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Venn Life hails breakthrough year

Published: 09:25 10 May 2016 BST

Venn provides drug development, clinical trial management and resourcing services to the pharmaceutical sector
Venn provides drug development, clinical trial management and resourcing services to drug, biotech and medical device clients

Venn Life Sciences Holdings plc (LON:VENN) moved into profit at the EBITDA level in 2015 on the back of a 135% year-on-year increase in revenue.

Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) in 2015, excluding one-off items, were positive at €0.39mln, compared to a loss the year before of €1.53mln.

Including exceptional items, the group made a loss before tax of €327,000, a sharp improvement on the loss the year before of €1.83mln.

The EBITDA profit attributable to the contract research organisation (CRO) business was €0.8mln (2014: loss of €0.96mln), while the Innovenn part of the business returned an EBITDA deficit of €0.44mln (2014: loss of €0.57mln) after a year of significant investment.

Having made progress on the Labskin and Clarogel initiatives, both of which are now through the development phase and into commercialisation, the board intends to reposition the Innovenn business to put it on an independent footing, so it can source its own funding and be valued as a discrete entity.

The board is actively looking at ways to realise shareholder value in 2016 for the Labskin (living skin) and Clarogel (anti-acne compound) technologies.

“The board intends implementing this repositioning in a manner that has a clear quantifiable benefit for Venn shareholders, and gives greater visibility to the strongly performing core CRO business," said Tony Richardson, chairman and chief executive officer of Venn.

Fee income stormed higher to €11.47mln from €4.88mln in 2014, driven by an effective business development effort delivering larger international projects coupled with an effective recruitment drive to support the workload, the company said.

House broker Hybridan said the revenue growth exceeded its already upgraded revenue forecast of €11.2mln.

Venn said it had made a solid start to the current year, booking €4.4mln of revenues in the first quarter, achieving a strong rate of business wins with new proposals continuing to come in.

“We will continue to improve our knowledge base, expand our geographical coverage and further develop emerging areas of specialism during 2016,” Richardson said.

“We continue to seek acquisition opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe and are exploring organic expansion into certain regions. Having developed into a genuine full service company with the addition of Kinesis we will focus in 2016 on business integration and successful cross selling of early and late phase services into the newly expanded client base,” he added.

Cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2015 stood at €3.8mln, up from €0.8mln at the end of 2014.

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on 19/2/24