Deltex Medical’s (LON:DEMG) chairman is heavily backing a fund-raise to build on strong recent US sales of its surgical blood flow monitoring systems.
Nigel Keen will put up half of the £2mln to be raised, by a new £1mln convertible loan and £1mln share issue at 4p, while non-executive Julian Cazalet will chip in a further £50,000.
The new £1mln convertible loan will replace an existing one that matures on 26 February.
Sales in 2015 were broadly flat at £6.4mln but this masked the change in the geographic mix of the business.
NHS funding problems meant sales of probe revenues fell by 21% while monitor sales were £300,000 lower.
By contrast, US probe revenues rose by 31% to £1.3mln. International volumes rose by 41% though the strength of the pound meant this translated into sales rising by 26%.
Keen said that traction in the US and other export markets was growing and reducing the importance of the NHS.
"In the USA in 2015 we increased the number of accounts on our Platform Programme from six to 17 and started to see the subsequent step-up in probe sales coming through in the latter part of the year."
Several of these new accounts only signed up towards the end of 2015 with consequentially lower contributions to 2015 probe revenues than originally planned but are positioned to boost the growth trajectory for probe sales in 2016.
Deltex added today that an 18th US hospital had signed up as customer and it was on track to reach its target of 30 platform accounts by mid-2016.
The new hospital is the flagship of a group of seven and is the third new platform account in the Great Lakes sales territory.
The hospital estimates that it will use 500 probes in the first year in colorectal surgery and will start to use Deltex’s oesophageal Doppler monitoring (ODM) systems in the other six hospitals in 2016 and 2017.