Bruker Corporation (BRKR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Luke Sergott. I cover Life Sciences Tools and Diagnostics for Barclays. With me, I have Dr. Frank Laukien, the man [indiscernible] legend, CEO of Bruker. Thanks again for making it here.

Pleasure.

I guess let's start off. I mean the topic du jour, obviously, is the academic and government markets, the health of those. You have your global business. We'll, I'm sure, touch on the NIH piece first. But talk about the news in Germany from the weekend on the new -- the coming party proposing the highlights on the defense side, where are the investments being made? And just kind of bring it forward to like, hey, this is a global business and...

Hey, some good news for a change, right? We all needed that. Yes. Indeed, there was a release on Saturday morning of the presumed next government of Germany, the coalition of parties under very likely next Chancellor Friedrich Merz. And they released their preliminary planning documents and that had very significant defense and infrastructure, additional investments. Defense is not a big surprise. All of Europe is now in the mode. We really got to reinvest in defense. And the numbers tend to be something like 800 -- this is not Germany, it's all of Europe, $800 billion, $800 extra billion over the next 5 years, presumably, those are the European numbers that are floating out there. And for Germany, among the $500 billion that they're requesting maybe half or $200 billion or so would go to defense. Why the hell is Frank talking about defense? Because we have a EUR 50 million or dollar same thing, European defense Detection business, Defense and Homeland Security that has been growing because of the Ukraine situation with customers from Scandinavia to Germany itself to other Central European countries. Not really going into Ukraine, but these are chemical and biological and radiological and explosive detection, things that you need, that... This business isn't well known to the investment community, but if you fly through Geneva or Zurich or Frankfurt airport, all the explosive trace detectors there are from Bruker. Very soon, your cargo on United Airlines will be primarily checked by stuff we do. This isn't post-genomic era. I know this isn't spatial biology, but it's just a nice example of something we do. That business will probably be growing very rapidly as European -- Europe reinvests in defense. More of a bit of a -- that was a little as expected by me. But then the additional infrastructure funding that Germany is proposing, I thought highways, bridges, that doesn't really benefit us very much. But there was also quite a bit of talk about R&D investment in general and innovation. I am originally from Germany, so I can observe that. But Germany hasn't had an innovation strategy in 30 years. They really did not. The country worked, but the government had no innovation strategy. This government says, "We want to invest in innovation. We want to invest in R&D." They didn't say spatial biology. They didn't say, proteomics or glycobiology, but among these very big parts of money that they want to invest incrementally innovation and R&D are topics that I think will also benefit the life science tools. And then as the last tidbit in all of that, Luke, was that they very much highlighted fusion energy research and Germany wanting to be the first country to build a fusion power plant. And believe it or not, something in our best division, we have a lot of tools, as you would expect from Bruker for Fusion Energy in particular. We and our subsidiaries supply a lot of arcane technologies for plasma heating and cryo pumps and diverters and superconducting materials for eater and for other fusion pilot projects. And yes, we are also -- we Bruker are a founder and minority investor in a company called [ GousFusion ] near Munich, and they intend to build the first FUSION power plant in the world in Europe somewhere. So a number of tidbit with all the doom and gloom over here, it's really not doom and gloom. It's just short-term disruption and uncertainty in NIH. I think we'll talk about that. It was nice to see a renewed and more focused and really well-funded additional commitment in Germany. Germany for us isn't small. For Germany, it's 9% of our revenue. It's actually, as you would expect the company that has German and Swiss roots originally, it's a sizable market for us. So a bit of good news. So that which we could all use.

So on that -- have you started to see orders or projects start to flow in and kind of the RFP process starting yet? Or is this just kind of headlines?

No, this is headline. These are even plans. These plans aren't even confirmed yet. So that becomes the plan of the new government and is negotiated will be some months away until that -- none of that will do any -- make any difference in '25, beginning '26, '27. But it's just a good long. Of course, we're paying attention to the quarters and the years. But -- this is just a good, really good demand driver for us for future years.

All right. It is more indicative. Okay.

The defense growth has been there in recent years already. So we've seen that already.

That makes sense. On the more near term, on the NIH and academic kind of walk through what you guys have baked in on your guidance? How you're thinking about it? I mean just -- what are you hearing from customers right now? We hear the doom and gloom message is pretty clear.

