At the end of May, we delivered our financial results for 2021, reporting on a year of good progress both financially and strategically. We were also delighted to be able to announce our exciting collaboration with Intuitive. Creo’s mission remains the same: to improve patient outcomes by bringing advanced energy to therapeutic endoscopy. We aim to do this via our Build, Buy and Partner strategy, and our collaboration with Intuitive is one of a number of partnerships which we are looking to develop to achieve our aims.

The commercialisation of our endoscopy devices continues at pace, with our user community continuing to grow as trainees from our Pioneer Training Programme are converted into users. We anticipate that high vaccination rates in both Europe and the US will continue to lessen the impact of COVID-19 during the remainder of 2022, allowing clinicians to focus on the huge backlog of elective cases, increasing activity in our key areas of clinical focus – core GI and soft tissue ablation.

In terms of revenue growth, 2021 was a year of considerable and strong progress for the Group. Total sales for the 12 months ended 31 December 2021 were £25.2m. Whilst much of our revenue is derived from Creo Europe (previously Albyn Medical), revenue from Creo’s core products continues to grow. Furthermore, we are taking steps to leverage this acquisition and open new markets for certain Albyn products within the USA.

Our acquisition of Aber Electronics during 2021 added specialist expertise to our team whilst securing a key element of our supply chain. This represents a great example of how the Buy element of Creo’s strategy can benefit Creo’s stakeholders as a whole, and we continue to evaluate potential strategic acquisition opportunities.

We also recently established our regional hub in Singapore to support the commercial roll-out of Creo’s products in the APAC region and, alongside our other global centres such as our US office in Danbury, Connecticut, enable us to demonstrate products and provide training sessions for clinicians around the world.

Our momentum from 2021 has carried over with strong trading in the year to date, and the Group continues to innovate, educate clinicians and to commercialise. The Board looks forward to further updating shareholders during 2022 on important product advancements and meaningful commercial progress. The solid progress made over the past year underpins the Board’s continued confidence in the Group’s opportunities in 2022 and beyond.

As a Board, we remain confident in delivering on our Build, Buy and Partner strategy and I would like to put on record my thanks to our hardworking and talented team at Creo, and my fellow shareholders alike for their continued support.