Can NAN Weather The Storm?, page-59

In the current circumstances, the business update from NAN was encouraging in so far as a very positive 3rd quarter (along with benefits to NAN of a stronger US dollar, + targetted cost savings) is likely to provide some sort of buffer for what is expected to be a rather bleak 4th quarter. The business update confirmed the observation made recently on this thread by Eire2011 that the global sales team are likely finding it more difficult to get hospital and clinic administrators to focus on anything other than direct Covid 19 issues.

In those respects the NAN update was timely and useful. What was less than useful was the failure of the update to say anything at all about the impact of the global health crisis on the timing of the much anticipated new disinfection product. It seems to me that there might be four possible impacts:

1) A possible accelerated time frame for market introduction - particularly if the new product had any potential direct or indirect application in mitigating Covid 19.
2) No change in the expected timeframe (ie during FY 21).
3) A possible extension of the timeframe for market introduction of the new product due to other priorities of product market regulators in the current environment.
4) Increased uncertainty about the expected timeframe for market introduction of the new product.

Given the focus of existing global health resources on dealing with Covid 19, I think we can expect that 1 and 2 above are unlikely and that 3 or 4 are much more plausible. Regardless, it is quite disappointing that the business update said exactly nothing about the timing of the market introduction of the new product. Just a one line update would have been appreciated - even if that update indicated a likely extension of the timetable, or the existence of sufficient uncertainty as to make updated timetable projections not feasible at this stage.

Having now got that off my chest, one thing that did occur to me is that NAN's patented UV space disinfection system seems less likely to be the next product being targetted for commercialisation. My reasoning for this is that with the spread of Covid 19 correlating so directly with contamination of various surfaces and with NAN's new product presumably being in the late stages of market approval when the Covid 19 crisis emerged, if NAN's UV space disinfection system had been the next product being targetted for commercialisation, it seems plausible to me that regulators would have been moving mountains to accelerate their assessment processes for that product. Anyway that doesn't appear to be happening. So, I'll be looking at something else in the NAN stable being the next product to be commercialised.

zeno9