Renaissance IPO ETF Price & Performance (IPO)

Particularly the nature of any forward looking statements. That might be contained within So in terms of what we'll cover today, I will provide an overview of the group's performance in 2024, I'll then pass on to Mark, who will provide an update on a number of our key balance sheet portfolio company holdings. David will then run you through the financial results, then we'll return for a summary and into q and a. As always, as Jake said, please do post questions in the q and a section. And we'll endeavour to cover all of them, either live if time allows or otherwise we'll do it via the, via the platform. So I'll start with that full year overview. So I think for those of you who joined us for the half year results presentation, you'll recall that I highlighted the focus that was being placed by me and the team on delivering cash exits as a sort of a major priority for this year. And that the maturity of our portfolio beginning to translate into portfolio exits, and that momentum appeared to be building into the second half with a number of potential further exits anticipated and I'm obviously pleased to report that we did indeed complete a number of further exits during the second half of twenty four that resulted in a total of £183,000,000 of cash proceeds realised for the year.

And indeed, this performance was significantly ahead of what was again you know, pretty sluggish period for liquidity across the venture capital market. Now this outperformance on profitable cash exits enabled us to continue to deliver on our commitment to make cash returns to shareholders And as you'll have seen, we've significantly accelerated our buyback program during the year. We bought back £30,000,000 worth of shares during calendar twenty four and then we announced further buybacks totaling up to 70,000,000 which we, you know, continue to implement during 2025. In today's release, you'll see that given the persistent discount of which our shares continue to trade, we now intend to allocate 50% of all realizations achieved during 2025 to cash returns to shareholders As always, we'll continue to review this proportion as a board based on the relative attractiveness of all of our various capital investment opportunities. You'll also have seen in today's release that as a result of further good progress on realizations during 2025 to date, We've added a further £10,000,000 to our buyback program, such that the commitment on the current program now totals up to £80,000,000 to put that in context, that represents that 80,000,000 represents almost 20% of our current market capitalization.

And since the commencement of our buyback programme we've now bought back cancelled more than 10% of the group's shares in issue. Now despite this outperformance on exits, and our accelerating buyback, our underlying NAV per share performance was minus 15%. I, David and Mark will cover the main contributors to this performance shortly. But as you would expect, this performance is both disappointing and it's it's well below what we believe is achievable with our business and our portfolio. As a result, and as I described at the half year, 've taken steps to proactively address this structure that we operate under, and our capability and our cost base. And this has resulted in a reduction in our net overheads run rate of approximately a quarter on an annualized basis at the end of twenty twenty four. And while we've had a small number of companies that have failed during the period, many of the fair value reductions represent reversals of previous fair value increases, so several of our portfolio companies raise money in 2021 and early twenty twenty two and some haven't grown into those valuations. As we'll describe later, although we've seen a fair value reduction for those companies, in many cases this represents a resetting of value and there remains a significant value creation opportunity for those companies given the size of the markets that they address.

And overall, we continue to see a significant opportunity to deliver positive back per share performance Mark will talk more to this shortly. And then finally, as shareholders, regular listeners will know, we've been building out our relationships with pension funds in Australia to manage private capital and that includes managing a commitment of $435,000,000 Aussie dollars for Hostplus, one of Australia's leading superannuation funds. We continue to believe there's a significant opportunity to continue to build out those relationships in Australia, And while things are definitely moving more slowly here in The UK, we're increasingly confident that long term private capital will start to flow towards scaling the types of science and technology companies that IP Group helps to create, fund, nurture and grow and that includes under initiatives such as the Imagine House Compact and as a result of the other pension fund reforms. So I'll cover these in a little bit more detail, First of all, I'll turn to one of the sort of standout successes of 2024. That was our investment in feature space and our support of that business through to its sale to Visa, which completed in December. As I said at the half year, is a very compelling business which is addressing growing multi billion dollar markets in fraud This was a business that we first invested in in 2012, we supported the company across seven financing rounds with a senior member of our investment team John Eddington, being a key member of the board.

We were joined on that journey by a strong syndicate of co investors, including the likes of Insight Partners, Highland, TTV, and and that is a is a a network that we will continue to co invest within the future. We consistently guided that feature space revenue should be approaching sort of $100,000,000 ish on a run rate basis by 2025, '6, and I said, you know, the decent revenue multiple a company value of about a billion dollars was realistic at that point. As it transpired, the company with our full support achieved approximately that exit level to visa and we were delighted to announce that in September, that was in 2024. So a year or two ahead of what we were planning. Were the largest shareholder in the company at exit at about 20% and we will receive total proceeds of 134,000,000 having invested about 23,000,000. And it's worth pointing out that a hundred and 34,000,000 is about 80% higher than our carrying value at the start of 2024 And we consider that that six times multiple and high 20% IRR or annualized return and represents a great financial return for our shareholders. It's also important from an impact perspective that Featurespace's anti fraud and anti financial crime tools will now be rolled out across [indiscernible] To protect a much wider group of customers.

So that was a standout success. That said, it was achieved during a very active second half of twenty twenty four in terms of cash realizations in July, we realized £9,000,000 from a partial exit of NASDAQ listed Sentessa. We completed the sale of Garrison that we'd announced in the first half. Then in October another exit from the therapeutics portfolio in the form of Kynos Therapeutics. The majority of that £134,000,000 of cash proceeds for feature space we received in December. You can see that there, hundred and 19,000,000. The balance of £15,000,000 will be received in two tranches in '25 and '26. In December we also announced the secondary of some minority holdings in nine portfolio companies across the group's balance sheet and our managed funds and through this transaction we expect to generate up to approximately 15,000,000 of cash proceeds and all of those sales overall at a small premium to our half year balance sheet holding values. As you can see from the slide, we've completed about half of this figure to date and we continue to work on the balance during 2025. So that positive momentum on exits continues with the completion in early twenty twenty five of a number of exits that we announced in 2024, and we've now received more than 20,000,000 cash met so far in 2025 which has led to the additional 10,000,000 that we're allocating to our buyback programme.

Although I'm very limited on what we can say due to SEC rules, and we've also noted that Hinge Health made a recent announcement that it intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange. Exchange. So I mentioned earlier that delivering these cash exits is one of our sort of most important during 2024. It's worth pointing out that this was achieved despite continued challenges from a liquidity point of view in the VC market. The The pitch book MVCA report which generally describing conditions in The US which are pretty applicable to The UK and Europe as well. Noted that extra activity has been the blockade limiting BC for the past three years, and return generating exits for the market have been few and far between. And you can see this in the chart here. In on the chart on the left shows our exit performance for the past few years. That's in pounds, millions, over the past few years. And on the right albeit with different units of measure you can see the total value of exits across VC market in The US as a whole. And you can see that 2024 remains less than half the value seen in 2019 and 2020, Interestingly, PitchBook did note that during the past two years the largest six both in terms of public listings and acquisitions tended to concentrate in healthcare and information technology, you can see from the previous slide was also our experience and we believe this continues to support our conviction around the value that can be delivered in these sort of sub sectors of deep tech in which we operate Moving to shareholder return.

So as Douglas notes in his chair statement today, the gap between our share price and our net assets remains stubbornly and frustratingly in place. And while this is also largely the case for our a few of our listed peers on the London Stock Exchange and indeed for some much larger balance sheet investment businesses globally. We've been taking increasing steps to retire capital at prices that we consider to represent very compelling long term value. Of course, all times we have to balance this opportunity with the fact that almost all of our portfolio companies require further funding, and in most cases some of that is likely to need to come from the group. But our success in generating liquidity has enabled us to continue to return cash from exits to shareholders We have significantly accelerated our buyback program during 2024. I mentioned, we've announced two new updates on that front today Firstly, given that persistent discount, we will now allocate 50% of realizations achieved during 2024 to cash returns to shareholders. We'll obviously review this and we'll update on our plans for 2026 and beyond in due course. And then secondly, as I mentioned, we're applying that approach to 20,000,000 or so realizations today, adding a further 10,000,000 to our buyback program.

