Creo Medical eyes 50% growth with new tech - ICYMI

Creo Medical Group PLC CEO Craig Gulliford talked with Proactive about the company’s strong performance in 2024 and strategic plans for 2025. Gulliford described 2024 as a year of "robust growth," underpinned by the Speedboat platform and several new product launches.

He highlighted progress across Creo Medical's advanced energy suite and noted that these products are “game-changing, innovative” and designed to “dominate advanced energy in every form of therapy for the endoscopist.”

Key strategic developments included the sale of a 51% stake in Creo Medical Europe to Micro-Tech, allowing Creo to retain access to its core GI customer base in Europe. Gulliford explained the move also supports co-development and distribution opportunities in markets such as China and the Americas.

He also updated viewers on the collaboration with Intuitive involving the MicroBlate Flex device, aimed at treating lung cancer patients. “We delivered the first robotically guided microwave ablation,” he said, noting that commercial rollout is now underway.

Operational efficiencies were also discussed, with £5 million in cost savings expected to fully benefit 2025. Looking forward, Creo is targeting 40–50% revenue growth, driven by product innovations and expanding clinical studies across 11 countries.

???? For more company updates and CEO interviews, visit Proactive’s YouTube channel. Don’t forget to like the video, subscribe, and enable notifications.

Proactive:Craig, very good to speak with you. You were out with your results last week and really 2024 was a year of strong progress for the company.

Craig Gulliford: Yeah. So I think it was, you know, strong progress, robust growth in the core product underpinned by the foundational product that we launched a few years ago, Speedboat; but also had a number of product launches over the course of the last nine, 12 months, which is really propelling our outlook as well. So we've seen sustained growth alongside some pretty exciting strategic activity during the course of last year, as well.

Proactive: Take us through some of that strategic activity, Craig, because you sold a 51% stake of Creo Medical Europe. That was to Micro-Tech and you're still holding onto a big stake. But it's also an exciting partnership.

Craig Gulliford: Absolutely. We acquired the underlying business back in 2020. The deal with Micro-Tech, which obviously retains our 49% stake. Importantly for us, the reason we bought the business in the first place was to get direct access to the GI customers that we were really looking to develop with our core product range in Europe. So we still have access to that through the Creo Medical Euro platform.

The Creo Medical brand will stay in place, which is obviously significant for us as well as our partners in Micro-Tech. And it's opening up development activities where we can help co-develop technology and develop markets, possibly in China, as well as distributing the products that we bring in from Micro-Tech into Creo Medical Europe, in other parts of our channel as well. So places like the US, North and South Americas, those kind of things. So all of that, so far so good. It's six months since we completed the deal. Took a few months to get the authority to bring the cash into Europe to complete the transaction. That's all done. And, you know, we move on to the exciting times.

Proactive: Another collaboration is with Intuitive, and that's with your MicroBlate Flex. Take us to where you're at with that?

Craig Gulliford: Yeah. So that's another exciting program. We started with Intuitive back in 2021, with two years' worth of development work that we need to do, which was funded by Intuitive to some extent. So some of the revenue came through the business alongside that, which was a lumpy milestone revenue. Most important of all, is our goal collectively with Intuitive is to treat patients, do it really carefully, specifically and go after this particularly high volume number of patients that could come through screening for lung cancer, which is by far and away the biggest cancer killer worldwide.

So really exciting. Last year, we delivered the first robotically guided microwave ablation with Intuitive with MicroBlate Flex. And that's triggered our process of getting into the market with post-market cases with Intuitive. So we've got the first couple of sites that are going commercial at this point in time. And we've had the first product sale in that platform and that program over the course of the last couple of months.

And it's just about delivering great quality clinical data, which would deliver great quality patient benefits, which we're starting to see come through. And we'll build that clinical evidence base, which is imperative for this. And if we do that, then, you know, we're in a great spot with a terrific partner. And yes, so things are going well.

Proactive: While you've been expanding your core product suites Craig, you've also been focused very much on costs. And you say the full benefits of that's going to come through in 2025. Can you expand on that?

Craig Gulliford: Yeah. So when we launched a number of products over the course of the last nine months, super exciting. But those projects and those products have been challenging. They are pushing the boundaries of technology. They're pushing the boundaries of the laws of physics in a number of ways, which is very difficult to predict, can take a lot longer than you expect, cost more.

But now that we've done all the complicated work, we're able to take a lot of the cost out of the business. It's not an easy process, obviously, for colleagues within the business. But what it does mean is we've got a really solid foundation in terms of cost and efficiency that we can bring into the business.

So that £5 million of cost will impact on the full year of 2025. There's additional cost that will start to come out a little bit as well as we just continually get really focused on cost and execution. And as we start to develop a bipolar range of products, more and more of our product will be manufactured outside of the UK and more through our partners, which just means we become a more streamlined, efficient organization, designed technology which is best in class in all of our applications of advanced energy. Designed and manufactured somewhere else. So that's basically the long term strategy.

Proactive: Craig, after a strong core technology performance in 2024 with revenue up 74%, you're targeting 40 to 50% growth this year, helped by your Speedboat Ultra Slim but also by Speedboat Notch, which also launched.

Craig Gulliford: Yeah. So that's a line extension to the product range. It's not a huge development lift. Obviously there's work that needs to be done. But that was in response to the market where certain physicians really wanted to get additional traction from the tip of the device. But now we've got the technology mass that we're able to deliver those kind of simple— and I would say simple, the engineers would probably kill me for saying that— but it's relatively straightforward in the context of where we are as a business to implement those simple changes.

And that, alongside SpiderBlade, MicroBlate Fine, MicroBlate Flex, completes our advanced energy rollout. These products are game changing, innovative, go after things that nobody else can do and lead us into that bipolar product range where we can start to dominate advanced energy in every form of therapy for the endoscopist, which is super exciting.

Proactive: Craig, we're almost at the end of the first half of 2025. How confident are you as the year progresses?

Craig Gulliford: I think we've had a strong Q1. And we're looking at a forecast for the second half of this year. We obviously focus on making sure that the guidance we put into the market is deliverable. And that's our goal. But with the launch of new products— but also we haven't touched on some of the other clinical studies that we've got running.

We've got a lot of clinical activity now that we've got many, many more users around the world. I think a simple example is, you know, 2 or 3 years ago, we had 2 or 3 key investigators looking into studies in 2 or 3 countries, looking at a couple of indications. We now have close to 40 investigators across 11 countries, with multiple registries looking at in excess of ten indications for our product ranges over the course of the next 1 to 2 years.

And that clinical evidence, alongside all of the other commercial activity we have, is what drives confidence in growth and great quality clinical outcomes. You know, super exciting.

Proactive: Craig, I hope you'll continue to keep us updated on your progress. Thank you very much for speaking with us today.