Member Info for drbiotech

If you look at the recent RNS feeds there are several funds that are increasing their stakes at 297 - above the bid price. They must be thinking they can get more. I’ve sold about 25% of mine at that price to lock in a gain but will hold the rest to see if a better price can be achieved. The founder Paul Young hasn’t openly backed it. I’ll see where he lays hit hat.

I have my doubts about whether posting on these forums makes any difference at all, least of all the bull cases. I almost never look at threads of shares I don't hold - and I'm pretty sure that 9 out 10 who read this will be holders (and I don't think bears make a great deal of difference). The most successful ramps I have seen are with RC365/Woodbois/Mast Energy illiquid minnows (look at their charts) and these have been promoted through false news/financial websites.

Not a big user of youtube, I do like investor meets though if you have seen them.

As for NICE I have looked through the latest Cavendish note and there is no mention of it. The management have always said they haven't allowed for any kamaptive (3rd party) sales and I *think* the same applies to NICE. Certainly no sales this year. Of course NICE is a help, they can sell to the NHS without it.

For me - that they hit 2025 sales targets and are confident of meeting this years shows that they have finally got traction and hopefully their forecasts aren't the fantasy that they have previously been. Getting a partnership and takeoff in the US/China could dwarf any UK sales.

For me this has been a poor investment, but I still have faith it can be a success. Its not been a smooth road but I think the TU was pivotal. Time will tell, but good luck with whatever you decide.

JY,

Equality has somewhat spammed this thread and others elsewhere, but what he has said largely makes sense, if somewhat over optimistic in my opinion.

You have clearly come here trying to make the opposite case, pretty much not knowing any details. Whilst decisions can get delayed (as evidenced in this case as its been ongoing for a lot longer than initially envisioned) its unlikely to be delayed for more data. Secondly, its not their robotic sytem that is up for appraisal. Thirdly the core product sales forecast for this year is c11m, thats about 70%. This excludes NICE approval as even if it does happen on time it won't make any difference to this years sales. Whilst a positive outcome will undoubtedly help its not the be all and end all.

Finally if you believe that boiler room guff, why are you interacting with them? Isn't that achieving their goal?

Edison is paid for research so are duty bound to be positive and whilst they have done a couple of decent interviews and articles I'd put aside their price forecasts.

Must admit I never really try and work out valuations of my early stage companies. There is so much that is liable to change with the clinical and commercial process. I just hope for gradual progression and that my investment will eventually come good. At the beginning of this year it was my 2nd worst ever investment (in value terms, I've had a few -100%) and now its up to the dizzy heights of 3rd worst. Its a company that I have become too emotionally attached to, and thats never a good thing. But I still believe that these results are the end of the very long beginning and its moving from an R&D to a commercial entity.

That’s a downgrade from cavendish, it was 11.2 FY26, and 19 FY27. B

Sorry to hear about your brother Asperger. Lets hope this treatment will help those in a similar situation.

I've been a holder here for some time. Been to an AGM (I live close to chepstow, met Kevin Crofton seemed decent (as did Craig) but I'm not going to judge on that. I've worked in a similar industry and have a decent understanding of the products. My thoughts are thus

1) They hit their targets for the first time in the recent TU. Great, but one swallow doesn't make a summer etc.

2) They are happy with the forecasts for this year - after only 3 weeks. Great to have confidence. FY forecasts is something like 11-12m, the two brokers (Edison/Cavendish) have differing forecasts. Thats roughly double last years sales.

3) If they hit that and keep costs under control then the company is much closer to being viable. I'd be interested to know "like for like" headcount now vs 2025. The costs didn't drop as much as I expected. Prove we can get close then other sources of funding may become available.

4) The timescale for NICE take up will be slower than mentioned. The way that the Croma platform works is different to standard procedures and requires some training. Its needs a few days training and some hand holding and can't be adopted overnight. The last thing you'd want to hear before going under is the surgeon asking "what does this button do" :-)

5) US adoption will be key. Thats not going to happen until 2027 due to the reimbursement happening then.

6) I'm hoping for some more clinical results this year and next, hopefully getting Intuitive more involved and promoting it on their Ion Endoluminal system. That would be a huge installed base to bring on board.

As I've said here and elsewhere I think these results may be an inflection point. I hope so, I have a large position thats somewhat underwater. I've not added to my position (clearly I should have traded, but thats not my style). Hopefully they will keep the market up to date more regularly to show they are on track. If they are at HY I'll probably buy more.

