Probiotics company $BIO have announced their international sales as promised.
ASX Announcement
Their Headlines
● Biome reports $1.5m in International Sales Revenue for FY25, up 69% vs PCP.
● Secured prominent strategic distribution partnerships across three key international markets in Q4 FY25:
○ Ireland - Uniphar, pharmacy wholesale and retail with 1,400+ pharmacy customers
○ New Zealand - Propharma (EBOS), the country's largest pharmacy wholesale network
○ Canada - Multiple high-value agreements with prominent pharmacy and health food retail groups:
■ Pure Pharmacy Group (British Columbia)
■ Healthy Planet Group (National)
■ Nature's Emporium (Ontario)
■ Nature's Signature (Ontario)
● Biome is now strategically positioned for significant international growth and expansion in FY26, leveraging new distribution channels to access thousands of additional pharmacy and health food locations commencing Q1 FY26.
My Analysis
$1.5m in international sales revenue represents 8.1% of total sales revenue, so NZ, UKI and Canada are starting to make a modest but meaningful contribution to the Group. Importantly, they are growing strongly at 69% vs pcp, vs. the overall group growth of 41%. (stripping out Australia from RoW, in FY25 Australia grew from $12.1m to $16.9m a rate of 39.6%.)
A fair amount of focus appears to be going in to Canada. CEO Blair has spoken recently how he thinks there will be a strong product fit in Canada, so the addition of two "sales and education" team members as well as the distributorship sets things up for a strong contribution in FY26.
The early retail chain signings are promising - but many more are needed. The Canadian outlets listed in the release reflect (by my research) only some 70-80 outlets. So it is still early days as Canada has some 10,000-12,000 phamacy outlets and another 2,000 specialist nutritional supplement outlets.
Although there is no breakdown to the RoW numbers, I believe most of the performance will have come from NZ and UKI, because Canada was only launched commercially in September 2024.
The distribution partnerships will be important, allowing $BIO to scale without having to growth a large international "sales and education" workforce. Important will be to leverage the small number of staff in each location to train staff at the distributors because it is critical that the end retailer understands the importance of the "behind-the-counter-positioning" needed to access the favourable margin contribution the products have reportedly proven in Australia. Without that, they are just another supplement on the shelves. Of course, with the distribution deals, some 20% to 30% of final price goes to the distributor, so there is a clear calculation to make between lower sales force costs with the lower revenue released per unit.
Conclusion
Overall, it looks like good progress.
It will be interesting to see the FY financials for evidence that $BIO can achieve disciplined profitable growth and, as part of that, to see how working capital is scaling as sales grow.
Progress in UKI and Canada is important to $BIO achieving its goals as Australian growth inevitably starts to mature.
In FY26, I'll be looking for the % revenue growth rate from RoW to accelerate beyond 69%. The distributorships signed across the year, as well as the retail chains added, together with the increased staffing and a full year contribution from Canada means that if the product has a good fit in these international markets, we should see accelerating growth.
For now, I'll hold my current position of 5% (RL). Delivery seems to be tracking in line with the strategy.
Disc: Held in RL and SM