Earnings call transcript: Aker Biomarine reports Q1 2025 growth, stock rises

Aker Biomarine (AKBM) reported its Q1 2025 financial results, showcasing a revenue increase of 5% year-over-year to $50.8 million. The company also saw a significant rise in adjusted EBITDA to $9 million from $5.7 million in the previous year, contributing to its trailing twelve-month EBITDA of $36.6 million. Despite these positive results, the earnings per share (EPS) forecast of $0.01 was not explicitly confirmed in the earnings summary. The company’s stock price reacted positively, climbing 5.11% in pre-market trading. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains strong liquidity with a current ratio of 3.79, indicating robust short-term financial health.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue grew by 5% year-over-year, reaching $50.8 million.
• Adjusted EBITDA increased significantly to $9 million.
• Stock price rose by 5.11% following the earnings announcement.
• Continued expansion in the Krill oil product line with new retail partners.
• Global omega-3 market growth supports Aker Biomarine’s strategic initiatives.

Company Performance

Aker Biomarine demonstrated solid performance in Q1 2025, driven by strategic expansions and product innovations. The company reported a 5% increase in revenue year-over-year, reflecting its ability to capture market growth in the global omega-3 sector, which is expanding at an annual rate of 6%. The Human Health Ingredients segment restructuring and reduced corporate costs also contributed to the improved financial results.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $50.8 million, a 5% increase from the previous year.
• Adjusted EBITDA: $9 million, up from $5.7 million last year.
• Gross margin: 40%, a slight increase from 39% in the prior year.
• Corporate costs reduced to $10-12 million from $19-20 million.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, Aker Biomarine’s stock price rose by 5.11%, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s growth trajectory and strategic initiatives. While the stock has experienced a significant YTD decline of 25.56%, InvestingPro analysis suggests the company is currently undervalued. The stock’s movement comes as analysts maintain a moderate buy consensus, with additional insights available in InvestingPro’s comprehensive research report, one of 1,400+ detailed company analyses available to subscribers.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Aker Biomarine expects continued growth in its Human Health Ingredients segment and aims to achieve modest growth in Consumer Health Products. InvestingPro data reveals analysts expect significant revenue growth of 27% in the current fiscal year, with the company projected to return to profitability. The company plans to expand its Krill oil customer base by targeting 40 new customers in 2025. Capital expenditures for the year are projected between $6-8 million, and efforts to mitigate potential tariff impacts are underway. For deeper insights into Aker Biomarine’s growth potential and financial health metrics, investors can access the detailed Pro Research Report available on InvestingPro.

Executive Commentary

CEO Mats Jansen highlighted the company’s consistent growth, stating, "This is now the ninth quarter in a row where we deliver year-over-year growth." He also emphasized the potential for market share expansion, saying, "We believe that it should be possible for us to reach 15 to 20% market share." Jansen described the Lucerveta launch as "the biggest and most promising in the history of the company."

Risks and Challenges

• Production challenges in the algae business could impact future sales.
• Emerging market tariff regimes present potential cost pressures.
• The ongoing restructuring of the Human Health Ingredients segment may face operational hurdles.
• Market saturation in key regions could limit growth potential.
• Macroeconomic factors, such as consumer confidence, may affect demand.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts questioned the impact of softer consumer confidence, to which the company responded that no significant effects were observed. The company also discussed expectations for improvements in the algae business in the second half of 2025 and provided insights into the budget for the Lucerveta clinical trial. The potential reentry into the South Korean market by summer was also addressed.

Full transcript - Aker Biomarine AS (AKBM) Q1 2025:

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Good morning, and welcome the presentation of Aker B Marin’s results for the first quarter twenty twenty five, where myself, Mats Jansen, the CEO and the CFO, Katja Neklaunis, will take you through the financials and the highlights of the quarter. Another good quarter for Akibimarien, delivering close to $51,000,000 of revenue, up 5% from the same quarter last year and a significant improvement on the EBITDA, up 59% from the same quarter last year. Human Health Ingredients continue positive development, 16% growth on the top line and 36% growth on the EBITDA. And it’s good to see Consumer Health Products also back into growth territory. Human Health Ingredients continued its focus on getting closer to breakeven and delivered $400,000 negative EBITDA with stable revenue, one step closer to that breakeven point.

