Originally posted by mg021
I was also at the meeting. Unfortunately I had to leave quickly and couldn't catch up with the others which was disappointing but hopefully next year.
I couldn't make the shareholder presentations in August as I was overseas so this was the first time I have seen Jack and Chris present. I was certainly impressed with both. Jack is certainly not just a figurehead. He is all over the science and strategy of Anteo. Chris's knowledge, vision and strategy were outstanding and I feel very confident in both. I wish we had Jack and Chris years ago as Anteo would be in a much better place.
Peter and Mark were asking very helpful questions and I hope Peter reports here as I'm sure his information will be most valuable to all on this forum.
Some of my observations.
Richard Martin voted against the renumeration report with his 90 odd million shares and this resulted in a first strike against the board. As the meeting progressed Richard seemed very happy with the company and its direction and spoke glowingly of them at the end of the meeting making his vote against the renumeration report bewildering to me. I would have liked to discuss it with Richard after the meeting but I had to rush. If anyone can shed light on this it would be appreciated.
The company could engage in more collaborations but they feel that it is best to focus their limited resources on the 2 mains ones they have now. They want to produce results and conserve the funds which seems prudent to me. Getting the results for one would open the floodgates!!!! More deals, more money more staff a scale up to suit demand.
My view about an eye watering announcement dropping anytime is a little more tempered than Semi's. An eye watering announcement is certainly a possibility but Anteo have a bit more work to do which could take some time. Saying that, if it happened quickly I would be very happy to be wrong.
To say my confidence has skyrocketed is and understatement.
All the best,
mg021
Thanks, mj021 and others who have reported above. Those reports match my own notes and recollections of what was actually stated. Perhaps my more useful contribution now is to note what I thought to be most significant about the meeting as a whole, and about the presentation in particular.
First, a confession. I had hoped for more from the last quarterly; for example, I had thought the reference to our attendance at the Merck IVD Conference was, as in the words of another investor unable to attend today and who was chatting with me by phone yesterday, "same old, same old". Yes, I had felt the quarterly was mostly saying "we're making progress". (As an aside, and this is the kind of information you don't gain from simply reading the presentation, I learned that Merck had specifically invited Anteo to attend, I gather because of their confidence in our technology. Related to this is a point made from the floor by Richard Martin, that now that we have a data pack, we are able to tell the Anteo story far more effectively than we had been able to do in earlier times.) And now I have digressed.
So this morning I was not expecting much to stir my enthusiasm, but I found that the morning built strongly on the last Shareholder Presentation (of August 8th last). Just a tad over three months ago.
All the directors and Chris Parker seemed quietly confident; no, I didn't have any sense of any stunning announcement to drop suddenly, more a sense of steady progress on a number of fronts, not just technical progress, but real progress in business development. Nothing smug, nothing brash, just knowledgeable and convincing. OK, so much for tone and for appearances.
There are four matters about the battery side of the business that I noted particularly:
1. Collaborator 1 (the north Asian battery manufacturer) had as an objective, a level of silicon content (in a graphite anode, I gather) that we have already more than met in testing. They are not shooting for 40%+ at this stage. A key point made very strongly by Jack as Chairman and Chris as CEO, was that the surface application of AnteoCoat to silicon particles is the early business target, and I gather that we can achieve that technically and robustly more quickly than the higher targets of 30%+ , which we are seeking to achieve robustly where performance is maintained through subsequent cycles, through silicon/carbon composites that are coated as larger particles. (I hope I have got this right - please correct me if I am wrong.) So the industry as a whole hasn't yet achieved without AnteoCoat anything better than 6% silicon content in an anode. Collaborator 1, it seems to me, would be very happy with 12% at this stage. In other words, they are looking to incremental improvement - and honestly, most developments in technology have been incremental for centuries. I think we need as investors to temper our expectations - too often, I think we have been hoping for the big bang, and I think that is our mistake.
2. So the plan is to be able to continue the work on the silicon composite; we need to remember that the test of any new anode in a battery takes about a month - say, 24 hours for a charge/discharge cycle, so that would give you about 30 cycles in a month. There's a lot of steady work to be done, and Anteo is applying its resources to where it can get the best early returns. The focus is on getting early deals, and revenues from those. We could reasonably expect a consequential lift in the share price.
3. It was very pleasing to see we have a second collaborator, this time a European supplier of battery materials (this can open up end-user contacts for Anteo, of course). This supplier had contacted Anteo immediately upon seeing that last Shareholder Presentation. Must have had nothing else to do, or had us on a watch list, perhaps?) As I write, Anteo and this party have reached the stage where they are sorting out the logistics of shipping supplier materials to Anteo for us to work with. Now I did ask the extent to which discussions with these collaborators were moving up their management trees, and was reassured that those discussions were proceeding as expected, and were expected to move to higher levels as the quality of results improved progressively.
4. And that brings me to the last point on the battery work. It is about the in-house facilities. Was this a cost-saving measure? What about independent testing? Well, the answer is actually very simple: it is the reduction in turn-around time. We are not dependent on logistics, we are not dependent on the resources or priorities of other parties, we can get on to any issues immediately. We can accelerate discussions - as Chris put it, we can "power through the initial assessment". (Currently we have a dialogue with Collaborator 1 over our results.) And as Matt Sanderson said at the meeting, we have control and we own the data. My own view is that the collaborators won't wait for independent verification - they'll just do their own, applying our AnteoCoat and our explicit directions.
Now to Point of Care.
5. Chis made very clear that the sensitivity results achieved (i.e. for cTnl, <20 picograms per millilitre) for testing with serum. are in the minds of the industry very significant because now those results with real human stuff. (I'm no biochemist, so forgive my layman's bumbling language.)
6. You may recall the table of POC opportunities that Chris used in the Shareholder Presentation. Well, it is fleshed out now with numbers and locations of players, and we have 18 of those with whom we are interacting at one level or another. 18 ! Actively interested.
So with all of that, I came away feeling quite cheerful. We have seen solid progress over these last six months. I don't expect anything grand to happen suddenly, but with our R&D having been in the doldrums during the DIAsource distraction, it does seem to me we are building up a real head of steam, not just in the lab, but in the market place.
