AptarGroup, Inc. (ATR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us in the coveted after-lunch slot. My name is Matt Roberts, the Packaging Analyst here at Raymond James. I am pleased to welcome back Aptar. We have Vanessa Kanu, CFO; and Mary Skafidas, of course, SVP of Investor Relations and Communications. You might be familiar with Aptar's products. If you've been sick, have allergies or have asthma, you're probably also familiar with their beauty products if you're getting ready for a night out and using your favorite fragrance. And you're probably also familiar with Aptar with everything in between, whether it's an upside-down ketchup bottle, [indiscernible] or even my favorite dish soap that fills my pantry. So it's really there for all parts of your life, both good and bad -- but ideally good. So thank you all again for coming. Vanessa, you have a couple of slides to start us off. So I'll let you do that, and then we'll get into questions.

Thank you very much, and thanks for joining us. Matt, thank you for that intro. I think you just did my presentation for me, which is fantastic. So after lunch, I'll try my best to keep the tempo up just so that you don't start falling asleep here. We think we have an exciting story to tell. But thank you for joining us and for your willingness to learn more about Aptar. Aptar is a -- as Matt mentioned, we are a global leader in the design and manufacturing of drug and consumer products, dosing, dispensing and protection technologies. And really, what that means is at our core, we are a technology company. We do manufacture -- everything that we manufacture is actually our own IP. We are not a contract manufacturer. And we are a truly global company. We operate in about 20 countries across 4 regions around the globe with Europe being our largest region. And for the year ended 2025, as you can see here, we generated about $3.8 billion in annual revenue across 3 primary segments. Pharma, which is our fastest-growing segment and the most profitable segment, accounted for about 46% of our revenues and nearly 70% of our adjusted EBITDA for 2025. Beauty accounted for about 35% of revenues. And as you can see here, about 19% of our -- 18% rather of our adjusted EBITDA. And Closures was about 19% of revenue and 13% of adjusted EBITDA for 2025. And I will get into a bit more detail about each of our segments momentarily. Across each of these segments, we also serve very attractive end markets with long-term growth opportunities, and I'll talk about that as well momentarily. We are additionally consistently recognized as a sustainability leader in our industry. You'll see some of the awards at the bottom of this slide. And then lastly, I would say we have a very, very strong balance sheet with leverage in the low end of our corridor. We have a corridor of 1 to 3x EBITDA, and we're about 1.38x as of the end of last year. So very much at the low end of our leverage corridor and frankly, amongst the lowest in our peer group. So the strong balance sheet is certainly something that we're very proud of and frankly, is also a competitive advantage, particularly in a Pharma business where the development cycles are quite long. And then maybe lastly, what I'll mention is our track record of consistently returning capital to our shareholders. In the last 5 years, we've returned about $1.2 billion of capital to our shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, and we'll talk about that as well in a little bit more detail later on. So I did say earlier that at the core, we are a technology company. So let's talk a bit more about our technologies and industrial capabilities across our end markets. So what you see here vertically are the different end markets that we play in. And then it shows horizontally how we leverage technologies and capabilities across each of those end markets. You see that the business shares a lot of technology platforms, right? Whether it's fine mist pumps, airless technology, aerosol and Bag-on-Valve. And you see how that's shared across the different segments and end markets that we serve. And some of you may already know if you've been following Aptar for some time that our Pharma business was actually organically born from the Beauty business. So again, a great example of you take a fine mist spray that's used in beauty, you adapt that technology and now you've got a nasal spray that is now a category leader in our Pharma business and frankly, a very, very high-margin products as well. And then leveraging these technology platforms across the business, but we also practice common industrial processes, as you can see here. So precision injection molding, high-speed assembly, AI-assisted quality control, just to name a few. So let's talk about innovation. I did say earlier that we own the intellectual property of everything that we manufacture, right? Because we're not a contract manufacturer. And for us, that IP includes patents, specialized know-how and trade secrets. And so protecting that IP is very fundamental for us. We hold, as you can see here, about just over 7,300 patents across the portfolio. This strong foundation of innovation is what we believe makes Pharma and frankly, Aptar highly attractive to our customers. Additionally, over the years, we've also expanded our expertise to include service capabilities, human factors knowledge and further strengthening our overall value proposition end-to-end for our customers. I also mentioned earlier that we serve attractive end markets. And we think that we're very well positioned for long-term growth just given the markets that we serve. What you see here is across our 3 segments, Pharma Packaging has a total addressable market of about $165 billion, and that market is projected to grow at a 7% CAGR. That's not our growth target. That is the market projected growth target, 7% CAGR for Pharma Packaging. The Beauty segment, about a $38 billion total addressable market, projected to grow about 4%. Closures, relatively smaller from a TAM