Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I want to thank all of the committee members for the opportunity to be here today to speak about LuminUltra's role in providing essential COVID-19 testing supplies.
I will aim to keep this brief so that we will have ample time for questions, but I do want to provide a bit of a backstory about LuminUltra.
We are a molecular biology diagnostic testing company that focuses primarily on testing for micro-organisms in water. Just like people, water systems can get sick. They can get infected with different types of microbes, and we provide tools to essential businesses around the world to apply treatments and management techniques without which there would be a global economic cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
We are proudly headquartered in New Brunswick, here in Fredericton. We have operations in six countries around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Australia.
We are 100% Canadian owned between me and XVP Water Partners based out of Toronto. We have been in business for about 20 years, but we span all the way back to 1995 when we got our early beginnings. I was lucky enough to be one of the three founders of the company as a laboratory technician while I was still in high school.
Today we have grown to nearly 100 staff, the vast majority of whom are actually here in Canada. I would say that up until recently we have been largely unknown to Canadians because our business has been very internationally focused so far. We sell primarily to private interests, more of a B2B kind of business, in over 80 countries around the world. Our customer base is largely made up of Fortune 500 companies. These types of businesses are in the business of providing essential services, and we have been committed to making sure that we're able to continue to meet their needs while maintaining the safety and security of our staff, which is important to us. We have a very innovative, very adept team that has grown accustomed to innovating over the years. It is actually that culture of innovation that made us able to step into the fight against COVID-19, which started on March 20 when the Prime Minister put out the call to action to industry. We responded very quickly through the front doors that were provided.
Knowing that we had certain expertise that could be brought to bear on the testing side, through those doors we were in contact with the Public Health Agency of Canada. We had some very detailed, in-depth discussions with the folks out in Winnipeg and realized that we could provide much-needed chemical reagents to allow testing to proceed across Canada. That has resulted in our commitment to the Government of Canada to provide reagents for 25 million COVID-19 tests over the next year. As of today, we have already shipped one million of those tests from our facility in Fredericton to all of the provincial health laboratories across Canada.
The next steps, though, as we always have an eye to the future, are that we are engaged with various government agencies, including ISED, NRC and ACOA, on scaling up this production even further and expanding beyond simply providing those chemical reagents to also being able to provide a more comprehensive solution for COVID-19 testing. We're also looking at the opportunities to deploy testing beyond the clinical setting into environmental settings as well, where we would be able to provide some assurances that the environments in which we all live, work and play are kept safe and secure as we begin to relax physical distancing in the future.
Overall, I just want to say how immensely proud I am of our team, and also of the team at the Public Health Agency of Canada, which has been incredibly hard-working with long hours and lots of conversations. It is a great team to work with and we have really gone through this together to be able to very rapidly shore up these bottlenecks through that collaboration.
Again, I appreciate the opportunity to be here today and look forward to any questions.
Thank you very much.