 20 years ago. A lot of those 20-year endowments overseas are coming to maturity, and we're paying those out. Replacing that revenue is another reason why we really have to focus on growth right now, and that's exactly what we're doing. That's our imperative.
With that, Leah asks, what's your current exposure in Asia? What percentage of your business is there, and what's your competition like over there?
Asia, I just came back from Asia. About 10% of our in-force revenue comes from Asia, and that's Taiwan. It is phenomenally high-quality business. We love those clients. We love the business. It's great business, but it's only Taiwan. Asia really represents the future two decades of growth in our company. Our imperative this year, I'll just take a step back real quick, is to solidify our growth plans in South America, in the Caribbean, in Central America, getting into countries where we don't have a lot of exposure, like El Salvador, Belize, Honduras, Guatemala. In 2026, it is really going to be focused on driving growth into new countries in Asia. We're looking at Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, maybe even partnerships in Japan and Korea. There are a lot of opportunities we have.
We haven't made any decisions there yet, but that's actually why a reason we're here in this offsite today, get away from everything and really start working on those plans for our Asia expansion.
Besides demographic expansion growth, how is the growth with current clients? Example, like once you sign a client, what does that look like? What is that process? What's the revenue stream like?
Right now, currently, historically, I should say, it's kind of one and done. You get a client, they buy your product, and we service that client as well as we can to keep that client in force until they either die or the policy matures, depending on the kind of product. We are definitely looking at product expansion into asset growth kinds of products, living benefits. Part of our future strategy is to have more than one product to have a client own. That's another way for us to grow is with the same client. Get more agents, get more clients, and then be able to sell more to each client and allow each agent to sell more across their portfolio.
When it comes to different products, how many products do you have in each category? Are you adding categories?
Yes. As I mentioned, I kind of bucket products into three categories: life insurance, and there's a lot of different types of life insurance, and we plan on expanding the types of life insurance we have. There's also investment-focused products, which could be a life insurance product designed specifically for asset accumulation in a tax-advantaged way. There's also annuities, and then there's also what I mentioned, living benefits. That might be a cancer product or hospital indemnity, a disability product, a linked benefit product. There's lots of opportunity for growth in that category also. It just comes back to the fact that we have literally the world in front of us and so much expansion opportunities in front of us in product category, geographic, ability to service clients with more than one type of product.
Great. Always great news on your end. Thank you for this update. Congratulations. We'll just continue on this conversation. Thank you, Jon and Jeff.
Great. Thanks so much.
All right, everyone. We'll be right back. Everyone, we have an update from MetaVia Inc. It trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol MTVA. It's a clinical-stage biotech company focused on transforming cardiometabolic diseases. Happy to welcome back President and CEO H.H. Kim and CFO Marshall Woodworth. Welcome back, gentlemen.
Thank you. Thank you, Anna. First, thank you for your time to joining us for a very quick 10-minute update. I'll spend most of my time on this slide since 10 minutes is pretty short. I think I would like everyone who's attending this conference to just remember two things after the 10 minutes. Number one, the data that you're seeing in this slide and throughout our slide deck on 1726, our obesity drug, it's not the max dose. We believe this 32 milligram is a starting dose. What you see here, very compelling data, is not the max. That's the first thing to remember. The second thing to remember is about our stock and what we have done with the recent financing. I'll go into that after I explain to you what we have in front of us. 1726, we have two assets.
We're a metabolic-focused biotech company. We have DA-1726, which is an obesity drug, and DA-1241, which is a MASH drug. Now, going into 1241 first, we did finish the phase IIA. We released the top-line data last December. This is a GPR119 agonist, orally available once daily. We have shown a very good safety, tolerability, even much better than the approved res material. Although it was only a 16-week study, we did meet the primary endpoint and showed direct hepatic effects. Unlike other MASH drugs out there, other than the GLP-1s, 1241 actually reduced significant HbA1c. This is very important because it provides an added benefit to the patients. With all this, what we're trying to do right now is to see whether there is any other combination potential.
Everyone in the MASH field right now is looking for a combo partner, and that's what we are focused on with the DA-1241. Now, 1726, the obesity drug, this is the GLP-1 plus glucagon dual agonist. The balance is 3:2:1. Now, it's very important to understand what GLP-1 and glucagon, as a dual agonist, can do. Now, GLP-1 by itself will lower glucose levels, plus it will control the appetite, while glucagon has high energy expenditure, plus direct hepatic effect. Now, with that, 3:2:1 approach with the 32 mg MAD study, which was a four-week study, safety tolerability, there was no treatment-related discontinuations, and very mild GI-related events, very mild. Now, is this different? Yes, it's very different. If you go into the other slide decks that we have prepared, you can see us comparing to other drugs.