perspective, but still not a small TAM at $7 billion, projected to grow about 2%. But of course, over time, we've actually demonstrated that we've grown Closures even better than the market through some of our category-defining innovations, some of which Matt actually mentioned, for example, the Dawn soap and the upside-down Dawn soap and the ketchup. That's how we've been able to grow our Closures business better than some of those market projections. And so as you can see here, certainly, when we think about our long-term revenue growth target in terms of 4% to 7% total revenue growth, that is very much supported by the markets that we serve, the total addressable market and the projections for market growth. And again, we have demonstrated our ability in certain of these markets to grow better than the market growth rate. So of course, we're focused on execution. And what I like about this is as you kind of look across our portfolio, it is a highly diversified portfolio and no single product or one single geography will define the overall long-term target growth rate. So you also heard me say earlier that we've returned about $1.2 billion of capital to shareholders over the last 5 years. If you look at the split of our overall capital from 2017 to 2025, what you see is that roughly 2/3 of that has been reinvested back into our business, organic CapEx investments as well as M&A. And just given the higher growth and higher returns attributes of Pharma, we obviously preferentially invest in Pharma. We also invest clearly in our other segments, but of course, we put more of our investments to the Pharma segment. And then roughly the other 1/3 of our capital has gone back to shareholders through dividends. We're now in our 32nd year of annually increasing dividends and, of course, share buybacks. I will say the buybacks are a more discretionary element of our capital allocation framework. Certainly, we like the flexibility that it gives us. You would have seen in the past year, we certainly have been a lot more opportunistic in our approach to share buybacks than we were, say, in the years. But that really doesn't change in policy. That really is just being opportunistic and using the flexibility that, that discretionary lever does provide us. And I won't go through all the awards here, but sustainability leader, so many awards. And while we have some of the more recent awards shown on these slides, what I will say is that this is -- certainly not a new or recent phenomenon. This goes back many, many, many years where Aptar has been receiving awards for its leadership in sustainability. And certainly, that really does help us in terms of our value proposition to customers. Believe it or not, there are many, many customers who do care about sustainability, and it's a differentiator for our franchise. And additionally, it also helps us to attract and retain talent, particularly younger talent as well, who also tend to take very importantly, sustainability and what companies are doing on that front. Okay. So with that general overview, I'll just -- let me quickly turn to each one of our segments, starting with Pharma. So Pharma is our growth engine. As I mentioned earlier, it's the fastest growing and the most profitable of our segments, as you would have seen in the first slide. Our market leadership here is very much anchored by our proprietary drug delivery systems, which, as you can see here, was about 70% of our revenues last year, followed by Injectables at 19% and then Active Material Science solutions at about 10% of revenues. We have decades of regulatory and technical expertise that we've built here. And that really has made us the partner of choice to bring a drug from formulation to patients. You saw in an earlier slide that we've got about 7,300-plus patents, of which about 62% is Pharma. So that works out to about 4,500-plus patents across the Pharma portfolio, and it's a very diversified portfolio. And then as you can see here, we deal with all of the leading pharma companies on a direct basis and often also supplying their CMO partners. So -- let's talk about what differentiates us in terms of Pharma. And I would say our differentiated position here is, again, built on our intellectual property and being deeply involved in the regulatory process, which ultimately leads to lock-in of our devices in the Drug Master File. And our services, of course, have also been built up over time and Digital Health also brings offerings that allow us to really embrace our customers early on in the journey, which also makes our devices a lot more sticky from an overall Pharma perspective. Of course, as a manufacturer, the engineering and the science and the know-how of everything we do is, of course, very important. And all of that is based on 40 years of expertise that we've built up, starting this business, as I mentioned earlier, organically from the beauty business and of course, applying that technical know-how over time and then building up that deep regulatory expertise. And we've also built not only organically, but we've also added to that through well-placed acquisitions over the course of time as well, and that gives you an idea of how the overall portfolio has evolved over time. This slide here, not our TAM, but it's a good indicator of how drug sales break down by the route of delivery. And what you see here, so we have a very, very strong position in inhalers. We've also developed a strong position in eye care drug delivery and dermal drug delivery. We, of course, we've built out capability in Injectables, and we're seeing that growth in our results as well. And in the oral route of delivery, we also have our Active Materials packaging where we also see strong growth potential as well. And then when you look back at the performance of our Pharma business over the course of time -- When you look at our Pharma business over the course of time, over the last 10 years, which is kind of what we show on this slide here, we see 9% revenue CAGR and 9% adjusted