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

Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the presentation with Bio-Techne. My name is Matt Larew. I cover tools here at Blair. Pleased to be joined this morning by President and CEO, Kim Kelderman; CFO, Jim Hippel; and Dave Clair from IR. So thanks to the team from Bio-Techne for being here. Two quick things I need to mention before they get going on the presentation. First, the breakout session is in Jenney B following the presentation that's on the second floor. And second, for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. With that, again, very pleased to have Bio-Techne here. And Kim, I will turn it over to you.

Yes. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. We always enjoy this incredible show. If I can move to the first slide. Bring your attention to the safe harbor statement. You can find a copy of this on the Investors section of our website, bio-techne.com. And with that, we want to talk about the company itself. And of course, it's a tremendous company with a purpose, and that's our mission. And our mission is to improve the quality of life by catalyzing advances in science and medicine. And we continue to follow this mission to eventually get to our vision, which is together to unlock the possibilities of science. And yes, we are working on this as a whole Bio-Techne, as one Bio-Techne family, and it's very important to us because it guides us towards our end goals. And I will talk about these end goals and how we get there a lot. But before I go there, I want to talk about something foundational and that's, of course, a sustainable future. We're proud that we have published our third Corporate Sustainability Report. And even though Bio-Techne is in an industry that is relatively environmentally friendly, we are very happy that we now have also furthered the monitoring of greenhouse gases across all our facilities. So therewith, we know what kind of footprint we have and where and how to improve. On the social side, we have a very diverse and inclusive workforce. And yes, I'm very excited about that, and of course, want to focus on keeping it and if possible, even making it more diverse than it is. I'm also very proud that our employees usually volunteer and have extracurricular activities for charitable work in their communities, and it's really bringing us together and having a positive impact on the communities in general. Last but not least, our governance side, we have a board that oversees our strategy, and it is a mixture of very qualified people with very deep scientific and/or business expertise. Now let's jump into the overall business and the overview of the company's businesses. The company is headquartered in Minneapolis. We have over 3,000 employees and 35 locations globally. And the company in total had last year, $1.1 billion in revenues, 10% from that revenue is related to sales of instrumentation, 7% and 2% related to services and royalties. But most impressive is the 81% of our revenues related to consumables. Out of that 81%, 10% is related to consumables directly linked to the instruments, meaning cartridges, consumables that fit only on the instruments that we sell. We have two operating segments, both Protein Sciences and the Diagnostics and Genomics segment. In Protein Sciences, we have a couple of core businesses. We produce proteins, antibodies, immunoassays, but we also have two growth verticals. And I'll talk plenty about the growth verticals in the coming half hour, but the 2 growth verticals in Protein Sciences are the cell and gene therapy growth vertical as well as the proteomic analysis portfolio. The other segment, Diagnostics and Genomics. And there, you'll find a growth vertical of spatial biology. There is a liquid biopsy and molecular diagnostics business. And in the core, we find our diagnostic reagents and controls that we sell across the industry. If I jump into the revenue breakout for these product lines I just mentioned. You see on the top left here, the Protein Sciences segment is the lion's share of our business, with 74% of the revenue is related to this segment, 26% related to DGS. And if you look at the inner circle on the left, you can see the breakout of the core and the different growth verticals. So 44% of the Bio-Techne revenue is related to the core and Protein Sciences. And then you have the 7% related to cell and gene therapy and 23% related to the proteomic analytical instrumentation. On the DGS side, you see 12% related to the core and then 5% and 9% related to liquid biopsy and the spatial biology businesses. From the market breakout, you can see that pharma/biopharma is our lion's share, with 50% of the revenue is related to that end market. We sell through distributors in Asia and China. And then we have Diagnostics with 17% and 20% academic revenues. Geographical point of view, Americas lion's share with 60%; Europe, 24%; and then 10%, China; 6% Asia-related revenues. Now let me look at the sizes of the different addressable markets that we have with these different verticals. So I talked about our core products that those products address the $6 billion market. That market is growing mid-single digits, and we have -- we enjoy about 10% market share in this market. Now then you see the four growth verticals, right? With the analytical instrumentation, spatial biology, liquid biopsy and cell and gene therapy. The common theme there is that they play in large addressable markets that are growing very fast. And that is actually exactly what we wanted to achieve because it means that we are in the right markets and that market growth helps us drive our businesses but also that we have enough head space and to still take plenty of market share in our -- in the front mirror -- no, in the front window so that we can see a path to continued