Key milestone for the quarter is that we have kicked off the first human clinical trial for our new Lucerveta product that will eventually, if successful, generate the first health claims for the new brain ingredient that we have developed over the last couple of years. So good development. This is now the ninth quarter in a row where we deliver year over year growth. You see a significant improvement on the EBITDA on the right side, both driven by stronger performance on Human Health Ingredients, but also better cost position across the company. Some more details in the different segments, starting with Human Health Ingredients.

As mentioned in the beginning, we are growing 16% year over year with Krill oil sales growing 15% year over year. That growth is coming in several regions, but China continues to deliver good growth. Europe as well, strong growth. And also the new emerging market of South America is showing good growth and contributing to a strong first quarter of twenty twenty five. EBITDA continues to drive up $11,300,000 EBITDA for Human Health Ingredients.

That’s the best quarter we have had since the heydays of Korea in 2020, with a significant improvement driven by both more volumes, better prices and also lower cost of goods as a result of more volume sold and produced. Following the fee transaction, we have restructured the Human Health Ingredients segment by moving many resources from our Norway Oslo office to our Houston site, creating both product and manufacturing hub around our Houston technology and the team over there. So that is implemented during the first quarter, meaning that we have given severance packages to those impacted here in Norway and started the hiring process in Houston. A new leader is also in place in Houston that will deliver that kind of new plan for Houston and products and manufacturing going forward. When it comes to tariffs, which is a big topic these days, so far we have not a significant impact from that.

We are importing krill raw material to our plant in The US. That is a Norwegian product coming from our old Norwegian vessels with 10% tariffs of the value of that raw material coming into the factory. And then our second exposure is products being sold from The US to China, where China has put big tariffs of products made in The US. There has always been high tariffs between The U. S.

And China. So historically, it’s already been between 2025% tariffs between U. S. And China. So U.

S. Or Chinese dietary supplement brands, they have set up their manufacturing hubs in New Zealand and therefore also historically, most of our volumes sold into China, we ship through New Zealand and then it gets manufactured and processed there and then into China and through that not getting any tariffs. That route is still also zero tariffs, and now we’re looking into how we can optimize the sales that we have currently directly into China through the same route. This is a moving picture with tariffs, but so far we don’t see a significant impact of those tariffs on our business. I mentioned our new clinical trial for Lucovyatta started.

We have a lot of preclinical data indicating the strong benefit this ingredient will have on brain health, but now we have started the first human clinical trial where we will test what will be the direct impact on your cognitive functions after taking Lucovita, and those data will generate the first health claims. I’m also very happy to announce that we have been granted a $2,000,000 grant from the European Union in a consortium with a couple of other companies and universities across Europe to do other clinical trials on LuciVeta in the coming three years. Twenty six million dollars in revenue, up from 22,400,000.0 in the same quarter last year and $11,300,000 in EBITDA, showing that nice development on the EBITDA that you can see on the bottom side. A couple of years ago, we initiated a turnaround plan for our human health ingredient business that’s been quite successful and that’s what’s been driving the growth we have seen in the last nine quarters. We are now going through kind of iterative process on a new strategy to take kind of the next growth away for our human health ingredient, and I wanted to show a few highlights from some of that work.

What you see on this slide here is some selected markets on the right side, and the different colors indicates the red part in the bottom is the sales that we are doing. The blue part is Creelo sales from competitors. And the light blue is what we indicate as the potential in these different markets across the world. Into that big omega-three market, you can see the numbers on top on gray, the size of those omega-three markets. So if you look at all the way to the left on this slide, you can see that we have about 5% market share in the global omega three space.

So 5% of any omega three sold anywhere in the world is sold by us. Then about half a percent is sold by a competitor of us, and the rest is Fischl. We believe that it should be possible for us to reach 15 to 20% market share because we have seen that in other markets where we are successful. Like the mass market in The US, we know and we have seen that we can get 20 market share when you have good distribution, meaning several brands on the shelf, so it’s easy for consumers to find the product, and some of those brands spend some money on marketing to educate consumers. If you have those two things, then we know we are able to get towards 20% market share.

So that is our growth story. It’s all about how we go from that 5% market share today up to the 20% market share that we should have on a global level. And the work around that is hard, but still very simple. You need to get better distribution, meaning convince brands to launch new critical products on the shelf, and then we need to convince the brands that already have a product on the shelf to invest in marketing to educate consumers. If we are successful with these two things, we will grow our market share from about 5% up to 15 to 20%.

