Thursday 28 December 2017

Shareholder Letter: BioLargo Wishing You a GREAT 2018 - Short Review of the Past - Present - Future

BioLargo Wishing You a GREAT 2018

Dear Shareholder,

This is always a good time of year for us to review the past, take inventory of the present, and lay out our goals and aspirations for the future. 

Past: 2017 Was a Good Year for BioLargo

Notable Milestones:
·      Clyra secured dedicated financing, concluded product development, and filed its first FDA 510(k) application (still in process) for its advanced wound care products.
·      Odor-No-More proved the market opportunity for our CupriDyne Clean products by doubling sales each of the first three quarters of the year. We also secured national purchasing agreements with three of the top ten US solid waste handling companies (more coming soon), and secured our first flagship clients in the wastewater treatment industry.
·      We acquired a world-class environmental engineering team – BLEST – that previously served two global, industry-leading firms, with more than 200+ years of field experience. This team helped respond to several well-known natural and industrial disasters including; Katrina & Haiti rebuild, US anthrax attacks, and extremely difficult industrial challenges like dioxin remediation. They are also notable technology developers, which is why we chose them to form BioLargo Engineering, Science and Technologies (BLEST). They have already entered into their first six contracts to serve clients in 2018, and are actively pursuing a wide range of business opportunities while also serving BioLargo in the scale-up and engineering of the company’s advanced water treatment technology.
·      BioLargo Water’s advanced water treatment technology, the AOS (Advanced Oxidation System), has received over 50 government and industry research grants (and counting) since the company was formed approximately three years ago. The company recently completed three commercial proof-of-claim trials and added highly qualified professionals to the team. A number of commercial projects are being considered for the AOS.
·      Our company won numerous awards and recognitions this year, including a highly coveted 2017 High Tech Innovation Award Winner in the Horizontal Disruption category by the Orange County innovation cluster OCTANe, and The Most Promising Technology Growth Award for 2017 by Uptick.
·      BioLargo secured important capital resources when it entered into a common stock purchase agreement with Lincoln Park Capital for up to $10 million of equity capital, priced at the market, and subject to certain terms and conditions as described in the Form 8-K we filed on August 31, 2017.
·      Total direct investments in BioLargo surpassed $20 million since the company’s inception in 2007.

Was this a good year?  Yes.

Are we satisfied? No. 

We are never satisfied until we deliver GREAT results in all categories and with all our business units.

We can all agree that we all want more commercial adoption and more financial success. And we want it faster. Let’s face it – conceiving, creating, developing, and successfully launching disruptive technologies (three and counting) for multi-billion dollar markets is not easy, it is not fast, and it cannot be done without proper capital resources.  

Are we winning? Definitely.

Our mission to build BioLargo and make life better has required significant investment of time, energy, and money.  It has demanded that we assemble an incredibly talented team of highly qualified scientists, engineers, and business development professionals. We weathered one of the worst economic disasters in history soon after the inception of our company in 2007.  We have endured numerous business setbacks as we pursued licensing relationships in our early years. We have been honored to receive investments from more than 400 investors. Our journey represents a life’s work for our founder Kenneth Reay Code. For me, Dennis Calvert, I consider my work at BioLargo to be one of the most important and worthy pursuits of my career. Ken and I, as well as our core management team, have remained steadfast and undeterred, investing directly in the early years, and all the while electing to convert salaries to BioLargo shares when the company needed to conserve cash. And, we’ve never sold those shares. We continue to stretch our company, our team, and ourselves, and we choose to defer our financial rewards for one simple reason: because we know it will be worth it.


Present: Cornerstones of Success

We have two active commercial operations and two future operations scheduled to go commercial in 2018. Our industrial odor control division, Odor-No-More, which launched its industrial odor control product CupriDyne Clean in May of 2016, is poised for enormous growth this year. The same can be said of our brand-new engineering group, BLEST. 

Clyra will be ready to go commercial when its products receive FDA approvals.  It submitted its first FDA 510(k) application at the end of September, and is working to provide the FDA additional information as required to keep it moving towards completion. Emergo, our FDA consultant and a leader in the industry, reminds us to be patient, as it reports that in 2016 the average time frame for these types of applications was 177 days.  So, we have a bit of work to do, but remain highly optimistic about our expected success in this process.

As for our AOS water treatment technology, we are smack in the middle of the famous technology adoption gap that author Geoffrey Moore coined as the “Chasm” .  We believe our AOS will cross over to commercialization very soon, and we will achieve this by advancing our claims and by supporting the next phase of engineering and scale-up (now that we have the talent on-board with BLEST). We are refining our technical offerings and claims and working to find adoption by pursuing large public funding opportunities, potential strategic alliances and/or investment, and by focusing on first-stage commercial opportunities where we can deliver value to our customers, such as in industrial wastewater treatment.


Future: Building a GREAT Company in BioLargo

Do we predict significant financial success for BioLargo’s future? Absolutely.

BioLargo’s evolution has been careful, deliberate, and by any account, amazing. Our company is first and foremost a sustainable science and technology innovator. We now have added the go-to-market talent through our environmental engineering services group, BLEST, complemented by an extensive team of highly qualified scientists and business development professionals, to help serve clients solve serious, real-life problems. We are highly purposeful in our selection of target applications and markets, choosing to focus where we can make an impact for good, and where we believe our technology will serve as a disruptive force for change, as illustrated by our slogan, “we make life better”.

What are our target milestones for 2018?

We have a series of specific targets upon which we will focus to enable the successful commercial future that we believe to be imminent.


·      Secure FDA approval for Clyra, and acquire additional technology assets to round out Clyra’s Offering to go-to-market in 2018. We hope to secure dedicated capital and position to spin off the company when the timing is right to benefit BioLargo’s and Clyra’s shareholders.Secure large public and/or strategic funding to support the AOS’s scale-up, engineering, and commercial launch.
·      Accelerate and increase sales, marketing and service teams for Odor-No-More to create positive cash flow.
·      Achieve cash flow positive status for BLEST.
·      Uplist to NASDAQ to create national market for our stock.
·      Continue adding highly qualified staff, including additional talented administrative team members for the corporate office.
·      Continue the company’s evolution to become an integrated solution provider with services, industry knowledge, rare science skills, and sought-after technologies and products to solve real life problems.


In closing: we love our company and are committed to achieving significance, both in terms of our commitment to a greater good as evidenced by our mission to make life better, while at the same time deliver a handsome return on investment for our stockholders. 

We are thankful for you and your support.  

Remember:

 “Nothing Great is Easy”

- Matthew Webb
The first man to swim the English Channel


BioLargo is a GREAT company and we believe 2018 will be a GREAT year.

Happy New Year!

Dennis

Dennis P. Calvert
President & CEO
BioLargo, Inc.