long-term double-digit growth. How did we pick those markets? I have this pyramid for you, in which you can see that there are a couple of megatrends that we have noticed over the last decade that are going to play a role, and that's how we positioned our product lines against. So think about this pyramid, one of the megatrends, by definition is automation, but you will see automation around multi-omic technologies. People want to not only study DNA but also RNA and most commonly now proteins. We utilize AI in smart ways. People want to have precision medicine where therapies and diagnostics are specific to certain patient groups. And then the ultimate pinnacle to achieve is healthy aging, right? Where people can live to longer, higher age groups, but in a healthy way. On the right-hand side, you see that there is also a journey from a product point of view, if you start off all the way to the bottom of research and discovery, obviously, very broad field where you would try to find out what therapeutic or what diagnostic you're going to work on. Eventually, you find interesting markers that you're going to translate and develop into products. And these products eventually are going to get used to help this healthy aging diagnose and treat certain diseases. And on the left-hand side of the pyramid, you see how our products are aligned with those megatrends, right? So our core products just help research in general. And then you see the different product lines and how to eventually translate into near-patient true therapies such as cell and gene therapy and liquid biopsy for diagnosis. How we are going to make progress of that pyramid is by a guidance of various strategic pillars. The bottom, you see the most important one, which is our people, right? On people shoulder basically every activity we do in the company. So they are most important to us. And they will be focused and help out in the -- in growing and leveraging our core business. I talked about the core businesses. These different products, we go to market directly. So other customers get to enjoy our high-quality, very bioactive ingredients. But we also use these core products to build these growth verticals that I was talking about. I showed you the four growth verticals. I won't repeat them. But that's the areas where we really want to capitalize on high potential markets and have differentiated offering that pulls through these core reagents. And these vertical markets should be in fast-growing, large addressable markets where we can have a differentiated position to then win market share in a fast pace. We also want to, of course, expand our markets through two things. One is innovation. It's very core to us. We value innovation. We have a CTO that runs a big portfolio of innovative thinking and projects. And then also, we have a strong pipeline of products that eventually come out into the market. And secondly, we have a great track record and a good playbook to acquire. We have done 19 acquisitions over the last 10 years, and we've been very effective in making those part of our product offering, but also integrate these very smoothly. And last but not least, our customers are centric to us, and we want to make sure that the customer gets all the attention they deserve to accelerate their progress. And we also want to leverage our e-commerce platforms there. Now we want to talk a little bit about the growth verticals. But before I go there, I will talk and give you an overview of our core products one more time. We have proteins, antibodies, small molecules, immunoassays and those diagnostic controls and calibrators. The last part is the one that sits in DGS. The other ones sit in the Protein Sciences segment, right? $6 billion addressable market, as I mentioned, and the main brands in there are R&D Systems, Novus and Tocris. Those are the different companies that make up that portfolio. Why is this portfolio so efficient and effective and lucrative? Well, it's because we have a tremendous choice in there. We have over 6,000 RUO and GMP proteins, over 400,000 antibodies, an expansive menu of small molecules and a large portfolio of immunoassays. We believe we got to that position because we have -- we work against very stringent quality standards. We test every lot so that we can warrant lot-to-lot consistency but also high bioactivity. And we can build our proteins from best-in-class antibodies. And there is, therefore, no surprise and the fact that we are the most quoted and most mentioned in publications by our customers. Now at the end of the day, we also want to make sure that we continue to innovate. And we do so by continuously improving our yields and by building out our factories and GMP capabilities. But even more innovative is that we have been pairing AI and AI capabilities to our development processes. And then very important to us is the inter-division collaborations, meaning we have these divisions around core products. And they, of course, have to work together with these growth verticals, right? Because they want to make sure that their products get integrated into these growth verticals that will help pull through of these core reagents. And if you then look at how that works here on the left-hand side, you get to see our core products and with the list again, that took us 47 years to put together, right? So this is the different brands I mentioned earlier. And specifically, the R&D Systems portion has a long, long track record and it's the core of Bio-Techne's foundation, really. And yes, these products do help out in the boost of these four verticals. And I'll give you an example. For example, the antibody is the first one. These antibodies get pulled through into the proteomic analysis systems, right? Their assays are based on best-in-class antibodies. That makes our ProteinSimple instruments look