On top, the global omega three market is growing about 6% per year that we will piggyback on. So what we have done now is that we have gone market by market, channel by channel, looking at what our market share is, looking what the potential in that market or that channel is, and then creating a strategy for how we close that gap. So as you can see in The US, we have 6% market share with a high potential to grow. In China, we have 7%, indicating some of the successes we have that lately. And as another example, you can see Korea there with that spike.

In 2020, Krillo was between 5060% of the overall omega three sales in Korea, so we know it’s possible to get there, but right now the sales is very limited. You can look at the blue bars and you can see which is competitors on the right side. In China, there’s 4% market share with competitors and that is more or less the only place we have competition today, local Chinese manufacturers selling to local Chinese companies. Taking this a little bit further, when we talk about how to drive that market share up, more distribution, more consumer awareness, we have also done consumer research across these markets to understand what is the consumer awareness today and how well is our value proposition recognized in those markets. I’m just taking out two examples here now.

First, on the right side is China, where you can basically see in this survey we run, 29% of those at this survey, they are aware of krill. And out of those 29% that are aware of krill oil supplements, forty eight percent of them have tried it once or more. So that doesn’t mean that 48% here buys it every day or every month, but they have tried it once. And then out of those that have tried it once, when you ask them what is the value proposition for Krill or what is the best source for omega three, you can see here 76% of them know that omega three from Krill is the best source. So basically what this tells us is that the value proposition is quite clear, people get it, and we need to work on two things, get that awareness up towards the %, and then work with those 48% that have tried it once to make sure they tried it many, many times.

And you do that by having the product available. So driving awareness through marketing, through our partners, and having increased distribution by convincing more brands to drive it. And then we can have a look at Korea, which is a market, you know, many, including us, are very interested in. This is a survey just did last month, the same thing there. So even if it’s now, what is it, four years, even five years since we stopped selling Krill in Korea, the awareness is still very high, 47%.

Quite low part of the population, at least remember that they’ve been taking the product, but again, out of those that have been taking the product, they know the value proposition. So this tells us that the Korean market is intact, the awareness is still very high, and it’s all about getting those campaigns going successfully and getting that distribution up. And then talking about Korea, it’s been political turmoil in Korea now for for a while. It hasn’t been the right moment to launch campaigns as the kind of anchor of those campaign is home shopping. And for home shopping to work, people need to be bored at home, you know, watching home shopping channels.

Once a lot of things is going on in Korea, people watch the news, not home shopping. But things are normalizing in Korea now. The economic outlook for Korea is looking more promising, So we believe that in not too distant future, we will be going live with our partners with new campaigns in Korea. Moving over to consumer health products, back into growth mode, 4% growth year over year. First quarter is generally a low quarter seasonality wise, but again, we are growing quarter over quarter.

Last year, we struggled with those inventory impacts by retailers building down inventory levels, so we were selling less into retailers than than they were selling out. Now that’s kinda balanced out, and we’re following the general development of the market. In the first quarter, the overall dietary supplement market in the mass market in The US grew 3%, so we are doing slightly better. But that also shows that despite kind of challenging times in The US during the first quarter, supplement industry is still growing quite healthy. EBITDA is improving, dollars 1,900,000.0, up from $1,700,000 driven by good cost control in the company.

Consumer Health Products is focused on the biggest retailers in The US. Currently, have 10 retailers that we serve, but during the quarter we have added on two new large retailers in the customer or retailer portfolio of our business. One of them is Whole Foods. I’m sure you all heard about Whole Foods. We will now start this autumn to make the Whole Foods branded dietary supplements or at least some of them in those stores.

And the same with BJ’s. BJ’s may be less known here in Europe, but it’s the third biggest club chain in The US after Costco and Sam’s Club, which already are customer with us. So Lang is also seeing some quite interesting development on the line. Emerging business, the most important here is to look at the right bottom side, which is the EBITDA getting closer to that breakeven point. What we have done in the first quarter is that we have pulled back on cost and marketing investment quite significantly.

And it’s good to see that we’re able to upheld sales at a stable level doing that, taking us one step closer to that breakeven point. So core itself, 300,000 negative EBITDA, significant improvement from the previous quarters and then 0.4 in totality for the all emerging businesses and the portfolios we have there. I reported also last quarter, we have a process ongoing with Understory, our protein business, that’s still undergoing and with several interested parties. And we are pursuing that towards conclusion in not too distant future. So with that, I will give the word to Cathleen Klabner, CFO, that will take us through the financials.