So we completed about £30,000,000 of buying back shares during 2024. So we've got a further 50,000,000 to go. And following the release of our results this morning we are doing so again at the sort of maximum allowable pace under the 25% of rolling volume. At these levels, at these share price levels, hopefully it won't all be done at these levels, but we'd be retiring about another 10% of our market cap in addition to the 10% already retired. And it's in fact, it's worth saying to all shareholders and the level of shares that we have bought back is now approaching the level of authority that you approved. At our AGM in 2024 to ensure we actually have the right authorities to execute the current program actually need to seek further shareholder approval we'll be doing that at a one off general meeting towards the April. The notice of that general meeting is being posted out to shareholders today.

So I mentioned that we outperformed on exits, but we underperformed on overall NAV per share returns with a with a 17 percent 17p per share reduction. Now Mark and David can talk a bit about that and the but I'll cover a couple of the key areas. So first all, the largest overall contributor was Oxford Nanopore. And while we saw something of a fair value improvement from the position at the half year, the overall reduction in the year was still around 7p per share. In terms of Nanopore sort of business performance, I've made sort of three observations. Firstly, the company did deliver good growth in 2024, about 23% in constant currency. That was significantly ahead of its peers. This was a result of their focus on expanding presence into high value applied areas such as clinical, biopharma, and applied industrial, which now make up about 30% of the company's revenue New product launches, particularly the Lockdown Q line series are essential delivering some of these more regulated end markets. Secondly, Nadafore announced several big landmark contracts and sort of strategic collaborations that included with the UK government, UK Biobank and Precision Health in Singapore. And that adds to existing relationships with the likes of the Mayo Clinic in The US for precision medicine in cancer and genetic disorders.

Those collaborations will add revenue and expected to advance genomics driven healthcare around the world. And then my third observation is Novo Holdings joined the Registrar as a major shareholder during the year. And the Ellison Institute of Technology is now the single largest holder at 11%. Is in addition to BioMeria and strategic relationships that the business has with NVIDIA and Apple, that that Novo investment was part of a small primary fundraise, and our modelling now shows that the company can comfortably trade to its 2028 cash flow breakeven Now the more recent results have evidently disappointed the market In our view, the company's taken an appropriately prudent view of the impact of NIH budget ary challenges in The US and sales restrictions in China. It means 2025 growth is anticipated to be nearer that achieved in 2024, than the 30% median target. Although think that the recent cost control measures mean the bottom line impact is is likely to be minimal. So we can still see how the company achieves its anticipation of EBITDA breakeven in 2027. Now the second category, and Dave is going to talk about this a bit more in the financial results, relates to sort of the knock on effect of this ongoing tougher funding environment for growth stage companies and on those businesses that need to raise capital reasonably imminently A number of these businesses have highly differentiated product offerings, address multi billion markets.

However, nonetheless, that funding environment was definitely more challenging than a couple of years ago. And this includes businesses such as Okser, which is our world leading industrial autonomy software business, and Mark will provide some further color on that one shortly. And then the third major driver is sort of commercial delays or technical setbacks specific to a particular company. And of course the challenging funding environment doesn't help, but it's largely down to specific issues with a company. And this includes companies like Ultraleaf, which is developing this sort of world leading hand tracking technology which had some commercial setbacks. Again, Mark will talk about that one. And another example of this category is of course, 'Ostesto' And this is one where we did have a technical setback. This is our single largest largest private company holding by value. Course, during the year, we were frustrated as were shareholders that Esteso was not in a position to release any data from it. Phase 2b RA study However, in February, Astesso did provide an update and it was disappointing that it didn't achieve the primary endpoint. However it was also encouraging that the trial results reinforced Loramestat, which is the name of their compound, it reinforced that novel mechanism of action and its effectiveness in both protecting the bone of people living with rheumatoid arthritis, We also saw statistically significant improvements things like bone erosions, improvements in disability and fatigue in patients.

And that is a huge positive impact for patients. Now the company will publish full study results shortly, and plans further phase two studies to to further evaluate the unique potential of that drug to promote what's called adaptive tissue repair, both in RA and in other conditions. And in our initial review of the data, both sort of internally from our team, and from independent external specialists, confirms that there is genuinely something unique about the mechanism of this drug so we are supportive of the company continuing to pursue this development we're also pleased to report that ESTESO is sufficiently funded to conduct those additional studies which the Phase 2b justified. However, given this setback and the knock on implications for monetizing the compound, we reviewed the carrying value including with the support of Deloitte and with review from our KPMG, reduce the fair value by about 32,000,000 or 3p per share. As we entered 2024, we recognised that the appetite for higher risk and early stage assets was likely to remain cautious and there were a lot going on in the world, lots of elections and disruptions to trade and investment flows and and and lots of geopolitical tension and military conflicts.

And we were also very aware of the continued discount between our now per share and our share price. So as a result, we agreed with the board a number of priorities for us to deliver in 2014 to seek to address that and optimise group for growth. And first of all, as I mentioned, we proactively delivered on profitable realizations. We continue to focus down our investment strategy and we extended our buyback as I mentioned, reduced our net overheads and we've maintained investment discipline worth saying that we invested about £63,000,000 down from 70,000,000 which was less than 10% again of the total capital $780,000,000 raised by the portfolio as a whole. And we also were successful in raising a further £95,000,000 of additional managed private capital partly through part walk and partly through an extension of our relationship with Hostplus And even these actions have yet to have a sustained impact on NAV per share or our share price indeed. So we continue to work tirelessly to deliver against these and others including now using our capital to even more aggressively retire our shares at these prices. As you would expect, the Board continues to review all options to deliver shareholder value.

So just a quick summary of how the business is now set up. We've clearly sought to reduce net overheads and to access additional private capital, This is the way that the group is now structured and increasingly we're making the bulk of our early stage investments through our Heart Walk platform here on the left. Here there is a lower cost of capital arising from EIS tax reliefs, and it's very well suited to [indiscernible] even in the sort of the challenge markets for raising EIS and VCT [indiscernible] We tend to raise about 30 to 40,000,000 per year This provides management and performance fees to the group, as well as a very differentiated investment pipeline The next stage of funding after that tends to come from the balance sheet we're doing later stage series A and on, the permanent balance sheet. This offers capital returns to shareholders directly and a lot of the value is as you'll see in Mark's slide is in businesses that we anticipate the opportunity to exit within the next sort of two to three years. And then finally on the right hand side, this is where as businesses start to scale, it's certainly something which is a target in The UK, they need further capital beyond the level that we can provide from the balance sheet So we've complemented the balance sheet with private scale up funds and that generates management performance fees the business, but it also helps to ensure that as those companies mature they can get better access to growth capital hopefully generating better returns for shareholders.

In terms of scale, Hartwalk's about half a billion, sterling of under management. The balance sheet is about a billion. And we're aiming to scale what is an existing few hundred million on the private fund side and to at least the same level as the balance sheet over time. And then finally, I said earlier that we have seen an overall reduction in that per share, but we continue to see this significant opportunity to deliver positive NAV share performance that will be enhanced for long term shareholders by our current active buyback program. I've covered Oxford Nowcor and Astesso, they're the two largest holdings by value. Each represents about 10% of our NAV per share. I'm now going to pass on to Mark to cover the next few. As well as touching on some of those companies that I mentioned had seen a resetting of value for this year for various reasons. And yet continue to have very significant upside potential. So Mark, over to you.

