Morgan Frank
Analyst · Northland
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the SANUWAVE Fourth Quarter and Year-end 2025 Earnings Call. Our Form 10-K was filed with the SEC last night, along with our earnings release, and our updated presentation was made available on our website in the Investors section. Please refer to that during the presentation. So joining me on the call is Peter Sorensen, our CFO. And after the presentation, we will open the call to Q&A. So let me begin with the always popular forward-looking statements and other disclosures. This call may contain forward-looking statements such as statements relating to future financial results, production expectations, plans for future business development opportunities and expectations regarding the impact of changes in tariff rates. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the company's ability to control. A description of these risks and uncertainties and other factors that could affect our financial results is included in our SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Certain percentages discussed in this call are calculated in the underlying whole dollar amounts and therefore, may not recalculate from the rounded numbers used for disclosure purposes. As a reminder, our discussion today will include non-GAAP numbers. Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results can be found in our recently filed 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2025. Okay. So that's prefaced. Let's dig into what was a good, slightly complicated quarter. Q4 was an all-time record for SANUWAVE with revenues of $13.4 million, up 30% versus the same quarter last year and adjusted EBITDA of $4.8 million, up from $3.7 million in the prior year and comprising 36% of revenues. Revs for the year were $44.1 million, up 35% versus 2024 and full year adjusted EBITDA rose to $13.6 million, up 89% versus $7.2 million the year before. We sold 624 UltraMIST systems in the year as compared to 374 in the prior year. And the 255 number in Q4 was by far the highest number in company history beating our prior record, which was in Q3 by 100 systems. We sunset the dermaPACE and Profile product lines in Q4. And this, along with taking a reserve for sales and use taxes to certain customers resulted in some charges in Q4 that increased cost of goods sold and OpEx, which Peter will walk you through in a bit. Okay. So that was 2025. Let's address the Pachyderm in the Parlor, which is so what about 2026? Obviously, the changes in CMS reimbursement for skin subs and for allografts have had some pretty wide-ranging effects. And I'm sure many of you have heard a number of the other companies in this space speak to that, seen the changes in estimates and the results they've announced. As we've discussed in the past, none of those changes to reimbursement pertain to UltraMIST or to the 97610 code. which got a small, like a couple of dollar bump up from 2026. But no company is an island and anything that affects the practitioners in this space affects everyone. There seems to be a fair bit of confusion about exactly how this winds up impacting SANUWAVE. So let me see if I can provide a little clarity here. The reduction in reimbursement price for skin substitutes to around $127 a square centimeter was a 90% to 95% price cut in an approximately $15 billion category. Adding to that, the new CMS policy of you can only bill what you apply, wastage is just not covered. This has put even more pressure on the modality. And as I'm sure you can imagine, very few wounds are perfectly rectangular. So on top of this, CMS adopted a very aggressive stance on audits for practitioners using skin substitutes. Seeking out improper billing, overuse or use of products that were priced beyond what they deem to have been medical necessity. A lot of the practitioners that use these products are also our customers. So UltraMIST is a useful treatment in conjunction with allograft. So long and short of this is they put a lot of very intense pressure on the space. As we've seen individual wound care providers get hit with 9-figure clawbacks on skin substitutes. And yes, really, 9 figures. As these pressures intensified, it took a fair few companies out of the space altogether. And it left even those who were doing business and who were doing everything right in fear of kind of ongoing audit and revenue loss, even if only from an insufficiency of documentation rather than a misuse of anything or any sort of misbehavior. So this has affected both our overall customer count and the patient count within a number of our customers. Like we saw this in Q4, continued in Q1, and this has affected our growth rate. Like this is the tide going out that we kind of discussed in the press release. I mean, internally, we've been discussing it as living in a fish pond where someone is grenade fishing. But honestly, I think a lot of the industry underestimated how sharp this shock would be and how deep these audits would go. So I mean, this obviously leads to sort of the question of, so what's the tide coming in? And that tide is this, right, the patients didn't go away, right? The wounds didn't go away. And sort of life after the grenade is finding a way as many of the other wound companies have said, it looks like Q1 is sort of a shock bottom. And from our own personal experience kind of amongst the upheaval, there's starting to be some real green shoots. And some of the -- where some of the customers are pulling back, we've seen others expanding to fill the spaces that the others left, a significant number of mobile wound providers dissolved, but we're now seeing a number