Katja Neklaunis, CFO, Aker Biomarine: Good morning. I will take you through the financials for the first quarter twenty twenty five. First quarter ’20 ’5 marks a good start of the year for the group with 5% growth from Q1 last year, totaling revenues of $50,800,000 up from $48,500,000 last year. We had growth in both key segments. The Human Health segment is up 16% driven by increased superb acryloin sales, both higher volume and higher prices, and a broader product portfolio including QHP, Algae and PL plus The Consumer Health segment is up 4% with the multivitamin gummy showing growth after the launch last year.

The Emerging Business segment is down 32% compared to the same quarter last year due to high recognition of Amazon revenues in Q1 last year. Gross margin for the group was at 40%, slightly up from 39% same period last year. SG and A shows steady improvement across all segments as a result of cost focus and continuous implementations of new initiatives in both human, consumer products and emerging businesses. Both understory protein and Ion are booked as discontinued businesses as there are ongoing sales processes. Hence, net results for these items is shown on this line.

For comparable figures, the Feed Ingredients segment was included in the full year 2024 of $195,800,000 Adjustment for the quarter amounts to $3,500,000 and includes costs related to the Feed Ingredient transaction and the restructuring with severance packages accrued for in Q1. Adjusted EBITDA was $9,000,000 up from $5,700,000 same period last year, indicating an EBITDA margin of 18% in the quarter. The non operational segment called Elim Other consists of all the corporate costs and includes the majority of the non recurring costs related to the aftermath of the feed ingredient transaction, including the restructuring and the IT migration process. Dollars 3,100,000.0 of the $3,500,000 in totality in adjustments are booked in this segment in the quarter. If removing all the non recurring costs, the underlying annual SG and A run rate for corporate is between $10,000,000 and $12,000,000 down from $19,000,000 to $20,000,000 before the fee transaction.

The bridge between SG and A cost and the adjusted EBITDA includes a negative internal profit elimination of $800,000 and a positive income from transitional service agreement with Accusea of $1,500,000 in the quarter. Most of the TSA work is now completed with the exception of the IT migration project continuing into Q3 this year. Adjusted EBITDA from this segment is negative $6,800,000 with the underlying figure being on par with Q1 last year. Positive change in working capital for the quarter includes an increase in inventory for Consumer Health products in addition to settlement of a few larger supplier payments related to the feed ingredient transaction. Additional feed transaction costs will be settled throughout this year, further reducing payables.

Investments of $2,400,000 in the quarter included mostly maintenance and upgrade investments related to the Houston plant, but also some development CapEx mainly for the algae projects. We expect the full year CapEx to be in the range of 6,000,000 to $8,000,000 with the main development work being related to algae Cash flow from operations was negative at $11,100,000, mainly as a result of a change in working capital paying down feed ingredient transaction cost of about $7,000,000, as well as buildup of inventory in the Consumer Health segment. Cash flow from investment was negative $2,400,000 from maintenance and upgrades of the Houston plant as well as the algae development project. Cash flow from financing was positive $14,000,000 as a result of additional draw under the bank facility. Net cash flow in the quarter was $1,000,000 ending the quarter at $16,000,000 in cash and available liquidity of $25,000,000 including the bank facility.

Going forward, cash could be affected by the new tariff regime as occupied Marine will be subject to duties both on import of the Nutramill into The US as well as retaliatory tariffs when exporting quill oil to other countries, for example, China. However, mitigating initiatives have been identified, including a duty drawback program as we export most of what we process from the Nutramill, and we’re also looking into alternatives for krill oil supply to China as Mats had already alluded to. Based on current estimates, we don’t expect the negative effects to be significant. Interest bearing debt amounts to a hundred and $57,000,000, up from a hundred and $45,000,000 last quarter as a result of additional draw under the bank facility. The debt includes a bond of hundred and $51,000,000 swapped to US dollars through a cross currency swap and a bank overdraft of $30,000,000.

At net interest bearing debt over adjusted EBITDA of 4.8, we are in compliance with the leverage covenant under the bank facility, and we are also in compliance with with a cash covenant of $7,500,000 under the bond agreement. Ending this section with a look at the balance sheet. Q1 twenty twenty four includes feed ingredients, so comparison with Q4 twenty twenty four is recommended. Limited change in assets. All assets, both PPE and intangible, are depreciated and amortized according to plan.

