Bio-Techne Corporation (TECH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Bio-Techne Corporation Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Brenda Furlow, Corporate Secretary of Bio-Techne. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning or good afternoon, depending where you are. Welcome to our Annual Shareholders Meeting. It's 8:00 a.m. Central Time on October 28, 2021, and the meeting is called to order. Today's meeting will be limited to the business matters outlined in the proxy. After the business meeting concludes, we can take questions that you might have if you're a shareholders. We see we have a few shareholders on the line. If you have logged in with your control number, you can ask a question by typing it into the box at the bottom of the screen at any time during this meeting. Before we turn to the business agenda today, I wanted to let you know that our CEO, Chuck Kummeth, and other members of our Board of Directors are attending today as well as a representative from KPMG. Also joining us is CFO, Jim Hippel; and our Senior Director of Investor Relations, David Clair. I will be serving as Secretary of the meeting and Inspector of Elections. So let's turn our attention to today's business. The mailing of our proxy statement and card began on at September 14 to shareholders of record as of September 3, 2021. About 89% of those shares are represented at this meeting by proxy or in person. Thus, a quorum is present. We're going to cover 4 proposals today. First is to set the number of directors at 9. And second, the election of directors. All the current directors have been renominated for election. Third is an advisory vote on executive compensation for the named executive officers as described in the proxy. And the fourth and final proposal is the ratification of the appointment of KPMG as the company's public accounting firm for the 2022 fiscal year. We're now going to turn our attention to the voting of shares. If you've not yet submitted a proxy card and wish to vote on these items or if you wish to revoke your proxy card, you may vote your shares by clicking on the Vote Here button on your screen. You will need your control number to vote your shares online. So we're going to give the shareholders online a few minutes to vote. [Voting]

All right. The polls are now closed, and here are the results: all director nominees have been reelected, and all proposals have passed. Thank you for participating in today's meeting, and the meeting is now adjourned. At this point, if you're online with a control number and you have a question, you can please type it at the box at the bottom of the screen. And if you have any general questions about Bio-Techne, please include your contact information, and we can return -- respond to you directly.

So we have received one question. When will COVID antibody test be available in Canada.

In Canada?

In Canada. Chuck, would you like to take that?

Sure. We'd like them to become available in the U.S. first. We're having a little bit of difficulty getting a secondary EUA established for the neutralization side of test. As you know, our test goes the extra mile and does full neutralization. So we can actually tell a patient their immunity level, their exact antibody count. We have all that data correlated through Mount Sinai in thousands of patients and with the WHO vaccine standard. It's been around for decades. So we know we're -- it really gets down to politics. There's a whole -- every country has a whole new set of rules, and Canada is no different. And we are established, I think, to get the first level EUA in Canada. But if the same thing holds, I don't think we're any closer in Canada for the secondary EUA. And you got to remember, this is important too because without that secondary EUA, then the reimbursement isn't big enough. So this is a 2-part -- 2-step test. And at the $40 level of reimbursement for qualitative reimbursement, which is all we have, like everybody else, there's enough interest for the labcorps of the world to get involved and do this. They just can't make any money. So it's sad, but that's reality. So the Canada is the same boat as the U.S. literally, and we're working our way through it. We do see some hope, though, because variants aren't going away, also immunocompromised people, people that are currently in chemo in areas the data is showing that when your body is in that kind of stress, you're not generating antibodies from a vaccine. So the need for screening in these, call them niche markets, are forming. And so I -- we do think there will be, long term, some interest and availability of our test, and we're not giving up. And we've got a great partner in Mount Sinai. We're also working on a next-generation version of the test. So instead of a blood draw, which is pretty invasive and maybe people just won't go the extra mile to get a blood draw, we're looking at different versions like saliva, where it's more difficult because there's less IgG to work with. But it's possible where the initial data looks pretty good. It's just more R&D and more investment and more time. So hang in there. We've got the best test. We've got great science, great partners, and we do think we'll see some business from this eventually.

All right. Thank you, Chuck. There are no other questions. So with that, we're going to conclude our meeting. Thank you to those of you who were participating in the meeting. The meeting is done.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.