Well, actually, the way -- I know I used the term kiddingly myself. I'm actually pretty optimistic that this is a multi-quarter turbulence and that doom and gloom for U.S. life science and disease research, I don't share any of that. I'm actually quite optimistic and think that by the time this sorts itself out, which is leading to turbulence and uncertainty this year, I think there will be -- what I heard from RFK Jr., more focus on chronic diseases. Many of these chronic diseases kind of fit with a post-genomic era because for many people who have chronic diseases, their genome doesn't change all that much, but a lot of other things, their proteome, metabolome, you name it, a lot of these things change. I have in the confirmation hearings for Jay Bhattacharya, as Head of NIH. I've heard anything that the U.S. would want to ever surrender its preeminent in life science and disease research or that it would not support its world-leading biopharmaceutical and therapeutics companies, pharma companies. So -- and last but not least, the confirmation hearings for Marty Makary seems to be like a -- could be a great choice for FDA. Already, the FDA in the last decade, I think, was much more progress-oriented and not only risk adverse and better to deal with for us and for many other companies I talked to. But under Marty Makary, if it goes according to those hearings, very pragmatic. It was in the context of rare childhood cancers and child diseases, but a very pragmatic approach to enabling medical breakthroughs and progress, while, of course, also making sure there wasn't excessive risk. So that all sounded really, really good to me. And quite honestly, what we're experiencing maybe as doom and gloom or at least as daily headlines that there is disruption in U.S. academic spending. About 8% of our revenue. Yes, this year, this is going to be a headwind that medium to longer term by next year, if U.S. academia takes out a lot of their non-research bureaucratic overheads, you could save billions. If that gets redeployed into actual research infrastructure, that could be good for the entire tool sector, right, and for pharmaceuticals as well. So I'm actually very optimistic by '26, '27. And how much of a delay and how much of a dip will experience in '25? Nobody knows exactly. We have modeled by now an 8% reduction in the 8%. Now you heard 8% twice, but that's a coincidence. 8% of our revenue is U.S. academia. We think it will -- I think there is contagion to all of U.S. academia. It's not only the NIH-funded stuff. Of that, we think there will be some slowdown in grants and there might be some further debate over these overheads. Could there then be a budget flush, where by August, September, maybe a lot of orders come in. But for us, many of them would then go into '26. Some may still come into Q4 '25. Anyway, this year, there is turbulence as we all know, which is shaping the debate here and elsewhere.

Yes. And so as you think about that 8% being down 8%, I assume that the way that it's -- the quarter shaping out with how you guys look at it. Just talk about, I mean, the kind of pacing that you've seen from order demand throughout your quarter from Jan to Feb to March. Because typically, you're back, I'd say, when you -- like 40% of your quarter comes in like the last month, 1.5 months, like something like that...

Yes, yes. It's almost half of orders and half of revenues comes in the third month in any quarter at all times. There's no unusual pattern here. So we'll have to see how the quarter goes, right? Actually, by middle of March, I don't have any updated insights or so that would help us or you today. We had hopefully prudent these -- given some color, we give guidance for the year, but then our CFO, Gerald, had given some color that we were expecting a flattish organic first quarter with about 3% to 4% organic growth for the year and 5% to 7% constant exchange rate growth for the year. And for this 8% of 8%, for that, I think we have enough conservatism baked in to where, yes, this is because there is additional headwinds. This, therefore, probably this may not be the year for beats and raises and the more probable scenario, which are still within our guidance maybe that would also not be at the high end of the guidance, middle or lower end of the guidance. When you set it up originally, you want to beat guidance, right? You want to do better for the year. I have enough other -- the other 92% of the businesses -- of the business, headwinds from China is turning into a tailwind, headwind from pharma is turning into a tailwind. Not a snapback, but a nice partial recovery this year. Cleantech, GreenTech, European academic pharma, rest of Asia Pacific investment in pharma, those are all pretty good, some new stuff like fusion and defense that you don't normally hear me talk about, but they start to be somewhat needle moving as well. There is enough positive drivers, and we haven't given 7% organic growth guidance. Otherwise, I'd maybe regret that now, but we've been pretty conservative, very much focusing on margin expansion, 140 bps, I think 11% to 13% EPS growth, if I recall it rewarded. And so that we will try to protect as much as possible. We think we can also grow within the organic growth guidance and the constant exchange rate guidance. But there are scenarios that are more negative than that. I try to ring-fence that, and I'll do it here as well because that's not the end of the world either. If you think about how strong and resilient our portfolio is, how international it is, even if -- and that, I think, is a pretty extreme scenario of our 8% academic business, 8% of our business in the world is academic U.S. Even if that came down 25%, we didn't have any of these type of reductions during COVID. So that would be a pretty extreme figure for a company that has a lot of backlog and so on. But let's do the math, that would be 2%, right, of my revenue. So then -- and this isn't my guidance, this is a what-if scenario, but you're all doing the modeling anyway. If I lost that 2% this year, we'd be at 3% to 5% constant exchange and get it right, 1%, 2% organic growth, which would be disappointing. And I don't think it's probable, but we would still be delivering very meaningful margin expansion and EPS growth. And I hope that we're all getting together sometime in the summer or wherever we are, again, that people say, yes, this is clearly a headwind this year, but that may -- that it didn't come to that what I would consider a plausible but not probable worst-case scenario. And even that's not so bad for us, we'll still deliver significant margin expansion and EPS growth because there, we've been even more conservative.