EBITDA CAGR as well. Obviously, not every single year has grown at 9%. That's a CAGR. We've had years where Pharma has grown 10%, 11%, 12%. We've had years where Pharma has grown 5%, 6%. But when you look at a longer-term period, the CAGR has been 9%. And again, when you think about our long-term target revenue growth of 7% to 11%, clearly, you see that we have historically demonstrated that. And we also just saw the market opportunity as well in terms of 7% projected market growth, and we've consistently grown better than the market, right? So when we get asked why are you confident you'll get to a 7% to 11% CAGR? You can look at 10 years of history, and that we only showed 10 years here. You can look at the market projections going forward, and you can look at some of the other diversified therapies and delivery devices that we have in our portfolio, which I'll talk a little bit about. So speaking of that, our pipeline is really what drives our business in the long run. And in Respiratory, of course, low-GWP propellant transition is one part of our growth in the pipeline, biologics for Injectables, and what we also call systemic nasal drug delivery. Systemic nasal drug delivery really just means that you're using the nose to administer drugs, and that's a growing field. And basically getting into the bloodstream via the nose, which has proven to be a very efficacious route of delivering medicine versus going through the GI tract or direct injection into the bloodstream. So the nose has been discovered as this drug delivery vehicle directly to the bloodstream, very efficacious, as I said. In addition to that, bypassing the blood-brain barrier and going directly to the nose with targeted drug delivery, which opens up a really great new category of growth for us. Again, that's what we're seeing in our pipeline, and that will also support our future growth given our experience and track record in that sector. Of course, we talk about small molecules, traditional injectable opportunities, ophthalmology, allergic rhinitis, et cetera, dermatology, all of those round out the top things that we're seeing in our overall very diversified pipeline. As we look at a deeper dive of proprietary drug delivery systems in our pipeline, the main thing here I'll call out is that these therapeutic areas are actually very diverse, very, very diverse. They're not overweighted towards any particular therapy. And as you look across here, we're seeing a tendency towards more complex, smaller volumes and higher-value products, which means that more focus and more stickiness on delivery systems as well as more opportunities for complementary services and royalties. And again, this just really highlights the diversity that we see in our overall pipeline and the drug delivery. We're also seeing a variety of neurological disorders and neurodegenerative diseases that are showing up, Alzheimer's, Dementia, Parkinson's, we're seeing that show up as well in the pipeline. On the cardiovascular side, we have 2 heart medications that were just approved in the last 2 to 3 months, I would say, one for edema, the other one for tachycardia as well. And this is where you take your heart medications through a nasal spray versus, again, taking a pill or even an IV, for example, in the hospital, right? So we've got all of these things show up in our pipeline and increasing contributors to our pipeline as well. And of course, oncology, even GLP-1s. We don't talk a lot about it. I know there's a lot of talk around oral GLP-1s. But guess what, somebody is actually working on GLP-1s delivered by a nasal spray, also in the works. Maybe we'll talk about that in 2 years from now. We'll see. All right. So that's the diversity of our pipeline and where we're seeing the growth in the pipeline come from, which, again, all of those things are what gives us confidence in terms of that longer-term 7% to 11% compared to the historical 9% that we've seen. One of the things here is -- I really like this slide because it really talks about the life cycle of a molecule and the journey that we, as Aptar go through. You see this is a molecule that was first prescribed in 1994. Prior to that, there was a development phase. And then started -- was prescribed in 1994. We've been with the originator since then, we were specified into the Drug Master File. During the development phase, we do actually earn revenue through services, so we don't just lose money. We work with our customers through that phase, but we actually earn revenue through services. Not a huge amount of revenue, but very profitable service revenues and also we have a royalty revenue stream as well. But you see here that we start earning revenues very early on. And then when the drug first goes prescription, we continue to earn revenue through the originator. The drug then goes generic. The originator loses a bit of volume, the generics start to increase volume, but they stay with us because we're expecting to the Drug Master File. The switching costs are pretty high. It's not impossible, but it's pretty high. So that revenue stickiness stays with us. And of course, the drug goes over the counter, which also tends to open up the market, increases volume overall for that particular drug. And again, our devices are typically used, again, very high switching costs, right? So you can see how that revenue stream that starts from the development phase right through the entire life cycle continues to grow and accrue for Aptar, which actually is a very unique model. And one of the things that our CEO typically says is that he's never seen a business where you just keep on compounding revenue to that degree. And certainly, I would say that he's right. So -- this looks at how we've built up our capabilities over time. And we've broadened our capabilities to embrace customers early on in the drug delivery process from design, formulation, creating insights, new patient insights, which our customers certainly really appreciate. And again, as we say, from design formulation, creating