At the moment you have two choices.

1) Sell in the open market at todays price (293)

2) Hold and see what happens - I am doing that.

There are multiple different outcomes.

Most likely is the bid goes through, and you will have to sell your shares to the bidder (295p)

Another bidder could emerge, and the price will go up. I'd say there is about 25% chance of this happening.

The bid could fall through - either through not getting enough support or through someone else buying a stake and refusing to back the bid (this happened with Playtech/Tribal/Inspecs). I don't see this latter as particularly likely.

I assume you have your shares in a nominee account. ie you hold them online with a broker. If thats the case your broker should send you a message in time saying there is a takeover and what will happen next. You may get the chance to vote yes/no to the takeover, but often brokers don't allow this and whilst I'd like to be able to do it more often my holdings are two small to make any difference in a vote. In my case I normally have to instruct my broker in good time to vote at AGMs, but I rarely bother.

Often with takeovers if a bidder offers 295p the price to sell in the market would be around 285p - so you lose a bit for selling earlier and not taking the risk it fail. I'm not sure why this is so close to the offer. Perhaps there is more speculation on a counter. But I'd suggest if nothing is said in the next couple of weeks I'd expect the sp to drift a bit lower until the bid goes through. Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

I'm hoping this is going to be the turning point. For the first time they have actually met their sales forecasts and are confident of hitting them this year (12m, so 100% increase). If they can do that it will show they have a commercially viable product that they are capable of selling. if they hit sales everything else should fall into line. Not without risk and not going to be easy but I'm not selling (or buying).

I think there should some LSE rules - can't issue options below any funding price of the last 3 years, can't take up more shares than their current (market purchased) holdings, can't issue more than 5% in the company in any year. I've never believed LTIPs incentivise management, show me one CEO thats says he's not going to bother if he can't have free shares.

I'm disappointed with this outcome. Less than 15x earnings, less than the price last year and as pointed out below less than price of the fund raising. I liked the company and the buy and build strategy, it paid a decent dividend. I'll hold for a bit to see if a counter offer is made. Perhaps one of the other big players may take a look.

On the positive side its been one of my best investments of recent years - and the sp was in a slump that probably wouldn't have been reversed on todays results. But if consumer confidence picks up then this has been sold too cheap.

Well I hope you are right. They have disappointed multiple times before with over optimistic forecasts and timelines so avoiding another landmine would be a start. I think at the last IM they said sales would be 40-70% (or similar) which was quite a wide target so it will be interesting to where they are compared to that.

Some kind of partnership announcement would be ideal, preferably with CMR or intuitive.

Its my worst ever investments in monetary terms, so I'm not feeling particularly hopeful. Lets hope they prove me wrong

Core sales (which will ultimately be the golden goose/rotten egg) rose by 50% H1/H2. Sounds great. But only rose marginally when comparing H2 with the previous H2(23). They have said previously that H2(23) was boosted by delayed orders from H1(23) so its sort of difficult to interpret. But a couple of years ago they were predicting growth that was going to be 2-3x so that was clearly way off.

Drop in costs of £5m. Thats a lot. My understanding is the costs associated with the sales (along with the revenue) of the consumables division will drop to 0 which will make the figures look very different. They will instead get income from the profits of this division. How this will affect sales of core products I'm not sure. Hopefully they won't lose focus and will sell more in areas where there is currently no representation.

Kamaptive sales of 0. They mention the intuitive trials, hopefully there will be some progress on these at some point this year. The trial at Brompton is ongoing but of course if the final endpoint is survival its going to be a while before we get results (the longer it takes the better, I think the first endpoint is less after effects, I don't think they have enrolled enough patients for overall survival). I'm surprised the turnover is 0 though. Implies there are no customers at all using it. Also what about CMR? Does the deal with intuitive stop them working together.

Cash seems OK, no immediate concern. If the loss has been reduced to less than £10m then there is 3 years cash - long enough to see some proper clinical evidence and if the products are going to be game changing.

