Earnings Call Transcript - PETV Q2 2022

John Dolan, Chief Business Development Officer and General Counsel

Hello everyone and welcome to the PetVivo Holdings Second Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is John Dolan and I'm the Chief Business Development Officer and General Counsel at PetVivo. Today's call is being webcast and will be posted on the company's website for playback. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that comments made during this conference call by PetVivo's executives may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Any statement that refers to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events, including financial projections or future market conditions is a forward-looking statement. PetVivo's actual future results could differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements for any reason, including those listed in its SEC filings. PetVivo assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. PetVivo filed its 10-Q and earnings release with the SEC today, which provided detailed discussion of our financial results. Both of these documents can be found on the SEC website and the Investor Relations section of our website. Now, I would like to turn the conference over to John Lai, the CEO and President of PetVivo. John, please go ahead.

John Lai, CEO and President

Thank you, John, and welcome to our first conference call as a NASDAQ company. Joining me today will be Bob Folkes as our Chief Financial Officer. I would like to begin by discussing some of the highlights of last quarter, and Bob Folkes will discuss the financial results and financial conditions in greater detail. I will conclude by sharing additional thoughts on our business strategy and key focus areas for the second half of fiscal 2022 before we open the line up for questions. Our key highlights last quarter were we raised approximately $11.25 million in a registered public offering of units, which we closed on August 13th, 2021, up listed to NASDAQ in connection with the registered offering. Our common stock trades under the symbol PETV, and the Warrant trades under the symbol PETVW. We also made a decision to rebrand our key product name for treating osteoarthritis from Kush to Spryng and commenced sales using the Spryng name and branding. We made several key hires to strengthen our management team. These were very important pieces to get us into a position for manufacturing and sales. So, one of our key hires, Brandy Meyer, became the Chief Operating Officer from the manufacturing standpoint; John Dolan is VP of Business Development and Corporate Counsel; Mark Middleton, National Director of Sales, has 35 years of veterinary sales experience, his last company, Animal Health International, had revenues of about $800 million a year in terms of veterinary devices. Russ Siakel, our Director of Marketing, comes from Pfizer Animal Health, which is now Zoetis, and also Boehringer Ingelheim, the second largest veterinary products company in the world. He has over 30 years of experience in marketing veterinary products. Dr. Ann Zieser is our Senior Vet for companion animals, small animals, with over 30 years of practice experience dealing with dogs, cats, and other smaller animals. Recently, we hired Dr. Joe Manning as a Senior Vet in the equine space, bringing over 35 years of experience in equine products from pharmaceuticals to biotech, previously with Merck Animal Health as a senior vet. Josh Wilhelm, our Director of Manufacturing, has dealt with our particles for many years and has been at several large medical device manufacturing companies. So, he brings a good team with him. We have hired four additional production people to work under Josh's direction. I would now like to turn it over to Bob Folkes, our Chief Financial Officer, who will discuss our recently completed registered offering and financial conditions. Bob?

Robert Folkes, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, John, and good afternoon, everyone. The most significant event from last quarter was raising approximately $9.8 million in net proceeds from our registered offering. In addition, one of our directors converted $196,000 in debt into equity at the closing of the offering. We used approximately $100,000 of the proceeds to repay certain corporate debt and payables, so as of September 30th, we ended the quarter with over $8.8 million in cash. We are using the net proceeds from this offering to expand our sales and marketing efforts to gain vet acceptance and generate revenue from the sale of Spryng. John has already commented on the team we added during the quarter, and we have also engaged Kick as our advertising agency across multiple marketing services disciplines. Additionally, John also touched on our manufacturing team, where key members have been added to ensure our production capacity supports our launch of Spryng. Now I will turn it back to John.

John Lai, CEO and President

Thank you, Bob. I'd like to talk more about the future, the strategy, and the key focus areas for the second half of 2022. Let's talk about Kick. Kick was instrumental in helping us determine that we needed to change the name from Kush to Spryng because too many people associated it with cannabis products. Now that we have changed the name to Spryng, we're getting good adoption and feedback. With Kick's help, we are launching into multiple trade shows; we are looking to schedule about 19 trade shows to attend because one of our key focuses with the raised capital was to spend it on sales and marketing. We are still on track to hire multiple salespeople under Mark, with these salespeople having extensive sales experience. We expect to hire anywhere from six to eight over the next 12 months. We have trade shows scheduled almost every month for the rest of the year, and these shows will initially focus more on equine, but the major show in Orlando is the VMX, which is the largest show of the year, taking place in the second week of January. We will have a full staff of small animal as well as equine salespeople and management team present to help spread the word about the product, as an educational process is underway. We are also looking to expand sales channels through partnerships, conducting additional studies beyond the Colorado state study for both equine and canine. We recently started launching commercials about a week ago to consumers on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, Fox Business, and also Newsmax. Additionally, we will begin advertising on bulletin boards at subway stations and New York train stations, with 15-second commercials running on those boards. We believe all these strategies will help drive consumer interest and prompt action to contact veterinarians. Our salespeople and marketing teams will be targeting certain vets at the various trade shows, producing white papers, and conducting podium presentations. With that, I'd like to let the operator open it up for Q&A.

John Dolan, Chief Business Development Officer and General Counsel

All right everyone. For questions, if you have a question for either Mr. Lai or Mr. Folkes, please raise your hand. I'll let you in, allow you to talk and then I will have the loudest speaker answer your question. Does anyone have any questions? I do not see any hands coming up as of yet. Do you see anything? Can I ask for your assistance?

Unidentified Company Representative, Company Representative

Sure. I'm not seeing anybody who has raised their hand either. It looks like nobody has any questions.

John Dolan, Chief Business Development Officer and General Counsel

Perfect. Does anyone have any questions? If there are no questions, I would like to thank everyone. At this time, I'll turn it back to Mr. Lai for any closing remarks.

John Lai, CEO and President

Well, I'm surprised we don't have any questions. But with that being said, I think the numbers were pretty much within the realm that we had indicated during our road shows on the offering. With that, I will conclude this shareholders conference call unless someone raises their hand in the next 10 seconds. John Dolan, I'm going to turn it back to you to call the end of the conference call.

John Dolan, Chief Business Development Officer and General Counsel

All right. Everyone, thank you so much for listening in on the conference call. Again, our information is all on this particular website. If you'd like to re-hear this webcast, the log-in that you ended up logging into is the log-in that you can use to re-hear what Mr. Folkes and Mr. Lai stated today. So, if there's nothing else, thank you again for joining our call. Thanks again. Bye everyone.