of new ones reform. And this has added a new customer category is kind of our internal taxonomy, which we're describing as the baby elephants. Like we're seeing these new groups coalesce kind often out of providers from multiple former groups. And we're working with them to get them their first UltraMIST systems, build mist treatment into their patient treatment plans and their practice flow. Like many of them are starting small, like they're like 3 to 5 practitioners, but have eyes on to quote one of them adding a 0 to that by year-end, hence, the sort of baby elephant descriptor. With the period of high-priced skin subs behind us, many of them feel a lot safer about 2026 billing than they did in 2025. Like the sort of industry disruption that we've seen has created what looks to be a really significant jump ball. And as we said, the patients and the wounds are still with us, and there is a land grab going on to see who gets to serve them. Land grabs are speed moves. And the best way to adapt to this opportunity is to expand rapidly. So we have engaged with a number of resellers to kind of add to our feet on the street count and go get after this current opportunity. So what does that look like? The partners we've chosen have deep wound care expertise. They have strong customer relationships. They're very much the sort of folks that we have long been interested in working with, but who were really -- who were too focused on the skin sub space to really be interested in partnering. So we've been highly selective. We're working only with those who we see as being strong long-term partners who have excellent customer service culture and a real sort of presence to purchasing sales strategy. And our goal is to gear up here, move very quickly and engage with the newly available white space in this industry and nothing does that like adding feet to the street. Most of these partners are acting as resellers or stocking distributors. So you will see that in the ASP figures as we sell products to them at a wholesale price rather than paying them a commission and selling at retail. Like this actually works out well for SANUWAVE. These sales don't carry any sales force costs for us. And they actually wind up being a bit higher in terms of operating margin than our W2 sales. So obviously, these sorts of systems always create this potential for inventory and channel issues. And that's something we've been really heavily focused on keeping manageable. We're trying to keep channel inventory down in the range of kind of 8 to 10 weeks, and that should decline as resellers ramp up with their selling effectiveness. And we'll aim to drive that lower through kind of smaller frequent re-ups, particularly as we get our ERP systems better synced with the resellers. 32% of revenues in Q4 came through outside resellers and distributors. That was up from 26% in the prior quarter, but still a little below the 2024 full year average of 36%. It's just worth noting back in 2024, those were all commission-driven distributors, not resellers. So the wholesale pricing, which began in Q3 is new. One of the effects of this channel shift to stocking distributors and resellers is that it causes the units in the field number that we have been providing to kind of lose resolution, right? Like that number is how many systems have been shipped to people out in the field. But when you ship a system to a reseller and they have not yet resold it to an end customer, now it's kind of sitting on their shelf, right? And so it's no longer really a good metric for determining usage rates. So in combination with the disruption to our customer base that's been going on during the last sort of 1.5 quarters, this seems like a good time to have like a hard first principles rethink on really how we think about that number and to clean it up. And so the number we've arrived at, we're calling active systems. And this is defined as systems owned by customers who have ordered applicators within the last 6 months or within their expected ordering time frame. There are some customers who, for whatever reason, like to make bulk orders sort of annually. We then ran through this and called all the customers we know to have shut down, and we removed them and their systems from the count even if they had ordered within the last 6 months as that just seemed like good housekeeping and the most accurate way to look at the data. This resulted in an active system count of 1,292 for the end of Q4. This really doesn't map that well to the systems in the field figure, which we've used in recent quarters. To give you some perspective, using this methodology in Q3 of 2025 would have resulted in 1,236 active systems. So the active system count for end of Q4 was up 56 systems or about 5% from the end of Q3. We took 168 systems out of that number during Q4 as discontinued, which gives you a sense of kind of the magnitude of the challenges in the wound care space right now. So all in all, like here we are, a lot of tide has gone out, a new tide is coming in. And ultimately, the idea of wound care moving to both evidence and cost-effectiveness-based standards looks like a good thing for SANUWAVE, right? UltraMIST is a great product with real efficacy, clinical data and value for money from a payer standpoint. Healing wounds is a lot less expensive than living with them. And despite -- or I mean, honestly, maybe because of the current disruption, this market is pending in a direction that looks extremely favorable to us in sort of the medium and long term. So with that, I'll turn it over to Peter Sorensen, our CFO, who can walk you through the financials in some detail.