those insights with our service offerings and of course, adding to that also analytical testing, which are customers, again, another factor that they fully appreciate. We've also added human factor design services. This is where we're using what is the best ergonomic design for that particular product and how is that going to be received by patients and consumers, particularly in our consumer health care business, very interesting and important to our customers. And all of this really just helps to build our moat in terms of creating additional stickiness for the eventual device sales that tends to follow. All the way through to patient engagement in the initial medication. And of course, that all helps to build patient retention as well. So for 2025, if you look at our Pharma business, we ended the year at about $1.7 billion of revenue. Reported sales were up 6%. Core sales were up 3%. We did see strong growth. Our prescription growth was actually 5% in the year, and that was even inclusive of the emergency medicine resets that started in Q4 of 2025 that we had talked about previously and also had size in our Q4 guide and also have size for 2026 as well. And I think that has been well baked in, but outside of that, we saw growth in central nervous system solutions. We continue to see growth in royalty revenues. We saw growth in asthma and COPD therapies. Consumer Health Care was down on a full year basis, but of course, we saw growth in Q4. CHC was up very nicely in Q4, and certainly, we expect that to continue. And Injectables overall had double-digit growth in Q4 as well, which we also expect to continue through the course of 2026. All right. So very quickly touching on Beauty. In Beauty, we generated about $1.3 billion in revenue in 2025. And this is a segment that spans fragrance, skin care, color cosmetics, personal care and a very small portion that is home care offering. In Beauty, a significant portion of our sales actually come from Europe. As you can see here, 60% of the sales are based in Europe because that's where customers tend to fill their products. However, roughly half of what we actually sell in Europe ends up in other places around the world. And so if you actually look at where the end product ends up, it's actually a lot more diversified than just Europe because there's a lot of -- our customers tend to sell that in other parts of the world as well. North America represents about 20% and Latin America is close behind. And of course, we're continuing to see growth in Asia as well. And we have -- you can see here, we serve many of the brands that you'll know and recognize. Many of these brands we worked on -- worked with rather for the last 20, 30 years and even longer. And in addition to the big brands, we also serve a growing number of indie brands as well in our beauty business. It's a very diversified portfolio. And I would say the most -- this is another area where we bring products to life through innovation. Innovation is the lifeblood of our growth, not only in Closures, which I'll talk about, but also in Beauty and of course, in Pharma, as I just talked about. So again, a very diversified portfolio, as we can see here. In 2025, we saw total sales grew about 7%. Core sales were up 2% in Beauty. Most regions actually delivered growth with the exception of North America, largely due to softer indie demand in 2025. Fragrance and facial skin care declined on a full year basis. And of course, in Q4, we did start to see some growth in Beauty coming off of more favorable comparisons. However, we are seeing some good indicators of demand growth, and we expect to see growth in Beauty in 2026 as well in addition to margin improvement in that part of our portfolio. And then lastly, our Closures business is $700 million business. And as you can see here, again, diversified in terms of geographic diversification. Again, as you can see here, we serve all of the major brands that you know, Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, L'Oréal, Coca-Cola, et cetera. And again, as we grow our Closures business, a lot of that has been through driving innovation, which helps to drive category conversion, which tends to generate very strong product revenue growth for us that is greater than what the CPG companies are themselves growing organically. Diversified portfolio. In the interest of time, I won't get into all of these, but of course, you can see here, and as Matt mentioned earlier, many of these, I'm sure, are either in your pantry, your fridge or certainly in some of your cabinets. On a full year basis, Closures have reported revenue growth of 2%, core growth of 1%, but as we look at that and we isolate the impact of resin pass-through because we do actually pass through the price of resin. So when you isolate resin pass-through and tooling impacts, we actually had strong product volume growth for the full year, you can see here 4% and margins remain consistent at 16% EBITDA margin. And as we get into 2026, we certainly expect, again, growth contribution coming from the Closures business and EBITDA margin improvement. I'm talking fast because I'm watching the timer go there. So just in terms of a quick high-level summary, fundamentals of our Pharma business very, very strong. Yes, we're going through an emergency medicine reset, but you just saw through the presentation that once you put aside the emergency medicine, we actually have seen strong growth in the rest of our Pharma franchise. And we've gone through what's in the pipeline, what's contributing to the growth -- future growth in the pipeline in terms of nasally administered medicines and the move towards that. And of course, given our market leadership in that, that will bode well for our future growth as well. Injectables is doing very well. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, expecting continued growth and margin improvement across Beauty and Closures as well. All right. So why don't I stop there, Matt, and turn it to you if you have any questions.