Thank you, Greg. Good morning, everybody. My name is Mark Riley. I'm recently taken over the responsibility of running the whole group portfolio. You've recall I've been on these calls before when I was running the technology side of IP Group's business where, of course, we've delivered, quite a lot of success in recent years with the exits that Greg talked about. Beachespace and and Garrison in 2024. And prior to that, the WaveOptics, which we sold for over half a billion dollars. So intending and hoping to bring that that success across the the group level. Portfolio. Regrettably, first job is to to convey to you with contrition or or write down. As Greg said, the drivers for that were a continued drop in the price of our holding, in Oxonantapol. That was the largest contributor, but, also, there were market headwinds and a and a contract in the availability of co investment capital, the associated price erosion that that causes, as well as some commercial setbacks in the portfolio. And I'll go into a little bit more detail on that. But the positive message is that some those were setbacks. They weren't write downs. They weren't write offs.

They weren't sort of complete loss of opportunity. And history tells us that venture capital as a business model relies on outsized returns from one or a small number of assets that pay back and and and deliver upside on on the rest of the portfolio. And inevitably, some of those challenges fall first and the sort of fluctuating journey So those outcomes can be a tough one as we've we've seen this year, but do continue to have a whole stable of candidates to be the assets that deliver to that really sort of high outsized return. To to to deliver return right across the portfolio. And, of course, the degree to which that potential is priced into the the current value fluctuates with the market, but, it's high a few years ago, it was lower this year, but the fact is that that potential remains. [indiscernible] picked out a few of our sort of most mature assets to to to exemplify that and to to really characterize that potential. All of the assets on this slide are delivering transformative products in multibillion, $10,000,000,000 plus market opportunities. Picking out the first one, you may already be familiar with Hisatta, which is our hydrogen electrolyzer company.

Hydrogen electrolyzer is basically a unit that converts creates hydrogen. It's it's how you [indiscernible] And they are commercializing a new type of hydrogen electrolyzer that is more efficient than you can currently buy. If you buy a electrolyzer today, will be about 75% efficient if it's a good one. And the high the Hisatra electrolyzer shown that it's capable of 95% efficiency And they have some milestones coming up this year technical milestones that are sort of validation points for their device. They're building a scale up version of their device at the moment. And if those technical milestones are hit and the the data is looking good so far, then there is a very sort of immediate opportunity to gain customer traction with that device and they're selling into a $17,000,000,000 projected market in twenty twenty thirty two thousand and thirty for hydrogen electrolyzers. So we see see a lot of upside in that opportunity. The second asset covered on this slide is Arteos. They are developing DNA damage response pathway drugs for treatment of cancer They have already published some early data in late twenty twenty three. They've some data where they said that durable confirmed responses were observed, and so we take that to mean that they're seeing a reduction in a visible effect on tumors.

And so now they are doing their phase one stroke two trial to which is expected to complete this year. To to prove that that effect out in the larger cohort of patients. The third asset on this slide is Pulmon's side. So Pulmicide make a drug that treats treats a fungal infection of the lung There's a fungus called aspergillus, which we all inhale it naturally occurring in soil and then fertiliser, and it doesn't usually do you any harm. But if you have a reduced immune system, or other sort of lung conditions, then this can be very dangerous and in fact fatal. [indiscernible] An inhalable drug, which is a sort of novel mechanism for treating this condition, which is showing very promising signs They, have already done some trials on this drug, and they showed that it potentially has fewer side effects, better efficacy, and improved patient outcomes than existing drugs. And their phase three trial is due to readout next year. So they're getting a lot of interest already in their [indiscernible] Inshelk, we, as Greg said, we can't settle the voucher to SEC rules for another targeting a very large market. So that's the that sort of exemplified the opportunity, I also wanted to emphasize this point that, yes, have had some write downs in the portfolio this year.

In addition to none of four, there were some private companies that we wrote down. But all of these companies still have that existing opportunity that they, they have an opportunity to deliver upside for us and to were not write downs because these companies have failed. They were write downs because they had challenges or or setbacks or markets. Contraction or access to funding challenges, but some they are not write offs. They they still give us an opportunity to to retain value. Ultimately, had commercial setbacks simply because the market for virtual and augmented reality technologies has developed a lot more slowly than anybody, including Apple and Meta and all the top players in this space anticipated. Didn't get the market traction that they hoped for and the time scale that they hoped for. But they have a huge family of very fundamental patents in this area of hand tracking and haptic feedback, and we will use hand tracking for interfacing with computers in the future. And so we've formed a partnership to monetize that patent portfolio, and there remains potential for us to get a return on our investment in that asset. Greg talked about Esteso. Obviously, disappointing not to have hit the primary endpoint in that trial, but it did generate a lot of encouraging signs that there is something really fundamentally exciting happening with this drug and there's something compelling from a patient perspective.

With this drug. So we now learned a lot and we know what we're gonna apply to the next stage of trialing the drug. So there's still potential there. First line fusion, they frankly failed to, to to raise money with the, the largest quantum that they wanted to raise. They had a business model that relied on on building a fusion reactor. And having not been able to raise money to do that, they have now completely pivoted their business model to be a specialist equipment or specialist component supplier to the people who are building fusion reactors, the people who are developing nuclear fusion as an energy source, sort of much more of picks and shovels play that allows them to get supply to the market and, in fact, it's already generating revenue today. So good opportunity there to obtain value in that company. And finally, ops are on this slide. So they raised money in a in a in a market that was very, very, very strong. We've been circumspect about this, that they're coming up to raise money again. We don't know how that will play out. We expect that they will raise money, but we don't know the price of that round yet.

And so we've taken a small impairment on this, but it's it's still very exciting. A commercial perspective. They have software deployed in vehicles that are running, carrying passengers today. One of the few sort of system integrators with the system. One of the few companies to go through a system integrator to put into a vehicle in that way and to run their software on the road and and lots of off road applications they have several partnerships that are going through trials at the moment, that have very large upside if those trials are successful. And sort of early signs of promising uptake of that that technology and operate applications like airports and ports and so on.

And finally, the addition to these sort of high value companies, the ones that sit at the top of our portfolio by value, there is a whole stable of assets that have the potential to be the next candidate to sit in that sort of a near term exit category. We have lots of exciting companies coming through again [indiscernible] very valuable. Areas of the market. I've just picked out a few of those, but there are a lot to [indiscernible] [indiscernible] Intrinsyc is a semiconductor company that is making smaller feature memory technology. So at the moment, we have a limitation in the feature size that we can apply to random access memory, and that gives us a constraint that we can't sit random access memory on the same chip as processors, and so you have a bottleneck in your processing. And Intrinsyc has technology that's the only 12 nanometer nonvolatile memory in the world at the moment. And, that should take out later this year. And so, if that is successful and it's the technical parameters of that technology are hit. Then we have a very compelling technology to completely transform a hundred mill hundred billion dollar market opportunity. [indiscernible] Memory.

OxyHealth, another company is doing very well, well into revenue now supplying 50% of NHS England's mental health trusts, and they have customers in The US as well. Genomics uses genetic databases and advanced algorithms to understand the genetic component of disease. They have some very compelling partnerships with the likes of GSK Vertex. [indiscernible] So the point being, there's a lot of kind of potential set beneath that the large component of value in the portfolio and that's a quarter of the portfolio that's made up by our our sort of smaller, earliest earlier stage assets. There are a lot of candidates that jump up into those those high value buckets. And so in summary, lot of candidates that deliver that upside return, the write downs were write downs. They weren't write offs. The opportunity remains and a lot of assets in the lower value portfolio potential to sort of the future returns as well. Thank you. Thanks very much. Hi, everybody. Good to be with you again.