It's not apples to apples, but you can see what the trend is. Now, when you look at other GLP-1 drugs, especially GLP-1 glucagon, you see a lot of discontinuations and a lot of GI events because GLP-1 has, as you all know, its own unique GI-related AEs, and glucagon actually has it too. When you add in these two together as a dual agonist, you see a lot of AEs. Compared to that, our four-week study showed a completely different safety tolerability profile. Only two subjects had nausea after the first injection, no nausea after the second, third, and fourth. Vomiting happened after the first injection, just two subjects, and only one subject had vomiting after the third. All of this resolved within the 12-hour, and vomiting never reoccurred. No diarrhea.
It's completely different than any other GLP-1 glucagon and even any other GLP-1 plus something drugs out there. Now, weight loss, day 26, maximum of -6.3%, mean of -4.3%. Just remember, this is the starting dose, not the max dose. -4.3% is better than semaglutide. This is quite comparable to tirzepatide, Zepbound, and it's only four weeks. Fasted glucose, max of -18 milligrams per deciliter, mean of -5.3. GLP-1 lowers glucose, while glucagon actually increases it. When you have a drug such as pemvidutide, which is very well balanced with 1:1 ratio, the dual agonist crosses out each other. 3:1 ratio, very, very different fasted glucose shown in just four weeks. When you compare other advanced drugs like survodutide or mazdutide, this fasted glucose on just four weeks is very different.
Waste of conferences, this is coming from the glucagon side of our drug. Now, max is 3.9 inches, while mean of minus 1.6 inches. This is only four weeks, and we believe our glucagon was potent enough with only four treatments that it broke down the white adipose tissues around the waist, and it sustained it. When you look at our drug, the most important is that we didn't do any titration. It was only for four weeks, but the 32 milligram dose worked as a starting dose because of the truly amazing safety and tolerability profile. Now, briefly, on what we are planning to do, we will be running additional SAD and MAD cohorts to go above the 32 milligram. Those results will be available within this year, and that will be the very near-term catalyst. As you know, there's only seven months left.
We will have these data out within this year. Now, when we released our data about a month ago, it was unfortunate that a large shareholder that came into our company last year sold their pre-funded warrants and their common stock as the market opened. That triggered the stock price to decline, while pre-market, it was actually going up a lot, like 25%. The stock price, I do not believe, reflects the quality of the data that we have in front of us. It was good that the current largest shareholder, Dong-A ST, and the ultimate parent company of Dong-A, Dong-A Socio Holdings, came in with the $10 million pipe, and that allowed us to run these additional SAD and MAD studies.
We believe, and I believe that when I look at all the papers, I cannot guarantee it, but if you go on a higher dose level, we will be able to see more weight loss. There could be a little increase in the adverse events, but I believe we will be seeing something different. Marshall?
Thanks, H.H. These numbers are as of the end of March, which predated the financing. We had $11 million in cash. If you add the $10 million gross that we received through financing, we're up about $20 million in cash. That will get us through the inflection points and beyond that H.H. talked about. In fact, this issue guidance that indicates we have cash into 2026. You can see the common stock and the warrants. The important thing about the warrants is we have Series A warrants from the last financing that will expire in June. We do not believe these are going to be exercised, so that number will go down below $10 million at that point, or 10 million warrants at that point in time. H.H.?
Thank you, Marshall. Just two things to remember. One, this max of 6%, mean of 4%, this is not the max tolerated dose level. We'll be able to see more weight loss, and we're hoping to see more weight loss with a higher dose in the new cohorts. Second, our stock price does not reflect our data. Thanks to the largest shareholder, Dong-A ST, and its ultimate parent company, we did raise $10 million. It's important that they only came in with common stock and pre-funded warrants.
It was making sure that dilution does not happen, and we don't have any ratchets or other warrants outstanding, so that they wanted us to, they wanted to help themselves, plus the retail, to make sure that we have a chance, MetaVia have a chance to go above a dollar and regain and reflect the great data that we generated. Anna?
All right, great update, guys. Thank you so much for this. We do have lots of questions for you, but we are out of time, so I'm just going to end with a comment from one of our viewers, Randy. He certainly appreciates all the hard work you're doing each and every day. We'll send these to you so you can answer our viewers on your own time, but thank you for this update, and we certainly appreciate you guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, we'll see you again soon. All right, everyone, great first day. That completes day one, but we'll see you all back here tomorrow morning, 9:00 A.M. Eastern, for day two of our Virtual Investor conference. Thank you all for watching. See you tomorrow morning.