Dunedin probiotics company Blis Technologies’ overall revenue has been slashed by 33%, the company blaming challenging market conditions.
The NZX-listed company released its half-year results yesterday, the company posting a deficit of $1.8million for the six months to September 30.
The significant drop in sales was largely caused by a 79% reduction in its United States ingredients business.
That was offset by an increase in revenue from its probiotics range of 37%.
Overall revenue was down 33% at $3.9million.
Blis chief executive Brian Watson said the result was strongly affected by market conditions in the US.
In the first half of last year, customers had actively built inventory levels in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but this year they were tightly managing stock in response to weaker market conditions.
Blis’ customers were also moving to a more "just in time" reorder schedule to reduce their risk, Mr Watson said.
That meant Blis was not seeing as many repeat orders in the first half of the year, he said.
It was hoped sales would pick up as the northern hemisphere moved into winter, which was usually Blis’ peak time for sales.
There was some forward ordering from customers, which gave the company confidence, Mr Watson said.
At the start of the financial year, Blis launched into the Canadian market, which had a "really positive" response from pharmacy retailers — "that has led to a really good start in that market".
Blis had had "great growth" in its e-commerce after a significant push to build the company’s capability in that space.
"We have very much actively focused on Amazon in the US and cross border e-commerce in China and Blis’ own website."
With New Zealand-based staff not being able to travel to overseas markets, Blis’ new strategic partnering with Sweden-based Probi was helping reach the markets it could not.
Probi had attended some "quite significant" trade events recently, which had helped promote Blis’ products.
Blis’ initial guidance was for full-year revenue of between $8.6million and $9.million with an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) deficit in the range $2.3million-$2.7million.
Blis’ share price was down 10% at $0.054 at the close of trade yesterday.