better, but it also pulls the ProteinSimple -- the antibodies through on the ProteinSimple instrumentation, and it helps not only growing that vertical, but it also helps the profitability of the company. And the same is true for antibodies, for example, in spatial biology. Our COMET instrument, we acquired, the Lunaphore acquisition, uses the antibodies just as well. And if you think about it, we also are going to come out with GMP antibodies that will get pull through into the cell and gene therapy. So therefore, you can see this matrix and basically the symbiosis between our core products and these growth verticals. Now double-clicking on this proteomic analytical instrumentation business unit, $3 billion in total. We have processes or instruments for the processes such as Simple Western, Biologics, Simple Plex and we have a product line in Namocell for cell sorting. The fundamental theory behind these is to automate clunky and/or manual processes and therewith reduced overhead, increase throughput time -- or decrease throughput time and increase throughput, but also increase the consistency of the results, which is important to most researchers. If you look at how we expanded this market to $3 billion, of course, for every product line, we had a strategy to make sure that they get used for the right applications. And we have expanded the applications for most of these product lines. The very first one, Biologics, we launched a product called MauriceFlex. And that instrument allows you to do fractionation. That means it used to be clunky to take your sample and bring it to a mass spec. But this one can create a direct link, so a portion of the sample that you separated can flow into the mass spec and will be now a complete workflow without interference, and therewith making a play on the HPLC market, which helps increasing our addressable market. All three instruments had increased number of applications in the cell and gene therapy market. And most notably there at the end, the Simple Plex on your right, you can see that we achieved the 13485 certification, which allows this instrument to be used in diagnostic applications, which then helps customers to enter the diagnostic market, and which then fits with the mega trend of going from RUO to eventually be in a diagnostic play. So that is a clear example on this slide. If we look to the cell and gene therapy consumables, same theme, by the way, from RUO to GMP here in cell culture, you see our media as well as our small molecules and RUO setup. For regen medicine, you see that we have very similar products in different form and fit, but they are GMP-certified. And then last but not least, we have a setup around immune cell therapy. I'll double-click on the immune cell therapy vertical because central to that one, we have the G-Rex. The G-Rex is a container that has a semi-permeable floor, so oxygen can get to the cells and with oxygen and necessary environment around the cells, which we create through adding GMP media and GMP cytokines, chemokines, proteins and food to make the cells grow. Now we have an ideal environment for -- to grow these immune cells. This is a setup where the pull-through is not an instrument, but the pull-through is the G-Rex, the container that helps you grow the immune cells for your immune cell therapy. We own 20% of Wilson Wolf right now, but we have an agreement in place to own 100% of that business at the end of the calendar year 2027 at the latest. Now if I jump into our next vertical, which is spatial biology. We believe a $5 billion addressable market. We have done two acquisitions in this business, ACD and Lunaphore. ACD is RNA reagents and Lunaphore is basically the company that brings the COMET automation to us. You see a photo of the COMET here. Together, this will be a fully-automated spatial multi-omic workflow. Multi-omic is important, right? So people -- I've mentioned that as a megatrend, first of all. And secondly, researchers will want to see what happens on the RNA level, but also what happens on the proteomic level. This instrument can run 4 slides at the same time, and it can run it overnight, no interference, manual interference needed when you run it. And it runs your sample all the way through to imaging. So you have an imaging software board that you can use to analyze your image. You have to do the normal preparation of a tissue on a slide, which everybody already does. So no special cartridges or other funky things. It's just a pure slide, which you click on a certain cartridge and then it goes in a machine and the probes will hybridized. There will be the RNA cycle and there will be a proteomic cycle. But that all on one slide and all fully-automated is a very powerful spatial biology solution. If you think about it, we can, with that, basically help researchers look at a variety of diseases, all immune diseases, but also very applicable in gene therapy. And if you think about our Lunaphore instrument can pull through antibodies and you can use your own antibodies you're already use using, so you can utilize the same data. But you can also use antibodies from us, and we happen to have 400,000 of those that will help you interrogating the protein side. And then we have all kinds of different tools, about 50,000 different probes. We can make any custom one you want to interrogate the RNA side, any length of RNA really. And that gives you the multi-omic powerhouse that you would like to have in this market. And we're very proud of the offering and feel that long term, we will have a fantastic opportunity in this growth vertical. Now last but not least, we're talking about liquid biopsy. We have on market here, you can see 12 products. Most of those are kitted products, and there's one CLIA product, which is the -- CLIA-based product, which is the ExoDx Prostate cancer test. We talk about