And if you dig in on kind of where you think the most pressure is going to come from the genomics piece on NanoString versus your high-end instrumentation in the UHF like -- try to bucket out where you would see most of that pressure here as we come into 1Q, where you're looking for flattish organic. What would be kind of the immediate impacts right now from an application perspective versus ones that can actually be kind of pushed out even further?

Yes. I think this year, academia, because of the uncertain. U.S. academia will be very judicious and very much prioritized. So if you have -- if you have 5 sequencers and you're looking to add sequencing capacity with sequencer 6 and 7, you can defer that by a year or maybe by 2 years. If you have a 10 year-old instrument and you just want to replace that, you can also -- it probably runs for another year or 2. So you don't have to do that this year. You may defer that whether -- if it comes out of direct NIH funding, you're going to spend the money, right? Because that's the grant. It becomes out of indirect research overhead. That's where you'll say, yes, can we can we go for another year or 2 without that replacement or that capacity expansion. But when it comes to real new capabilities, if you want to understand protein isoforms with the TIMS omni, for instance, and because that's much more meaningful even than just identifying protein groups, which we can do by mass-spec, and others do it by affinity methods I'm referring to. But when you come to the functional information to where you don't just get boring lists of boring genes and boring lists of boring proteins, functional information that gives you disease insight, then isoforms are really important for that. You need mass spectrometry on the affinity methods. I'm very optimistic that this will generate disease insights in cancer and neurodegeneration and autoimmunity. You could also say it will generate cell and science in Nature papers that will be protected. The new pain scape that we talked about at AGBT, completely new capability for understanding 3D genomics and what's going on in the nucleus and how that affects cancer biology or infectious viral disease impacts on our human host cells and so on. These are mind-boggling new insights that are becoming available. I think that academia that will continue to invest, we'll continue to invest selectively in these cutting-edge tools that really are enabling. We all talk enabling tools. But wow, these are really enabling tools. And that's where we have transformed our portfolio at a relative performance level, I think, in a challenged environment this year, which I think is a transitory effect, not a structural effect, I think we will be doing relatively well because of the importance of these new tools for disease research or just fundamental cancer biology or biology insights. So I'm not so doom and gloom. And most importantly, I think whatever we experienced this year, however, long the delay and now however picked the dip, I think these are completely transitory issues. I think U.S. academic life science funding and biopharma funding will be as strong as ever, perhaps even stronger if we spend less on academic bureaucratic load, which is pretty considerable.

Yes. Fair. And I guess, when you're thinking about -- you're laying out a product road map or application road map for better discovery, multiomics, everything like that. Is there a chance there from a pharma perspective that they can pick up some of the slack? From a proteomics side, they I would say, been behind the curve versus the academia, where now they're all genomics, but is there something where you can ultimately push further into that, given now that you have a NanoString...