Inventory is down in the Human Health Ingredients segment, but this is offset by an increase in the Consumer Health segment. Cash is at $16,000,000 up from $15,000,000 last quarter. Assets held for sale includes the group’s investments in Ion and understory protein of $35,500,000. On the liability side, current liabilities including the bank facility is up $14,000,000 and accounts payable is down $7,000,000 as a result of supplier payments mentioned earlier. Equity ratio is 44% for the quarter.

That concludes the financial section, and I’ll leave the word to Mats to close off the presentation.

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Thank you, Katina. We’ll now take you through the outlook for the business, starting with Human Health Ingredients, where we expect to continue to grow that business. On the back of that strategy and those market slides I showed earlier in the presentation, we see great potential for growth, and we see a good pipeline of business opportunities for us there. And then we expect the profitability to increase on the back of that as we are able to utilize our operational leverage, as you will see our bottom line and then EBITDA growing faster than the top line. For consumer health products, we expect to be back in modest growth territory after a challenging 2024, now following the expected development on our point of sales performance of our products.

For emerging business, it’s all about getting that into breakeven territory. We do that by both optimizing cost and grow the business, but maybe more importantly seeking transactions, selling those assets to companies that can utilize those assets in a better way than we can currently at Akebia Marine. And for corporate, Katrina and I talked about, we have taken our cost base from $19,000,000 when we were one company together with Feed Ingredient. Now we have established a new cost level in the corporate segment of between 10 and $12,000,000, and we expect to stay at that level going forward. So that concludes the presentation.

We will now open for questions. You can send in your questions to iraqebmarin dot com, and then we will answer them. So we are now ready to answer the questions that has been sent in, and you can also continue to send in questions on IR akbmarin dot com.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: Alright, so Christopher Winter here on the Q and A side. Let’s see if there’s any questions coming in. Okay. So first questions here. Have you noticed any demand impact due to soft softer consumer confidence in The U.

S. Post Liberation Day?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: No, no impact seen so far. Generally, dietary supplements are very strong in negative cycles. We’ve seen that in the previous kind of recessions that have been globally and with our consumer health products, you know, we follow point of sales data on a weekly basis, so far we don’t see any impact from that.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: And then over to Algae. So what’s the status in Algae now and how much did you sell during Q1?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: So quite limited sales. We had a few hundred thousand dollars in sales, so quite limited. As we talked about in the previous quarter, we had some production challenges in our Houston factory with quality. We have now identified all those problems, designed solutions to it, tested it and got it confirmed on small scale and now implementing it in a larger scale and waiting to also get it confirmed on larger scale. So we expect that the algae business will pick up in the second half of twenty five.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: And then to Luciaveta, how much annual spend will go into the clinical trial?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yeah. So there’s two clinical trials or two clinical programs. We got European Union grant of $2,000,000. Our contribution to that program is only $150,000 over the next three years. And that is a consortium of several universities across Europe and a couple of ingredients companies that are testing their products in a battery of, yeah, test schemes related to longevity and brain health.

Then for the clinical trial that we’re running ourselves, it’s gonna be about million dollar in costs related to that.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: Should we expect a similar level to marketing spend in the emerging business as in Q1 going forward or was this a temporary effect?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: No, we are cutting back on marketing. It will go a little bit up and down from quarter to quarter, but generally, we’re holding back on the marketing spend and driving towards that breakeven point which is the most important KPI for that business now.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: Okay. So are there any large new Krill clients you are targeting now?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yes, we have several targets in our portfolio. Last year, we got about 40 new brands or customers on board. We expect to get about the same amount this year. Some of them are large brands, some of them are smaller, but sometimes it’s kind of hard to identify kind of beforehand who will have success and who will be big customers. Sometimes it’s the small brands that kind of really hits it become very large and sometimes the big brands are not successful and not able to drive big volumes, but we have several large opportunities in our pipeline.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: Okay. So what’s the strategy for South Korea? Are you launching any sales starts?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yeah. So I mean, we are also selling b to b in Korea, meaning that we sell to other brand holders in the Korean market. I mentioned on the call earlier today that we are expecting to start campaigns probably around the summertime. It hasn’t been the right environment for running campaigns in Korea during those political turmoil that’s been now because people are not paying attention to home shopping channels, which is the main channel for driving consumer awareness in Korea, but things are normalizing now and the economic outlook for Korea is also pretty positive, so we know that our partners now are working with new campaigns. We’ll see about the timing when they hit.

