Egm in the X-ray: Arterra Bioscience sees revenue leap by 29.2%

Vitalab Srl (whose managing director is the researcher Maria Gabriella Colucci, a key shareholder and founder of Arterra Bioscience) is 24.99% owned by Arterra Bioscience, which, however, thanks to an addendum to the company's shareholders' agreement signed in October 2025 with Intercos, will be able to receive 40% of Vitalab's dividends until 10/10/2030, should the company resolve to distribute them. Also until that date, Arterra Bioscience will retain the right to subscribe to its share of the capital increase that Vitalab resolved on 2 October 2025.

Arterra Bioscience, as it turned out, has liquidity and consequently should have no problem using some of it for this capital increase. And as for dividends, in 2025 it received as much as EUR 144,200 from Vitalab (although this figure is lower than the EUR 200,000 in 2024).

Not so lucky was the transaction Longevity Bioscience Srl, a joint venture set up in July 2024 with Exosomics with the aim of using exosomes from plant cell cultures in the cosmetics, aesthetic medicine and medical device sectors. The stake was sold back to Exosomics for around EUR 44,000, substantially at book value (a loss of EUR 6,000 was recorded), but Arterra Bioscience nevertheless emphasised that it intends to continue developing and commercialising solutions based on exosomes (extracellular vesicles) of natural origin.

In the meantime, the company has been awarded a non-repayable grant of EUR 2.05 million by the Campania Region for the development of the 'SmartLab 2.0' project, i.e. an innovative platform for the use of lactobacilli isolated from buffalo milk and PDO Sardinian sheep's milk cheese as a 'cell factory' for the industrial production of high added-value molecules and fermentation processes that can be used in the cosmetics, nutraceuticals, agriculture and agri-food sectors. The project will last two years and the cost estimated by the jury is about EUR 3 million (so the costs borne by Arterra Bioscience would actually amount to just under EUR 1 million).

Arterra Bioscience has a peculiar shareholder base. First of all, it has a very high free float (especially in the Euronext Growth Milan) of over 43%, but among the major shareholders, in addition to the founder Maria Gabriella Colucci with 27.9%, there is the activist investor Alberto Previtali with over 15%, Intercos itself (for which Arterra Bioscience carries out research activities through Vitalab) with 8.65% and, recently, also the 'permanent capital' holding company Smart Capital (Euronext Growth Milan Pro segment) with 5%.

And Smart Capital is also definitely an activist investor. In 2025, it participated in the Eurogroup Laminations takeover bid and will participate in the one on Ala by divesting their respective stakes, resulting in substantial capital gains. He directly holds a 6.1 % stake in G.M. Leather and indirectly shares in Cofle and NextGeo, all at Euronext Growth Milan. It also recently announced that it has promoted a 'reverse takeover' transaction aimed at merging its subsidiary Smart4Tech and equity crowdfunding company WeAreStarting Srl into CrowdFundMe, itself a crowdfunding platform listed on Euronext Growth Milan. The transaction is expected to be finalised by the first quarter of 2026 and the reference shareholder of the new entity would be Smart Capital itself.

But beyond shareholding considerations, it should be remembered that skincare accounts for over 27% of the Italian cosmetics market and as much as 27% of the world market, of which over 80% refers to facial care products, with an estimated cagr of 6.5% up to 2030 according to the international research company Mordor Intelligence; a percentage driven precisely by products with natural and organic formulations. Of course, the world's main market for skincare is the USA, currently affected by the notorious tariffs (so much so that Intercos has been thinking for some time about a direct entry into that market through acquisitions), but the ever-increasing propensity towards self-care does not seem destined to change in the future. And from this Arterra Bioscience can only benefit. In addition to the two active ingredients presented by Intercos, the 2024/2025 product pipeline includes PlantExo Vita (exosomes derived from plantain), NC75 Vita TechCollagen (recombinant collagen produced from lettuce), NC77 Vita Vinea (cell cultures from vinifera vine) and NC78 Vita Sculptis (cell cultures derived from helichrysum), and during the year active ingredients were developed for the high-end cosmetics bigwigs Mao Geping Cosmetics, Charlotte Tilbury and La Prairie.