TRANSCRIPTION OF FINANCE NEWS NETWORK INTERVIEW WITH STIRLING PRODUCTS LIMITED
(ASX:STI) MANAGING DIRECTOR, PETER BOONEN
Clive Tompkins: Hello Clive Tompkins reporting for the Finance News Network. Joining me for the first time from pharmaceuticals company Stirling Products is Managing Director, Peter Boonen. Peter welcome to FNN. Can you start by introducing Stirling Products, how long it’s been going, what do you do?
Peter Boonen: Clive in its present form Stirling Product’s been going for five six years. The company encountered a lot of difficulties financially late last year, early this year. I took over as Managing Director on February the 9th this year and along with a completely new Board, since then we’ve put together a team of people – experts, scientists, marketing people - with a major focus on getting market product that sells, acquiring product and developing a strategy.Our strategy is not complete yet, it’s global, it’s big, it’s aggressive and we’re not there by a long shot yet. We’ve got another year of hard work, but we are expecting significant revenues to start during the first quarter of next year.
Clive Tompkins: And where is your share price today and what does that equate to in terms of market cap?
Peter Boonen: Today our share price is 1.5 cents, it doesn’t sound great but that’s about five times what it was in February. Our market cap today is about 14 million.
Clive Tompkins: Okay Peter, now to your portfolio of products and their stage of commercialisation. Let’s start with your TB HIV product Immunoxel.
Peter Boonen: Immunoxel as used in TB TB/HIV co-infection works absolutely sensational. We’ve had about twelve trials of the product and we’ve got continuing trials happening at the moment in Nigeria, which has got the highest rate of HIV infection in the world. We’ve got another trial coming up in South Africa in the relative short term. And the product, it doesn’t specifically cure TB or HIV; it works purely on your immune system. It builds your immune system up like nothing else and in many cases people are a hell of a lot better. They walk out of hospital in about six months, then get outpatient treatment for about another six months and are well on their way to cure. Nothing has been able to do that in the past and we are very, very excited about it but it is not an accepted treatment yet. We’re doing a lot more trials to establish the product – to establish its credibility. We’re using world class people, recognised people. A lot of the early trials have been done in the Ukraine. We’re taking it out of the Ukraine into the areas of focus - and a lot of work to do with that product, but a hell of a lot of promise.
Clive Tompkins: And now to R-Salboutamol?
Peter Boonen: R-Salboutamol is a complex – it’s a real drug. It’s highly unusual for a small cap company such as Stirling to even have it in its portfolio. It is the world’s only single enantiomer beta agonist, there’ll never be another one. Now that goes a hell of a long way to saying – hang on you’ve got something very, very unique.Historically for the past five six years, the company has done a lot of work with the product in trials – very successful trials in its application as an animal growth promoter. There’s a lot of work going on in South Africa at the moment with Animate South Africa with whom we’ve partnered the product for that specific application.Its other application - potentially its one of the world’s biggest drugs because it has massive application for human obesity.
Clive Tompkins: And Peter, tell us about your drug inhalation platform.
Peter Boonen: Very, very simply, most people would be aware of the old or the traditional puffers and most of the puffers, they’re either pressure driven or fan-forced. There’s a lot of waste - in the old systems it was up to ninety percent of waste product. But still drugs within your system and still drugs that give you side effects - but the drug’s not going to its source where it should be going. With this system it’s patented, it’s patented globally, not patents pending. The product’s fully developed, we don’t have to say proof of concept, that’s all done. But now on specific products there’ve been a number of trials that have been conducted, where anything up to ten percent less of an existing drug use, gives you the same result.
Clive Tompkins: And Peter finally your Botanical range?
Peter Boonen: We’re launching a range of these products in the U.S in the first quarter of this coming year. We’re in a category of dietary supplements where we deal with structure and function claims, as do pretty well all dietary supplements and they’re supplements that are structured to your immune system.
Clive Tompkins: Peter turning to your financials now, what’s your cash position and your burn rate?
Peter Boonen: Cash position at the moment in what we’ve got committed in funds that we’ve announced in unincumbent property with regards to the properties that we’ve settled, which is our future offices - we’ve got about three and a quarter million. Our burn rate – it varies a little bit at the moment because our development pace is fairly intense. It hasn’t settled down to anything specifically yet but the thing is, it’s going to be offset by revenue so at the moment we’ve got things pretty well covered. Burn rate specifically if you’ve got to put a number on it is about 175 to 225 a month.
Clive Tompkins: Peter given a difficult year where you had to recapitalise the company and reduce outgoings substantially, what are your objectives for 2010?
Peter Boonen: We’ve publicly announced that by midyear what we are targeting is break even and profitability. By year end, we’re looking at annualised revenues of 36 million. Odds of achieving that – we’re on target today, we’re ahead of where we’ve strategized ourselves to be.
Clive Tompkins: Peter at your AGM you announced a strategy of repositioning the company based on two significant as yet, unreported transactions. What is their potential should they be completed?
Peter Boonen: We announced this morning the acquisition of a pharmaceutical facility in Canada. It’s state of the art brand new. Unfortunately a Canadian group were hit by the financial crisis and are in the process of being sold up. We’ve got essentially a multimillion dollar facility on very extraordinary terms that we haven’t announced at the moment. We’ve been advised that the property has been sold to us. It is subject to court ratification or court approval. It’s going through that process now and until that process is complete, we can’t say we’ve bought it because there’s always a little bit of risk that for whatever reason it doesn’t complete.But that’s one part of the strategy. It gives us control over certain production of certain products that we want to control there. We also announced this afternoon that we have signed a conditional project to the plant subject to the sale being finalised.
Clive Tompkins: Peter Boonen, thanks for introducing Stirling Products.
Peter Boonen: Thank you Clive.