Just quickly going through the financial results I mean, it's a relatively short section, but I'll give you a quick summary of the key points. Cash, very good. You heard very strong up about 60,000,000, up about 25%, and we'll look at a kind of cash waterfall in a minute and be able to see the bridge from last year to this year. Net assets, as we heard, are less positive.

Down to 97p per share from about £1.14 this time last year.

It's about a a 15% reduction in that per share. About a £200,000,000 loss. Over the period. Net overhead slightly down in the period. We'll talk about that in a minute down 22 to 19. They're actually at the year end, lower number again, I'll talk about that briefly when I do casts So really probably come to the main messaging, which is what is in that loss effectively. So on the green side, on the positive side there on the left hand side of the screen now, [indiscernible] which made it up to about six six million. Top of that, there's some other quotes companies in the next door box. In for example, example, in the Sentessa went up in the and these are companies [indiscernible] the screen. The middle, the actual basic up rounds, down rounds, other movements on on plat [indiscernible] sort of canceled themselves out. So probably where the main story is, I'm afraid, on the right is on the right hand side of our screen. We've talked about oxymenopole. A publicly listed company. Actually, it's trading over good. Actually, it's been achieving the numbers it said it would do. In this difficult market, it it performed well and then share prices down in this. 66,000,000 of euros in one go.

And then leading to the presentation Mark just gave, there's kind of a category of company that is extremely strong. We're still very excited about. Of that stuff like Fusion and Oxford, which mainly due to the funding So in both cases, those companies have actually funded later than we expected. So it hadn't yet fully funded where it launched at this stage. You're in that situation, it's quite difficult to do anything else than have a lying down. It's hard to carry. Valuation is sometimes relatively old. Both cases one's under 21, and one's 22. So relatively old, you can't rely on them anymore. Haven't yet completed another funding round. Therefore, you really have to take decision to be pretty prudent and take [indiscernible] very much hope when subsequent on the grounds happen, which we believe they will on very fast companies, [indiscernible] [indiscernible] fusion, for example, and oxygen is about a third. So that really accounts for that. You have about a hundred million, a little bit over a hundred and 30,000,000, where there are actually like, I would say, that can be setbacks. So we've heard about about the pesto. Obviously, very unusual in that missed its primary endpoint.

A lot of very interesting and really disruptive sounds to the secondary endpoints in terms of bone repair. Unavoidably though, we had to rerun those numbers and we've had to write that down by about £31,000,000 in the period. And, ultimately, we might just explain to still an exciting company for interest in new business models of generating licensing camp. But given the primary market been successful, we had no choice to do a significant write down. We wrote that down by about 26,000,000. Then the last one in that category, company called Crescendo, which is a drug company. Achieved a prostate cancer trial have some good evidence of success, but unfortunately not enough not over enough patients make it competitive with other drugs in the market. As result, we've taken very prudent view and actually written most of that off. So that really explains it. We've covered all that loss in in those small number of companies. Next slide. Actually, that's what I give pretty much every year. It it it's pretty simple. Our numbers are actually pretty simple, which is [indiscernible] [indiscernible] Most of which, by the way, are contingent on exits. So you can get to pay if you get exits.

Items such as Karen. And you can see there are reduction from that 1.2 to just under 1,000,000,000 in NAV. In terms of on the right, the actual distribution portfolio is still pretty similar actually. They've got the vast majority, 83% of it in the top 40 companies. So we are although having, you know, very model, have a lot of companies, but we're not very exciting early fetch. [indiscernible] Mark just explained three companies a moment ago. Actually, a lot of the value is really restricted and focused on a fairly small number of companies And then not too much on our end to this slide. I have this we talk about each time. Normally, where we normally find the hour, we've got about a third of the portfolio of funded. Need to make more money. It might raise money if it wants to, need to waste And then we normally have about a third funding this year and a third next year. And as it stands, we've a relatively small amount this year. They were enough as you've heard to I mean, we broke down some of our bigger assets. But most of that chapter 26 pretty hopeful we'll get those assets funded in the first half, and then you should have a relatively small amount that require funding in the second half of the year, which of course is a good place to be combined with our strong cash.

So this is what have what cash performed quick look at numbers will see we invested about 63,000,000, a little bit less than yours recently. We're investing between 70 and 90. About 63,000,000 invested. Very good realizations underpinned a lot by that feature space exit, but also garrisoning there and a number of other exits. Meaning, we generated over a hundred and 83,000,000, proceeds there. So so three times what we invested We've heard about share buyback program. We bought back 30,000,000. We're still committed to about 50,000,000. Our overheads at 19 have it in a minute. Gonna be lower soon. A little bit of debt, very small amount of debt funding. Other working capital items that occurs because on occasion, it's on a license side, we collect money in on behalf of other parties that we don't have to distribute. You have that working capital movement. But actually, in the average on 85,000,000 which which are obviously very strong. Probably worth making a point. We're still strong today. 277,000,000 in the bank as I speak to you. That although we're three months later, position has remained pretty strong. I think last for me, just to remind the evidence I touched on during the year, we did do a very comprehensive review of both heads have reduced the mentally significantly.

Down by about 23%. You don't see that in the numbers. You only see a 13% reduction in the numbers year to date. And that's because it made most reductions in the second half. And therefore, we haven't had a full year impact. As at the year end, the run rate has reduced by about 23%, which means that we've got about 16 to 7,000,000 net as opposed to about 22.1. The beginning of last year. And we've achieved that by focusing on our strategy, [indiscernible] the sourcing, and that's allowed us to actually reduce our cost of graph across the group without actually significantly determining our ability to perform, and we hope to start delivering good returns going forward. So with that, I'll hand you back into a question of two queen.

Thanks very much. Dave, very good. Right. Just very quickly to summarize and then get on to questions. We've a number of questions. In the q and a section, which is very good. Thank you, everyone. So I guess firstly just to highlight that there will be there's there's more than 35 milestones of various descriptions coming up across that balance sheet portfolio and during 2025. Obviously some will be good, some may be bad, including on the clinical side of things. Given [indiscernible] statistical outcomes that are possible there But as Miles mentioned, number of them are also product launches, technical updates and indeed included in that is first revenues for our [indiscernible] a specialist component supplier. So there will be plenty of milestones to mark us against during the portfolio over the course of the year. I did also want to give shareholders visibility on what we are prioritising for 2025 and beyond. Know, as I mentioned in 2024, our main priority really was being able to deliver profitable cash exits And I think we delivered on that despite a tough market. Clearly, the priority for 2025 is to get the NAV per share moving positively again We talk in the release also about continuing to deliver those those cash exits, possible cash exits, we can see line of sight on £250,000,000 from the private portfolio by the end of twenty seven And we do have line of sight on which companies are potential contributors to that.

Of course, timing and the outcome of those companies is always the most difficult thing to predict. But we do have a very strong pipeline across a number of companies that we are working towards As I mentioned in the release, we are upping the level of our cash exits that we're using for cash returns to shareholders, which, you know, we are doing this by way of a buyback at the moment. The the eventual game plan, you know, is a shareholder myself, is that we get back to a position where we're not trading at a significant discount to NAV, And at that point, we can reconsider using mechanisms such as the dividend, pays back cash to all shareholders equally and when the share price isn't at such a significant discount to now, that's obviously what the board will consider and look at. Another area that we're targeting is to access further private scale up capital As I said, I do believe that there's a great opportunity in Australia, ironically, we're having more success with the Australian superannuation funds than we are with those in The UK. That's not to say that we don't have support from UK long term capital.