Yes. Actually, this thesis, right, of this, hey, we're towards the end of -- the end of the beginning, which is all this genomic breakthroughs over the last 25 years for which we've learned a lot, but we still only understand, I don't know, maybe 10% of biology. It wasn't the book of life. It wasn't the blueprint for life. It's a misunderstanding. You need for more information, including -- yes, genomic information and that gets more and more refined, right? Now you can do T cell receptor genomics, there's great new applications for that as well. But that you then -- that beyond these things being accepted in academic medical research and academic research that biopharma is even more so accepting that they haven't learned enough from genomics and need these other eyes open and other levels of insights. So in one really big biopharma company, U.S. based, they did a lot of -- they did two waves of restructurings, one last year, one early this year. In both cases, my friends in the genomics group were the only group that was unscathed. And in fact, because they are now also going into glycoproteomics, glycobiology, and that just wasn't a good land post to see that, but it's really important for drug discovery and development. They even got some additional budgets, which -- in a tough time, I think that's the sign of the time and from small biotech to really big the J&J Janssen to Bristol-Myers Squibb to, of course, anybody who has a GLP-1 drug, they're investing heavily, and they're investing in the tools that I've characterized as opposed genomic tools to complement the sequencing capabilities that they, of course, exploit to the extent they give them information. But it's not enough information to develop -- it has helped them, but in many areas of disease, it really has helped them nearly as much as they were hoping for a decade or 2 ago.

And so after this period of restructuring rationalization and tighter budgets, they're still spending on those technologies that help them discover the drugs. And so this could that kind of...

Yes. This is now what they're beginning to prioritize more so. And so I think that will bode well, of course, for our timsTOF and NMR tools, but also for the more recently acquired NanoString spatial biology tools and the Beacon type of platform from the old Berkeley Lights Phenomex that we acquired shortly -- also within the last 18 months, which is not only good for better antibody development, which is where it was used for during the pandemic, but really also very much for clonal selection in stable cell lines for cell and gene therapy. Some of the fast growth areas beyond biologics into cell and gene therapy that we Bruker hadn't worked -- didn't really have an entry into. And so that was our entry into that. That's also coming back. So that's all encouraging. That's going to be from a significant headwinds to a moderate tailwind this year. But by being in the right part, I think we're getting a bigger part of that, rising tide tailwinds, whatever the metaphor is.

Got you. And then lastly here was in the last couple of minutes, when you think about the heading into the year as well, on your guide, how much has been -- how conservative have you been on the China piece? So update us on China. The stimulus activity. You guys have already seen a couple of orders there. Has that continued to pick up? That was kind of where you were being conservative, where it could offset some of those academic headwinds. So give us an update on the China side.

Yes. I think it's going to be a bigger wave, and it's going to be a longer wave, so timing and amounts. I'm -- so our CALID Group President, Juergen Srega, had just spent extensive amounts of time in Asia Pacific. And of course, in China, we had a Shanghai innovation Day with a lot of people from Shanghai and biopharma, but really also from all over China participating by virtually and with distributors. So he was amazed of how many groups are convinced that they now have all the authorizations. Apparently, one gets a red stamp, once you're authorized by your department, would buy your school or buy your university and then you kind of have a shovel-ready project, all you're waiting for now is the money. So there were many large projects, many of them specking in leading edge instrumentation from Bruker and some others, right? But big ticket items, leading sometimes even bleeding edge, sometimes they want us to quote stuff that we're only releasing at ASMS or at HUPO, but they say, hey, you're not delivering to late this year or next year, quote it anyway because I want the latest and greatest that all supports our thesis. Last week, the NPC authorized a second batch of funding for a second year of funding all of that, which was 30% higher so that this is now a 2-year program, probably much larger volume, but also, I don't think that the orders are all coming in, in Q1 and Q2. Some of those customers said, "I don't know when I get funded, maybe soon, maybe next year, I don't care, but I'll definitely get funded." That was -- so it may be a longer wave, but it may be overall a much bigger wave and a multiyear wave, which quite honestly, for running a life science tools company is a better way to do it. It also means that for this year, I've got a very conservative amount built in, that one will hit no matter what. I think -- I have very little doubt about that. There could be some upside this year and more of the upside might be coming in '26 and '27. And probably pretty good margins because these are leading edge instrumentation where there's nothing comparable.

Got you. That's all the time. Thank you.

Thank you very much.