It’s all about hitting that campaign right, the timing right, so you get that positive ROI and can get that positive spiral going. So our partners are also very careful to make sure that once we launch, we will be successful.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: And then so what was the South America’s total Krill sale in ’24 and what was it in this quarter?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yeah. I need to follow-up on detail on that question. I don’t have the numbers on top of my head, but we have very good growth in Mexico. Mexico is now bigger than Canada, just as an example, and are growing very strongly. And we’re putting focus now on some of the other emerging South American market like Brazil that has a big potential for our business.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: So we can go on. Yeah, you kind of touched upon this, but when do we expect to see the reentry of South Korea materialize for the oil business? What are the key hurdles encountered? I don’t if you want to elaborate a bit more or

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yeah. So I mean, it depends on our partners when they launch and how things will develop in the market and the political landscape in Korea in the coming months, but let’s say we can hope for a relaunch now this summer. And again, the hurdle has been to make sure that when they launch, they’re able to come and get the consumers’ attention quickly get success because that’s what’s going to drive that positive spiral that we’ve seen in the previous years.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: And then a question on margins here, so could you provide an indication on the gross margin for Superba, QHP and algae oil in the quarter?

Katja Neklaunis, CFO, Aker Biomarine: So what we said earlier is that Superba is the high margin product, so we carry gross margin of above 50%, while QHP, PLT plus and algae is lower margin products, so that will be a diluting that will be diluting the human segment overall in this quarter and also going forward, and you can also see that when you compare with previous quarters when we didn’t have that broad product portfolio.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: Yeah. And maybe just add that there was quite little algae oil sale in the quarter, so in terms of margin, we’re left with superb and QHP. Yeah. So what do you think about mid long term sales potential of a product such as Lucerveta?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: I think the potential for Lucerveta is very high. I mean, it’s a unique product, no one else has it. It has a unique mechanism published in Nature, kind of the most kind of, you know, impactful scientific publications. So we have big beliefs in that product. I think we said when we launched it some years ago that this is kind of the biggest and most promising launch we have had in the history of the company, meaning that it has potential bigger than Superba, but it’s starting from scratch in comparison to algae where there is some market and we can go in and take market LPC products doesn’t exist on the market, so we have to build awareness of the kind of categories as long as we alongside selling it, so it’s going to be kind of step by step, little bit the way that the Superba business have been built up from scratch, but definitely very promising in terms of what it can become in the future.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: Thanks. You have previously talked about limitation related to cross border export, especially to China. So what’s the status on that now?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yes, so we talked about that in the previous quarters that there’s some change of paperwork between China and the different countries in terms of what documents need to be following the products when they do this cross border e commerce. So all the countries need to go through a process to update the documents. In some countries, that goes fast, in some countries, it goes slow. But as of now, I think all countries that used to take that route into China is approved except The US. Given the current relationship with US and China, we will see when that kind of gets working, but all the other routes works and we see that some of The US customers, they’re starting to use the other routes through Camada, for instance, which is approved quite recently.

So I think as of Q2, things should be normalizing coming our business in China. We should not have an impact from this kind of challenge anymore.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: And then on some growth rates in sales. So what was your superb annual revenue growth rates in the key countries such as U. S, China during Q1? Maybe answer generic or

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yes. I think we can answer the generic. So I mean, we if you just look at kind of last twelve months, kind of looking at a little bigger chunk than just a quarter because that can be very impacted by if you get the PO at the end or the beginning of a quarter. But generally, we saw 17% growth in The U. S.

Over the last year, 40% in South America and Europe, which is one region for us, 60 in China. So we see generally good growth rates. We delivered 16% now the quarter, and I think we have a good outlook for the rest of the year and the coming years too when it comes to growth in these markets.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: So will you use your existing clients when pushing LucerVeta into the market, meaning easier access to market versus Krill Oil when you needed to build entire supply chain and clients?

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yes. So that’s one of the strengths of using, call it, the superb platform, if you like. One part is the manufacturing side of things, but the other part is then the market reach. We already have a big chunk of the most prominent dietary supplement brands already in our customer portfolio, which means the doors are open and we don’t have to kind of go through that kind of first hurdle of getting them interested in getting that meeting, so we will definitely use that when rolling it out.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: There’s no more questions at this point, so maybe give it ten more seconds and see.

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Yeah.

Christopher Winter, Q&A Moderator: Yeah. So I guess that concludes the q and a.

Mats Jansen, CEO, Aker Biomarine: Okay. Thank you for joining and see you next quarter.

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