Railpen one of the most active DB schemes in The UK is our large shareholder. We have a number of other shareholders on the register from that that investor group. We have Phoenix, the biggest DC provider in The UK, which provides our long term debt and we also have investors in a number of our funds. So there are many ways that the sort of Imagine House Compact etc can be delivered through IP group and we're working hard to do that. It is it is slow but we're seeing increasing signs that some of that capital may start to flow whether it will be this year or early next. Not sure. We're definitely working towards it being this year. So I think we can access further private scale up capital I've got greater visibility, as I said, on those relationships in Australia, of course is relevant for companies that we have across the portfolio. But hopefully that will be joined by The UK. And then I just want to also, I made this point a bit at the half year and at the moment we are very much focusing our balance sheet capital, as Mark said, on delivering those companies that are going to deliver NAV per share returns and cash returns in the next few years.

Which does mean we have deliberately scaled down the number of new investments that we make on balance sheet. That's not to say that we don't have a rich pipeline. Most of that opportunity pipeline is being delivered through our Park Walk managed funds. We do 20 to 30 new spinouts a year through that and and while strategy that I described, which is to use the the part the part part funds a sort of sourcing engine and then fund from the balance sheet. We haven't actually done many of those because the level of capital that we're allocating to new deals is is very low at the moment. We think that's the appropriate balance for delivering value to shareholders, NAV per share. But as as we are successful, we will be able to do that in the future. So to summarise the key messages hopefully by now you'll have these sort of drummed into you, but we did for an exit despite the market being tough, from a liquidity point of view for VC generally. That's led us to primarily accelerate our buybacks. We've got 50,000,000 programme still outstanding at the moment, which is more than 10% of our existing market cap And that's having already retired and cancelled 10% of our shares.

We hope that that's going to have an impact on share price. A positive impact on share price of course. Our NAV per share did decline I hope that Mark has been able to set out to you the reasons why we're confident that in many cases those are, resetting of value and setbacks rather than write off of opportunity. And so we do believe that there is a very significant opportunity to deliver these positive NAV per share performance And the fact that we're doing buybacks at these levels will enhance the net per share return for [indiscernible] And that will hopefully yield results in our share price and that is obviously the most important KPI for shareholders myself included. So with that, I will now move to q and a. Dave or GI, you do a great job every time Thank you very much. Jake, I'm gonna appear. No. I I will okay. Well, so looking ahead, everybody, we we're forty five minutes in. We I will warn you, we'll probably overrun the hour. We will carry on and do all the questions. That's what we endeavor to do. I'll let you know when the hour is up.

Those that might need to go. So I've got 28 of these to go through. Number one, [indiscernible] Are the annual costs among the company? And are they justifiable given the poor performance over the UNCF? It's a very fair question. I just explained the cost base a moment ago down from 22.1 probably to about 17,000,000 this year. A quite a significant reduction during the period. So we have implemented quite a big cut We think it is right sized. We always have to review the costs. But we think what we did was right at the time and remains right today. Something you want to do, often. Regularly. And we think given our belief in the future growth of the company, we are about right sized as we stand. But as always, we'll be watching your costs. Among the key thing on these days, make sure they don't start creeping up again. So we're quite focused on that. Second question, I'm gonna pass it to you, Mark. We high we high start I've been pre subscribed, so I don't know who submitted them. RehySata. Where do you see the global hydrogen market developing? Quite a big question.

Yep. Yeah. So I I mentioned this figure of $17,000,000,000 market by 30. We think it's one of the biggest markets in in clean tech. There are no practical alternatives to hydrogen, but zero carbon production of steel and shipping and ammonia fertilizer production, methanol production [indiscernible] obvious adopters of green hydrogen. There is a a about 12% of global carbon emissions that they account for about 12% of global carbon emissions. So those four sectors alone have a demand for something like 200 megatons zero carbon hydrogen. Hydrogen that was produced using renewable energy sources. So clearly, company with disruptive efficiency much more efficient electrolyzer, the opportunity to take advantage of that. But it's obviously sort of we're all kind of re recalibrating our our assessment of the market opportunity in regards to The US because there are some headwinds there and challenges in adoption of clean technology. But what we've observed in clean tech over the past decade is that people quietly get on and do what is most economically [indiscernible] I I start to deliver a much more efficient solution? We think that there is a very large market in Europe and a big opportunity there. Large market in The US as well.

And a lot to go up for for high start.

Thank you, Mark. I'm gonna go up. This is a question from Ken Phee. I'm gonna go your direction, Greg. If the initiating oxazanopore and growing the company privately a solution envisaged by IP Can you answer that to some extent?

Look at what we can just to some extent. I mean, we we tend not to comment on specific companies as regard to, you know, corporate transactions like that. I mean, we we obviously as a as a major shareholder, look at all of these things and and, speak to the other major shareholders at Nanopore, as well as engaging very regularly with the with the management team and the senior team. So I guess sort of no options are off the table as is the case for any public business.

Thank you. This question is from MB. Again, to you, Greg. The company is managing third party funds. Host plus is mentioned. Our investment position is made in a way that equally respect the interest for shareholders and third parties. And it's totally explained now.

It's a good question. We've take this very seriously obviously because you know lots of managing your capital is a regulated activity and we have regulated business here in The UK, Park Walk's an example, and regulated businesses in Australia. There's a number of mechanisms as to how this is done in terms of the investment mandate for each of those different pools of capital and the investment decision making body I. E. Investment committees for each of those pools of capital tend to be different. For example, [indiscernible] we have a separate IC, it's a separate FCA authorized entity, a separate IC which takes decisions that are in the best interests of the EIS investors in those funds. We have a separate investment decision here on the balance sheet side for example, that considers we're making co investments. I mean it is something that needs to be managed by all businesses that are managing pools of capital for different stakeholders, and we've got good experience of doing it. And there is benefit to a healthy degree of sort of collaboration but also appropriate differentiation of decision making. [indiscernible] Moving on quite a long question, I'll read in full. Again, I'm gonna point to you Greg.

Yeah. We should could all might want to answer.

Marxie. The share price is down to NAV reported at the end of twenty four? Is still true wide at circa 44.8%. We agree.

It was circa 49% at the end of twenty twenty three. Do the board consider the actions taken to reduce this discount by where the 30,000,000 Shire buyback program in the year, a success. If not, would they consider purchasing shares themselves with actual cash to signify to the market their confidence in the company. It is noted that the director sold shares in the air did not buy shares other than receiving any paid options.

Well, clearly, 30,000,000 hasn't had enough of an impact yet, has it? That's why we're doing more and why we're accelerating more in the mean, this question probably came in a little bit ten zero seven, so it came in I think a bit before we talked about what we're doing to accelerate that by that further and to continue to retire more than 10% of our share count. So again, So we are you know, we are doing this aggressively given that significant discount, persistent discount to NAV. We do always consider purchasing shares. I've done it regularly and and certainly would look at it again now that we're outside of our closed period On the not necessarily to comment too much on REM policy because I'm not sure how appropriate that is, but it is the the reason that we have these disclosures around directors sort of receiving options and buying selling shares The we've set up our remuneration to be as long term as possible through a long term business. And so our bonus opportunity is, the max bonus opportunity I think I'm right in saying is the lowest bonus opportunity on the FTSE two fifty. [indiscernible] Done that deliberately and not only that the amount that we make in any given year 50% of it is deferred into shares that then obviously it contributes to our minimum shelving requirement but the intent is it's sort of locked up for a further two years to make it even more long term in nature.