Thanks for the broker figures. Presumably Edison will update in due course

The kit is in my mind undoubtedly better than whats out there. Key competitor is Erbe ( https://uk.erbe-med.com/uk-en/)

So far the clinical data suggests less collateral damage due to the bipolar energy being more focused (this is mentioned in the Baillie Gifford vid). It also doesn't produce any smoke. I did wonder if this is much of an issue, and you can see from the smoke extractor on the front page of Erbe website - so it obviously is. Obviously we know they haven't sold many so the data is limited. The reasons for this in my mind are

1) There is only limited amount of data so far so benefits not yet known for many procedures (we can assume POEM ops are better). They are working on this - getting NICE approval will help and the lung trial will be important

2) The market is very conservative. "I've been using the same kit for 15 years and I'm comfortable with it and the outcomes are already quite good". This is hard to get over

3) There is a cost of the croma box - this may need to be capital spend that could take a while.

4) Operators need training. This is one of my concerns. In the last RNS they said they had doubled the amount of training centres but in the 6month period they had only added 25 users. One a week. I'd like to know more about why that is - are they going on the training course and not impressed? Have we lost users? Looking at the 2023 forecast I think they said they would train 200 this year - so 25 in H1 leaves 175 to do in H2. Thats not going to happen and a huge miss. Could be many reasons for this. If there is an investor meet its a question I'd ask.

So reasons to be optimistic? Currently the Intuitive Ion system can not do treatments it can only take samples. So if the lung trials go well this could be really beneficial for them as it will sell more robots.

There other clinical data will hopefully be available in a reasonable timeframe

Assuming the sale of the consumable system completes, funding shouldn't be an issue.

Sales were very underwhelming, and they have yet to prove they can move from R&D to commercial . Lets hope they can.

No sane investor would buy shares in the offer when its cheaper and quicker to do so in the open market. If there was news pending I'd like to think they would have delayed the raise until after it was released. Perhaps they hoped the consumables sale would have boosted the SP as it temporarily did and they waited until the last possible day to announce it. Unfortunately the poor sales figures had to come out at some point and thats depressed everything.

I haven't lost hope here, but my expectations are a lot less than they were.

There will have been some forward selling here, guessing the larger holders would have found out roughly the time of the sale of the consumables business, then some other larger or more significant holders a few days before, with the standard PIs the last to know. Would be nice to believe that there wasn't any insider dealing, but its hard to explain the higher volumes and the drop any other way.

FWIW I don't believe the sp will recover by friday and the PI sale will flop.

It was nice to see the chair buy a substantial amount. He obviously believes. Would have been nice if more the directors took part. I guess they still could through the public offering? I'm not holding my breath though.

Getting the core sales up is my key concern. They were way behind target on sales & number of users. It may be there is a defining moment that acts as a trigger - some really good clinical data or Intuitive/CMR striking a proper deal. It was noticeable that they didn't give any guidance on current trading post period. What I didn't like was the way they span the H1 sales as being 79% up on the previous H1, then when it came to the comparison to last years H2 (only 14%) it was because last years H2 was particularly strong because of a backlog in H1. Not only is it not going to fool anyone, it loses trust and that is hard to win back.

It was on that basis that I took the hit on part of my position. I am still to close to this company and my head must overule my heart. Still hold a meaningful position though.

You are not alone in that. I don't really understand how we can hit a YTD low on the back of what seems to be a decent deal and the removal of near term funding concerns. I also bought more after the news. Results should be out soon, should hopefully provide a solid update that we are heading the right direction.

Depends on your timeframe. I like to think the 80p deutch bank target is achievable within 12 months if sales go well. Yesterday’s announcement removes any concerns about a cash raise so hopefully the downside is limited.

Hxxps://archive.ph/bGJQG

Change the xx to tt

There is some goo stuff here

https://www.investormeetcompany.com/meetings/audited-full-year-results

Other sources of funding could include a licensing deal etc.

I wouldn't read too much into the going concern jargon. Whilst it is a real risk, much of what they have to say is obligatory.

Nice spot TG. There has obviously been a bit of a PR round today. There is a more in depth article here that mentions Creo directly

https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/uk-news/2024/04/30/hope-for-robotics-to-help-diagnose-and-treat-lung-cancer-in-one-procedure/

Thats a great video on the tech aspects (I couldn't get the link to work, easy enough to find "creo proactive on a you tube search). He's comes across as a well meaning person who wants to improve lives but not particularly keyed into the commercial side. His "6 months" seems a bit like a finger in the air comment which is fair enough.

At the first sign this company looks like hitting its targets I think I'll add in a big way. At the moment its 2% of my folio. I think the lung cancer treatment could be huge, but its going to take a while to show its clinically beneficial.