Mr. Thatcher: Cobra is a supplier of manufacturing solutions to the pharmaceutical industry, largely biotech companies. We have a core competency in manufacturing gene therapy products for early clinical trials and a worldwide reputation in that area. We were founded in June 2002, but prior to that we were the manufacturing division of a gene therapy company called Cobra Therapeutics Ltd. Cobra has nothing to do with snakes; it stands for Clinical Oncology Birmingham Researches Associates. The company was set up as a gene therapy for cancer platform, and was a typical VC backed R&D company, founded in 1992. At that time in the early1990s and unlike now there were no opportunities for outsourcing the manufacture of these sorts of products. The founders had the foresight to see that manufacturing products in this sector would be quite a challenge, so they brought me on board as employee number two with a remit to develop manufacturing technologies for producing plasmid DNA products and then subsequently virus products. To cut a long story short, the R&D side of the company didn't do too well. Therefore, by 1998 although everything was set to go in the manufacturing division, there were no products for us to manufacture. So the pretty obvious decision was to go out and try and sell our services to the wider biotech community. We have been very successful at that, doubling revenues year-on-year ever since that time. The Cobra company was acquired in 2000 by a small pharmaceutical company in the UK called ML Laboratories. Manufacturing wasn't why they bought the company initially, but when they saw how manufacturing was bringing a useful revenue stream, they invested. We spun out from the parent in June last year, and selling the ailing R&D division back in a simultaneous transaction. For the first eight years of our existence, we had very little visibility within the company and therefore now, if you like, we are the cuckoo that kicked the R&D egg out of the nest. Our current position and the core competency of Cobra is in manufacturing services for DNA products, both plasmid-based and microbial products. Most of the technical guys are from a protein background, so we also manufacture protein therapeutics. We are focused in the manufacture of high potency products where you don't need massive capital resources, but you do need serious technical know-how. We are concentrated in that high value-end of the market. We have got about 67 employees, a customer list of about 35 on four continents, and we have now been trading profitably since the float in June.
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