The mechanism to do that unfortunately is to grant nil price options that then have to be exercised and then much like a bonus you pay your tax on it, but it shows up as a you know sort of a purchase or gain of shares and then a sale. We're looking at whether or there's a way to make that a bit more efficient in terms of mechanism. I think it does. It's unhelpful to make it appear that we're selling shares actually. All we're doing is covering the tax which we would have paid had we received the bonus in cash. So, we do definitely look at buying shares for sure and understand that you know that sort of signalling.

Yeah, thanks very much. I'm going to highlight where I fit the questions are coming from analysts. I've been asked in the past to make it clear for analyst questions. And I think this is Paul C, which I'm guessing is you, Paul Cuddon. Thank you for being here. Quote with you, Greg, any prospects for additional secondary sales of minority position? Within as we did in the Well, we continue to look at that all the time. We looked at a number [indiscernible] possibilities last year, and all the time you're balancing you know sort of the pricing and what's offered and the terms versus we think we can deliver and how it compares to using the returns to pay for share buybacks or other returns. So we continue to look at it obviously when we've got some progress on that front. If if we find something that works, then then we will but, of course, that again because we if we can deliver value to shareholders in that way, we'll we'll absolutely do A second one for Paul. Again, I'm pointing to you, Greg. Any interest from big pharma in a secondary endpoints? Understanding it may be which you wouldn't say about your favorite company.

I mean the short answer is is yes. And as yet, insufficient to result in something commercial. Yes, I mean, was a there's a significant amount of interest and the company intends to make some much fuller disclosures around particularly those secondary endpoints and what they mean both in RA and in other indications. And that should be available for us to talk about in coming weeks. So we'll definitely update more on that at the half year.

Thank you. And next to a different analyst, Sam England from Berenberg. You for being here, Sam. We appreciate it. You mentioned in the release that you are targeting more than £200,000,000 in exits. By the end of twenty seven. [indiscernible] Can you talk about the visibility you have on To what extent does it rely on a pickup in public private market? Something's for exit. I'm gonna chuck that ball to you, Mark.

Yeah.

Exactly. So, well, I've I've talked in the presentation about a lot of the highest prospect asset that we think have a a mid term realization. Prospect. It's hard to pin down precisely when that's coming. Wouldn't have predicted that feature space was gonna set in '24, but we thought that that was one that was coming up in a sort of three year window. And indeed, that was a great outcome there. So similar now, we have a stable of assets that sit in the category of having the potential to deliver in near term. And those questions disappeared. I can't I can't answer the second bit of it now. But I think it was about what public and private Yeah.

The the funding environment. So we have already seen m and a interest in several of those assets that we we talked about Does it rely on the funding environment picking up I I mean, it it relies on third party funding. I don't think it necessarily relies on it It's it's only gonna be delivered if there is a complete sea change in the availability of caps. I think that these are strong companies. And even in relatively difficult markets, strong mature companies with a near exit potential tend to raise money. And so I don't envisage that we're gonna have a sort of major problem unless there is a pickup in the in the availability of gas.

Yeah. Again, know that we were talking about the realization from the private portfolio as well. So we're not seeing any public companies included in that number. [indiscernible] If if a company were potentially to IPO, we might become one it might become one that we would then exit. Again, back to Paul Cullen. You're back. Nice to have you. I'm gonna go this to you, Greg. When do you think the proposals in the Mansion House compact could start to be implemented? And what would it mean for backing visionary ventures in The UK? I I don't know. I mean, we'd we'd obviously hoped sooner Then they I suppose that my observation is the nature of the conversation I spoke on the last year's full year results and at the half year about it felt like sort of some of the plumbing for this was being put in place. Speaking to potential signatories to the to the Imagine House Compact and others who manage money for them There still are a number of changes, particularly to regulations around things like fee caps etc. And that have been pushed through or going through government and legal changes. So that is still to happen, which is which is sort of causing some childiness, I would say, on the delivery.

So I hope in twenty five, I mean, the the Maginha has gone back, had a twenty thirty. Backstop date. So time is getting somewhat tight on this for those who who have committed to that. But I think the nature of the conversations we're having are starting to move more towards the implementation. So sort of hopefully second half of this year What does it mean for back end visionary ventures in The UK? Mean, is a huge opportunity here to deliver growth and to deliver investment returns And we've done work with PitchBook to look at what's the nature of the funding gap in The UK it's very very prominent beyond Series B. The UK is very well set up actually for early stage investment particularly through EIS and more can be done and more is being done and then what continues to be done continue to do that. But the real opportunity is backing businesses to scale so more companies can get to the scale that feature space did before they exit. A great example is Yasa Motors which we back through REIS funds and that achieved a sort of 300,000,000 company valuation on exit it's now a core part of Mercedes Benz Daimler's delivery of electric drivetrains.

Fortunately that one is still here in The UK and we're backed through again through Carth Walk another spin out of that technology from that business. Hopefully soon Gently move on to the very I've got 34 questions. Just over everyone's away. It's 11:00. I do understand people who are booked for the hour would be quite understandable. We're going to carry on and try and get through all of our questions. I'll have a go at this one. David c, thank you for this. Buybacks don't really turn cash to shareholders in the way the dividend would. Why not reinstate the latter? I have some sympathy to your point. I understand the point entirely. We think it does still remain the most efficient way to attend capital at the moment. You could argue if you take out cash and let's say now is obviously liquid position. Some are best to consider our discount enough to be as much as 80%. I bet it was an 80% position. And so by using our our cash be by the shares, we are actually getting an immune return. Believe in our network, we do we believe endorsed by the fact that every time we sell assets over the last three or four years, sell them at a premium.

It's a consistent pattern 2021, 02/03, and very much last year again. Think consistently sold to the premium seem to support our values We may have realizations. It does make economic sense to buy them back this way. It should be, you the time that the residual value to all the remaining shareholders has gone up as in the remaining NAV per share, but for each individual does go up and and actually should improve proposition in time. And that's why we maintain with it. [indiscernible] much this is Sam again, in. Thank you, Sam. How much the portfolio needs to raise cap in 2025? And how are you thinking about the valuations these businesses might achieve relative to last time there is money? This factor into calculations. And that's yes. Very much it. I actually had slide earlier which shows you something like about 45% of the it's not so much this year. It's it's quite a big percent next year, but it does need to raise money. [indiscernible] [indiscernible] Only got a small amount remaining in the first half, and then we're gonna be small amount in the second half of the year. Most of it's now moved into next year.

It's '26. Sorry. But we very much do factor in what we think companies are worth money at. The things that's quite difficult is when you're doing this process is actually knowing what the value's likely to be until it kinda hoses into view, if you see what I mean. Something that may not raise money till '26, it's actually very hard to determine what their current balance can be like. Whether the company achieves its milestones, and what value you'd like to get. When they become more imminent as in this year, begin to get much better idea. And I think I explained in my short presentation [indiscernible] actually was because we need to factor in what the potential future funding round might be had. So it's very much one of primary factors. That we actually factor in when we're we're considering evaluation. Next one, I might pass to you, Mark. Let's see How many part I think we covered this one. Have we I think I've covered it already. How many part work any stage investments might be the written Do you mention a number? I can't remember. In series a year over the last three years, it's a bit of an exact question. [indiscernible] I don't have the number in front of me.

I was just trying to talk to somebody to come up with the co investment I've listed six or seven here that That's right. We've got invested in in the over the last few years with them. So I mean, it depends on your definition of series a, but some of them certainly product a lot of the assets alongside. [indiscernible] doesn't affect the company's true value, is the board person investing in shares other than through wiki to purchase? I can't find any information after April 24 on direct to dates. [indiscernible] Next one is has Irene just jumped. So the next one is Andrew m. Thank you. Obviously, the priority is to support the existing portfolio. And realize their value.