Vanessa. Very thorough there. I enjoyed the presentation. Maybe on the presentation, I'll start with Slide 14. You don't have to bring it up. But Slide 14, I think it ranked the pipeline by the weighted average with Respiratory injectable and nasal delivery. I think those are the top 3. So maybe I'll ask on each one of those. So maybe when I think of my asthma inhaler, I don't necessarily think of growth there. I kind of just get refilled every year. But I think it was also 5% of the $1.7 trillion TAM that you had on Slide 12 as well. So maybe of that 5%, how much of that is within asthma, COPD that is then within Europe and exposed to some of the regulations around the powder meter dose inhalers and low propellant gas? Is it -- basically, how big is it? What type of growth are you expecting? Or is it more of a substitution from my existing inhaler into another one perhaps at a mix benefit rather than volume?

Yes. So this is the transition from high-GWP, Global Warming Potential propellant to low-GWP propellants for pMDI pressurized metered-dose inhalers. Certainly, I think from a -- that's a critical step for any Pharma company that's looking to obviously reduce their carbon emissions and of course, the negative environmental impact. And Europe did come out with regulation along this front, I want to say maybe 2 years ago now. And that regulation essentially mandated a gradual phaseout of high-GWP propellants from pMDIs. So it's a gradual phaseout and a complete phaseout by 2050. And this is an area actually where Aptar has actually been very highly engaged. We've been very collaborative and demonstrated a lot of thought leadership in this area. We actually were contracted by the U.S. FDA to do a study around the opportunities and the challenges of this transition from low-GWP -- from high-GWP to low-GWP propellants and the impact on pMDI. So certainly, Aptar has played a very key role in providing thought leadership just given our market position around this space. We also have our own products that actually make that transition easier. We have our own products that are compatible with the newer next-gen low-GWP propellant pMDIs. So that's good. But to your question, is it cannibalistic? No, it's not. Clearly, there are existing customers who are going through the transition because they have to or because they want to for climate reasons. But there's also newer customers that are showing up in our pipeline. So it's both.

And maybe we'll go next one down the list. Injectables, you've seen great growth there after you built some shiny new facilities. It was up 24% last quarter. You're guiding to, I think it was longer term, high single digits to low double digits. So maybe in the second half, maybe if you could help parse that growth or discuss the exposure between other GLP-1s or other biologics? And how much of a runway is there for the existing capacity you have? And how does that influence your CapEx decisions, whether it's you need a new facility or a new line or just how it changes as it grows going forward?

So we invested a lot several years ago. I would say from 2020 to 2022, we're probably the largest -- 2020 to 2023, we're the largest. And Stephan described it as -- our CEO calls it the big box -- which is the big factory build-outs, right? So those big-box build-outs are done. Of course, we may add lines as we deem necessary. We actually just added a mixer as well, which obviously helps from a capacity standpoint. So we think we've got capacity. And certainly, we're seeing the growth now in Injectables, double digits, as we said. So certainly, that investment thesis is proving out. The growth is certainly, GLP-1s were a big part of that in second half 2025, but it's not only GLP-1s. We've seen growth across biologics in general. We've seen growth in other immunotherapies, blood derivatives and so on. So it's really more broader based. But of course, for H2, it was driven by GLP-1.

And we're down here towards the end, but I'm going to go a little off script because I'm a Packaging Analyst. I don't get asked about this very often, but certainly in the halls, I heard this acronym AI out there. And I've never gotten to ask packaging company about it. But I think is there optimism from your customers or biotech companies that pipeline could accelerate or even shift upwards? Or have you had any conversations around that? Or how do you think about that topic?

For AI, -- that's a great question. Certainly, AI is important for our customers. And -- but I wouldn't say I'm seeing that be a direct contributor to the pipeline itself. I would say one of the trends that we are excited about, though, is, of course, Pharma companies, everybody -- data analytics, for example. So we have a Digital Health business inside our Pharma business. And that's part of our service wrapper that we include, which again strengthens our moat. In that business, we're able to use AI to do a lot of advanced analytics for our Pharma customers. A lot of these big Pharma companies don't actually have great patient data. And so we are using our AI to give them additional insights, which actually is contributing to our service revenues. Again, it's not huge dollars right now, but we're actually seeing more and more demand around that. And ultimately, that is just part of strengthening our moat and ultimately pulling through additional device sales.

Vanessa, Mary, thank you all for coming again. There is a breakout in [ Cote d'Ivoire ] 2 for anybody that has further questions wants to hear more. Thank you all.