Newly-appointed Clinical Cell Culture chief executive Bob Atwill believes the company’s more focused sales and marketing approach will ultimately reap benefits for long-suffering shareholders.
Newly-appointed Clinical Cell Culture chief executive Bob Atwill believes the company’s more focused sales and marketing approach will ultimately reap benefits for long-suffering shareholders.
Canberra-based Mr Atwill said the company had previously adopted a scattergun approach to promoting its innovative skin repair products in global markets and the end result was a failure to hit key milestones.
“It’s gone from the scattergun to where it should be,” he told WA Business News.
“It’s all about choosing your market and choosing your surgeons and [medical] centres in those markets.”
Mr Atwill’s appointment in May followed a tumultuous period for the company, which suffered a major setback late last year when it failed to gain regulatory approval in the US or Australia.
As well as appointing a new chief executive, co-founder Fiona Wood rejoined C3’s board of directors and is actively involved in promoting its technology to the medical industry.
The company also cut staff numbers and scaled back its research activities to preserve cash.
Mr Atwill said the company was putting a lot more effort into working with a small number of surgeons and centres to ensure they have appropriate training and are able to successfully use its technology.
“Where we get surgeons to use the product, and we provide the right support, we find that they use it more,” he said.
“They are starting to have a cascade effect to the next level of users.”
Mr Atwill said the company needed to regain the confidence of investors, and the best way to achieve that was to hit defined milestones.
“I think the business model we have is very robust. We expect to get more sales traction, we’ll see depth of usage, and there will be new markets coming on board.”
The company has also worked closely with the Food and Drugs Administration in the US and had a schedule of work that was expected to culminate in regulatory approval in the third quarter of 2007.
“Hitting those milestones will deliver confidence in the market,” Mr Atwill said.
He said the company would need to raise additional capital to support its commercialisation plans and was aiming to achieving significant progress before taking that step.
“We want to go to the market when we have got some traction, to get the best deal for our shareholders.”
He acknowledged that some investors were not happy with the company’s old management structure, under which former chief executive Troels Jordansen and chief financial officer Andrew Cannon worked from its operational headquarters in Cambridge in the UK.
“There was feedback that investors couldn’t get access to the CEO,” Mr Atwill said.
An Englishman with extensive experience in the medical and pharmaceutical industries in Europe, Mr Atwill migrated to Canberra with his Australian wife last year.
He believes the Canberra base will put him close to Australian investors and customers on the east coast and complement other directors, such as chairman Dalton Gooding and Professor Wood, who are based in Perth and Mr Cannon, who joined C3’s board earlier this year.
C3 is expected to generate sales revenue of $1.1 to $1.4 million in 2006 rising to about $6 million in 2007 and $14 million the following year.
Mr Atwill said most revenue would be from sales of its ReCell product in Europe and Japan.