However, the paper share buyback has been so given the scale of discount to NAV. Returns shareholders are rightly focused on share buybacks rather than in some category, when the discount is so large. But in absence of dividends, the way to share buyback has been far too slow. Pace has even slowed in March. The daily purchase should be at least double. I'll answer that one. Yeah. It's fair. One of the reasons it slowed recent in last month was we go into what's called a closed period. And during the close period, we're treated as being inside. People beginning to get an idea of what our results look like. That meant we weren't able to change any instructions that we share buyback. And we actually set it at 6%. We've been buying back about 15% of the previous thirty days average deal flow. We are likely to increase in time to increase that this morning. So we'll increase that then. Bit tech, but I think we'll save half of the maximum you really meant to do. And we've increased that max and we'll start buying back at about 25%. Think given the very low price, think given the rather high volumes in the last couple of months, it should have seen going through.

Would expect to see us buying back at a faster pace. And, last time we're in the situation, similar to back end of last year, we began to buy it for $8,900, even a million shares a day. And, of course, if you start buying it that way, you're buying, what, A percent every two weeks. So we think that probably it's built in that you'll start seeing an increase in the rate, which we are buying back. Next one, David b. Hello. With a Stesso, is the effect of the treatment potentially slower to emerge? Than the timeline of the primary endpoint Or is the effect of treatment different to that which is being [indiscernible] I'll say it again. No. No. Go ahead. You go. Yeah.

I understand the question. Yes. Great great question. David. We think that that might be the case. Yes. And that the phase 2b was done effectively over a three month period for various reasons, ethics and fact that all the phase two drugs that have in RA that have gone through in the past. Two, three, four years were done on that same time frame. However, [indiscernible] could well be an explanation and I'll leave it at that for now there will be more information on this, as I said, from the company in sort of coming weeks, but that is a that's a that's a very good observation. And we think we think that is potentially what's going on when you cure the underlying condition. The physical symptoms take a little bit longer to be reduced.

I can give this one to you as well, Greg. Andrew M, thank you. Please expand on how the group scale up fund will operate.

The scale up fund is an opportunity, here in The UK primarily focused at Series B and [indiscernible] [indiscernible] the intent, as I said on the sort of the funding strategy slide, is to add additional capital at the series b b plus stage in the sort of series all have different definitions depending who you talk to. But effectively, as businesses hit the point of commercial traction, they often need to raise rounds that are in the order of magnitude of sort of 50,000,000 to say hundred, 200,000,000 of funding. [indiscernible] is a very big gap in the market for that type of funding. Which is particularly acute here in The UK. And the intention is that that would be a product that addresses that. It's also better suited to sort of a fixed life fund and being done privately. So that's the intent.

Thank you, Andrea. The second question might share this one a bit, Mark.

How realistic is OX evaluation given lack of contract awards over the last six months?

Well, think it's the right valuation. It's got a lot of investor interest. It's got very exciting commercial traction. See a lot of high prospects with that company. Don't wanna be specific about the, where they are commercially because that's confidential to the company and they want us to share some of that. But we spend a lot of time on these valuations and we think it's the right right front. [indiscernible] informed, and so we had an eye to that. So I think we feel relatively confident in it you never know. It is it is a very difficult process that many of these companies.

Even when, you know, you're quite imminent to something else. You never know for sure. We'll see, but we're relatively confident we've got that one right. This is a kind of It's a Terry question from Davinet. Thank you. I'll give it to Greg. We might all try Why continue the share buyback? Actually, not improve share buys. Rather than investing further in new companies, which given the chance to improve NAV. What what is the principal objective of? [indiscernible] Gavin, this is the this is the the regular debate or decision that the board of IP group has to take with guidance from the executive team who are managing the business from day to day. It is a balance. So we've historically sought to invest 80% of our proceeds back into the portfolio and use 20% to return cash in some form to shareholders. At the moment we think that the level that the shares are at represents very compelling value. But we do also need to invest in the portfolio deliver now. So we're this from a NAV per share point of view or a share price point of view. So obviously, buying and retiring shares at a discount to [indiscernible] Inherently improves the NAP per share.

That's the that's the intent. But you can't do that ad infinitum because then the portfolio NAV per share will reduce at a greater level than the cash that you're using. So we do agree the principal objective of IPO is to deliver investment returns However, given the discount to NAV, been more we're using more of our capital to seek to address that discount.

Yep, thank you very much. And Andrew, another question question. This is, I think to me, write down in first sight fusion valuation following a large write down last year. Raises questions about valuation accuracy. What kind of question, but I get your point. Without sounding too defensive, it is probably one of the hardest companies that You know, obviously the potential for first light fusion and achieving some kind of fusion breakthrough is at absolutely immense. If it can be achieved over the next ten, fifteen years, it's completely whole new alternative energy source for the earth that could power power humanity incredibly cheaply. Actually, was the terminal value that is hard to measure. And it makes it very difficult to actually work out, you know, what a likely ultimate valuation would be. We originally did put the value up considerably at the end of twenty one. Early twenty two when it achieved fusion. And perhaps in time hindsight that was too much. Think now we're now much more anchored to realistic kind of funding round valuations However, year, we very diligently have third party valuations. We've tried to juggle this this this difficult asset value. And I think we've done a relatively good job.

I checked in hindsight, we wouldn't have taken that significant increase which are probably at the time of the future being achieved all those years ago. But that aside, I I do think we managed to try and get it relatively fairly valued.

I think the other thing to say is it's a very different company. To the one that it was a year ago. It's had a complete pivot in its business model, and we've got a fairly good Thank you, Mark. Yeah. That's that's good. Another Andrew n, again to me, what further measures on [indiscernible] Big deductions we've done. I think we're well sort of scaling the business. However, as I said, we do need to keep a sharp eye on cost. They can creep up supply with inflation. So then we will still be keeping a very sharp eye on on what we allow to add to our overall running cost and we'll try and keep it level we have it at. I guess what saying you'll see from the results [indiscernible] small impact you know the board and the exec and having no pay rises again this year. So that that mitigates some of the effects of inflation.

Yeah.

That's right.

You'll that in the remuneration.

You'll see that in the doses when they come. You will actually see that yet, but that's right. We will certainly at board level, we're increasing again for the second year, which it does seem appropriate to inform Andrew M again, this is you, Mark. Definitely you. First slide focused on revenues. What realistic time frame? Yeah. I know.

I'm surprised I'm kind of under under premise of the question is that, fusion is still an emerging area and, there isn't a large market for fusion power production today, but there are lot of people making very serious efforts to develop fusion. They need improved technologies to to to help improve their their the the power of their systems and to [indiscernible] amplify the the effects of the reactions that they're they're generating, which is what some first light fusion does. And so the company is projecting good revenue growth over the next few years. They're already in revenue today and the prospects of generating millions of pounds of revenue in, sort of three year time horizon.

Thank you. Andrew again. What I think, Mark, what is the major area of investment in 2025?

Yes. This is a we spent a lot of time thinking about where our thematic focus areas should be We have other seminars on this topic because the teams intermittently run seminars of communicating our focus areas. So we're very interested in the impact of AI, and we have a lot of investments in the impact of AI in the compute stack So I talked about intrinsic semiconductor memory technology company that enables us to have computing that will service the increasingly intense needs of of AI processing. We also have technologies that sit within the communications network because our demands on the communication network will change a lot as results of AI [indiscernible] remain very focused on clean tech, whatever political fluctuations are affecting that industry. We still see a steady march towards a clean energy adoption, and, we have technologies that are very compelling and exceed the benefits of fossil fuels in those domains. And so that's sort of some of the key areas for us, but we could spend a lot of time back getting the team in to to talk about those.