that every quarter. It's growing relatively rapidly. And we are passing now 150,000 tests as we speak. But on top there, you can see that there are screening assays, diagnostic assays and monitoring assays. And we like the screening part because there are many patients, and therefore, higher volumes. And in the back end, the monitoring part where you have to monitor regularly, fewer patients but more regular tests. So we like that, too, because there are volumes. So if you look at the middle of the slide, you can see our current development projects. You can clearly see that those are skewed to the left and to the right where we believe the volume sits. There are a couple of tests that we know how to design, and we are gathering data, which is the colorectal cancer test there on the left as well as the transplant rejection test on the right. And those are not tests that we go to market ourselves. There are people -- there are companies in the space that are maybe tuned with these markets. So highly likely, those would be licensing out opportunities. On the right-hand side, you see a little red check mark because the transplant rejection test, we, a couple of years ago, we achieved an agreement with Thermo, that we would license that test out to them. You see in the darker blue boxes here at the bottom are the different channels that we own. And one is the urology channel, which, of course, we utilized for the prostate test, and then the clinical labs channel where we sell all our kits to laboratories, where then the laboratories perform the test. This portfolio is pretty much based on exosomes. Exosomes are basically little biological vesicles for which we get the rights and the technologies through the ExosomeDx acquisition. Those bubbles come popping out of a larger cell when it's alive, very much like a lava lamp, where there's little bubbles come in and out of the larger bubbles. And it is for intercellular communication. These exosomes have fantastic properties compared to circulating tumor cells and cfDNA because they carry all the information. They are available in early stages of a disease. So a healthy cell already starts shedding thousands of exosomes, which makes it possible to really have an early detection. There's an ability to enrich so you can fish them out of your sample and look at them specifically. They're very stable. They're designed to keep this information DNA and RNA in a stable way. And the outside of the little exosome has the same characteristics of the originating cell, so the same finger print. So we know exactly where the exosome came from. On the right-hand side, there is a figure that basically indicates that if you use exosome sensitivity and specificity its gets much better. And that's not a surprise because one cell secretes tens of thousands of exosomes per day. But it only secretes two copies of DNA and only after it dies, right? If you look at the cfDNA. So a very promising portfolio, and we're excited about growing that portfolio in the clinical diagnostics space just as well. If we talk about one of our key processes, which has been M&A and successful integration of other companies. Here, you see a very impressive track record. As I mentioned, 19 of those in the last 10 years. And you can see that this acquisition strategy has really helped us build those 4 verticals, and it's really helped us putting technologies together that organically would have taken much longer. But with those integrations -- successful integrations and technologies, we've also made sure that we continue to innovate and bring those technologies together. And that's why the collaboration between those divisions that I mentioned earlier is so important to our portfolio. If I translate this to the one last slide, it took us 47 years to build this portfolio of core products, right? The core products, the building blocks for any research project, proteins, antibodies, small molecules, immunoassays, calibrators and controls, very high quality. We have a great reputation and we have a fantastic menu with high-quality products that do not only go directly to market, so you can buy them from our sales force or through our website, but also they feed into those four verticals, growth verticals. And I talked about the growth verticals, but I'll go through one more time. The protein analytics, that was a combination of three acquisitions. You see the CyVek, ProteinSimple as well as the Novus acquisition. In total, we deployed $0.5 billion there. Cell and gene therapy, there, we deployed $374 million, but we also invested organically, more than $50 million in our GMP facilities. And of course, there will be an extra $1 billion that we will spend in Wilson Wolf in 2027. Spatial biology is a combination of ACD as well as Lunaphore in total deployment of $0.5 billion and a very competitive positioning in that space. And then last but not least, the liquid biopsy molecular diagnostic business, that is a combination of ExosomeDx and the laboratory serving surgeon products that are mainly kitted. Now if you think about that, that results really in having a combination of a very powerful core products that grow at market or a little bit above. That's where we usually drive it. And then four growth verticals that are growing much faster than the standard market. And that gives us the benefit that on average, we are outgrowing our peer group by 500 to 1,000 basis points. We usually target our EBITDA margins to be anywhere between 35% and 40%. And of course, we want high teens EPS growth for investors. And I think with the strategy that I have shown with the positioning against the megatrends as well as the markets, large, fast-growing markets with our verticals, we are absolutely set to do a great job in this industry and be a fantastic company to follow, but also to work at. Thank you very much.