Next, it's gonna be a very short question because you can't answer it. Any sense of time for Hinge? No. We we don't actually and not really come up. We know we know more from you. John h sort of covered this. When will you reinstate the dividend? Many holders require a dividend to justify holding the share.

Let me cover this one. I'm you know, we it's a balance, lots of different views on this. I definitely understand the position of [indiscernible] and I think the right thing at the moment is the [indiscernible] using the [indiscernible] There is an intention over the, you know, the long term share price gets back to closer to NAV, then dividends are an efficient mechanism for category of shareholders to to receive, cash returns.

We have said that we well, it's more than 20% discount. We're gonna maintain the form of buyback this way rather than Next one, Menards. Nice to have you. Another analyst analyst from Edison. Thank you, Lee. This is going your way, Mark, you seen any impact on funding rounds to investors diverting capital into AIA businesses?

Yeah. I mean, every every business is an AI business or or will be soon. We're it's it's sort of enabling technology in the same way that the Internet was in in February. So I I it's not quite the way I think of it in in terms of our own investments. I I wouldn't say it's a trend that I've noticed. I wouldn't say anybody's swung me up and said we're not gonna invest in your in your your portfolio company because we're diverting all our capital into AI. It's possible that's the a a sort of market mentality, but some a lot of very large cohort of our businesses are either enablers the opportunity in AI or have the opportunity to leverage AI to enhance their own product proposition. So I see it as we have a a value proposition for people investing in AI as opposed to losing out to to that. Fair enough. The next one, I'm gonna point you, but it may not be going too long because it's rarely it's the same question here. It's the tension between should you be doing buybacks should you be investing in your own portfolio? We have sort of covered from Andrew M again, massive growth cash balances, 05/21/2025.

Please highlight what portfolio come portfolio companies can give a better return over twelve months.

For just substantially increasing the rate of share buybacks. I don't if you wanna come in any particular ones or feel we've covered that anyway.

We've probably covered them. Happy to cover them. We haven't covered that quite a lot. I'm trying to get that down tonight. I go p, perhaps this one's a twenty ninth question. What's your plan regarding ONT? Will this continue to be a strategic long term investment would you prefer to monetize it partially or in full? Should the share price move closer to its fair value? How do you protect against ONT being subject to an opportunist takeover bid? [indiscernible] Yeah. Mark Mark, I'll view on this as well. I mean, all companies in the portfolio are up for sale at the right price. Mean, that's definite the the mandate of the business for sure. And so if the share price was closer to what we consider to be fair value or indeed reflect what we consider to be a good price, then yes, we would be prepared to it. Partially or in full for sure. Absolutely, if that's the case, How do you protect against Danaport being subject to an opportunistic take out bid? I mean, the truth is you don't. There are and I mentioned earlier there are a number of what I consider to be strategic holders on the register, people like BioMeria, and Novo Holdings, Elston Institute of Technology, Us who clearly have got views on the long term value of the business, but also have the same financial objectives that other shareholders have.

So I think there's there are some strategic holders on the register, but you know as an investor in that business you've always got to consider whether monetizing it is the right strategy, and and we'll do that, you know, as as as that's appropriate.

I'm gonna push on food. If everyone are going, it's about, 11:20. We'll we'll definitely finish at eleven I think probably an hour and a half is we'll have had our our share. So let's try and get to the remaining seven or eight questions. Please, this is Philippine, just who exactly is selling the shares? Who are the main sellers? And I could start on that, but I'm not gonna name individual institutions. We have this ourselves. We get shared respect at least once every month. We analyze every month. We look at it. And in most months, there are not consistent So that's not consistent. During the year, this year gone by from '24, were a couple of institutions. Normally, in one case, because the family member retired and neglected fund and allocate reallocate their funds. They did actually reduce their positions in the year that's why we saw it in the year. There were couple of occasion periods quite big numbers came to market. So and 12,000,000 trading in a day. [indiscernible] It's more, I think, a lack of buyers from sellers, I think, probably. There's not a persistent server at the moment over the other those kind of instances where we saw [indiscernible] name those funds, but you'll see them drop off the register if you look at Next question.

How are your peers performing in terms of NAV per share and funding challenges? Probably not for us to comment on the days. Is it Probably not. No.

Probably not. Weird thing I might say. Is in the sector these discounts are relatively consistent. We're not the only people in this sort of sector [indiscernible] [indiscernible] Okay. Russell H of question 32. Can you give us an idea when you believe or how long it will take for the NAV discount to justify it may disappear? You must discuss this presumably on a regular basis. [indiscernible] I I think we've just got this was a question that came in at half an hour ago at 10:52. So my my guess is that we've covered vast majority of our views on this. Mean, yes, we discuss it very regularly every board meeting [indiscernible] you know it influences our capital allocation decisions significantly. So so very regularly as for when it will return, that's that's a difficult one to call. Okay.

John H, just saying more robust question. The discounting have remained massive and Amgen failed to address this. Shares trade at close to an all time low back when the company visited.

Isn't it time to wind up the company and distribute the proceeds?

And also, can we have a vote on this? Mean, the the as I said during the presentation, we we, the board, are reviewing all options all the time as you would expect any public company board to do. We consider that the company has opportunity to deliver value for shareholders, long term value for shareholders and we're very focused on delivering shareholder value and we see there's a number of growth drivers over the coming months and years. So you know we continue to keep this under review and regularly reviewing our existing strategy amongst a range of other options.

Russell H, for you for you, Mark, again, may feel we've done This is this is after you talked about your pipeline a bit. You tell us a little bit about the next set of companies we're looking to invest in as start ups or early stage businesses? To become the next big business over the next five to ten years. I know you can touch on free delivery.

It was after the that, but since then, I've put gone through all sort of focus areas and and so on. So [indiscernible] And the last two was more like comments. John h, it's a balance on dividends, now no reason not to do both many times too. And we're fair enough. I think that the [indiscernible] given And the last and not least, none suspend dividends new buybacks. Okay. It's the same. But I think it's the same point, the same person, John H. Thank you very much for that. And hopefully, we we've covered that with the answers we've given. I can report we have finished all 36 questions. Jake, I think we do we hand it over to you or just great white luck now?

Yeah, absolutely. Greg, David, Mark, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation and for being so generous of your time then addressing all of those questions that came in this morning. Of course if there are any further questions that do come through we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. But Greg perhaps before really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great.

Yeah, thank you everyone. Thank you for your time and thank you for your support this year. You know, mixed year this year, we've outperformed on exit we've accelerated buybacks, obviously, as we've discussed in the Q and A session. And there's a lot of debate that goes on internally about that capital allocation and what's the right balance and the right mechanism. But we do have an active buyback program that more than sort of 10% of our shares an issue and the NAV per share decline is definitely not what we're targeting and we're working very hard with made changes in the year, and we continue to change that forward looking strategy. We're seeking to access further scale up capital. But I hope you take away from this is that both the buyback reducing our share count and the strong portfolio upside potential that we have in a number of those leading companies. Will yield results both in terms of NAV per share performance this year and and our share price. And, you know, we do recognize that is the most important KPI for shareholders and the board is fully aware of it and we're working very hard to deliver returns for shareholders.

So thank you all for your time. I look forward to updating you at the next set of results.

Perfect Greg, that's great and thank you all once again, for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? She'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. Will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company.