Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. (CRL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everybody. It seems like the morning is flying by. I'm Dave Windley with Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research. I'm based in the States, actually in Nashville, Tennessee. I cover CROs for Jefferies and I passed my 25th year of doing that for Jefferies this year. So I have hair, but it's all gray. We're very pleased to have again Charles River Laboratories here with us and Birgit Girshick, the company's COO. Thank you, and Todd Spencer is lead IR in the audience with us as well. But Birgit, thank you for being with us.

Thank you.

We've done a triple header with Charles River this year. We went to one of their important sites yesterday and a breakfast this morning. And so Birgit is definitely tired of me already.

But we'll -- let's start off just with a discussion of the demand environment. I think that's been topical. The bookings, softness in biotech that you saw through the summer and how you're seeing that kind of accelerate, I should say, bookings, RFPs, request for quote, but how you're seeing that progress as you move out of the summer and into the fall and winter?

Yes, certainly, happy to. So in our earnings call, we discussed what we're seeing in forward-looking KPIs as well as backward-looking KPIs really. So we discussed what we have seen in Q3 which was kind of a little bit of a mixed bag still. So we announced our net book-to-bill to be at 0.82x, flat from Q2. We also indicated that was -- it was mainly driven by biotech being a little bit -- had a little low in Q3. But what we've been seeing is improving bookings in biotech over the last few months. So going from a low in the summertime with improving month-over-month bookings, which is a positive indicator for us. We also have seen good proposal volume, both in our biotech segments, in our global segments, which gives us a lot of confidence in the future and into the upcoming quarters. With the book-to-bill is -- there's actually 2 factors to it. So there's the actual net book-to-bill, which is still not quite over 1x, but we are also looking at how quickly work is being booked, which has accelerated for us in the last few quarters. So we often see work being booked in the same quarter or the next quarter, which certainly helps our top line. So a little bit of good news story here with some mixed indicators like the net book-to-bill. We are seeing pharma being a lot more stable for us and biotech improving. So looking forward to hopefully more stable net book-to-bill in the future. But at this stage, that's where we are.

Got it. Very helpful. Within that, consistent with attracting the business, pricing discussions have touched on using pricing strategically, trying to defend or gain share. I think pricing, discounting was a little more aggressive in the market generally and maybe for Charles River included earlier in the year. Maybe discuss the progression of that. And should we think about the pricing in the backlog that we'll see in revenue in the near term as being better than, worse than? Is there a pricing factor that we should be thinking about in the near term?

Yes. Maybe let me touch on competition here for a second first. So Charles River in the Safety Assessment market holds about 30% market share. That's our estimate. Our next largest competitor is about half the capacity than Charles River has. And then the competitors after that are considerably smaller. So Charles River is known to compete based on regulatory compliance, our client centricity, our strengths of our portfolio. We are definitely the market leader in specialties and providing consistent and high-level quality to our clients. In a market where demand is a little bit softer than we all would like to, many of our competitors are using price discounts to buy themselves better capacity utilization. During a time like this, we will strategically use price to maintain market share, to gain new clients and to win work that we really, really want, like some of the specialty work as a follow-on work of like a 4-week study. So in 2023, 2024, we saw quite a bit of a shuffling going on with pricing. Since then, what we have been seeing is really a stable price -- stable spot price. So if you think about it this way, the discount hasn't gotten worse, but pricing also haven't gotten much better since then. But we are in a stable environment for that. And if you look at our quarters over the last 3 quarters, we've actually seen a price/mix ratio. So we're always looking at price and mix together that has been actually a tailwind for Charles River. So we are not seeing a headwind from price, particularly in our Safety Assessment business. All our other businesses are getting price as well. So that's also good news. Going forward, we don't see any indicators that this needs to necessarily change. So not looking at headwinds from pricing per se.

Okay. Within DSA, Discovery is a relatively smaller -- quite a smaller part of that business. I think logically, maybe an area for clients that can be sacrificed in the short run when budgets are tight. And so that has been softer for some time. How is that environment stabilizing or not?

Yes, certainly happy to touch on that. So our Discovery business is a relatively small part of our company. So it's actually -- it's 10% of our DSA segment, just to size that. Dave, you're right. So Discovery in a time when biotech funding is hard to come by is -- has been quite soft for us. And we're -- even so we are in a niche play for our discovery services, where we work with biotech clients mostly that don't have the internal capacity to run studies themselves. We have seen certainly the need for Discovery services decline over time. We do believe that this will rebound with the better biotech funding. And we do think that many of our services are required in that space for clients to get actually into -- towards the toxicology services. And so therefore, we should see some uptick in that. And we will certainly continue to refine our portfolio to make sure that we have the most competitive portfolio available for the company.

Got it. And then remind me from a sales go-to-market and strategy standpoint, I think some years ago, you went to a combined DSA sales force. So how does the sales force adjust to that demand environment? And how much is -- I think the answer is small, but how much is Safety Assessment dependent on pull-through from Discovery -- your capture of clients at the Discovery stage?

Yes. Let me start with the second question here. So because of the size of our Discovery services, the need for pull-through and even the pull-through from Discovery into Safety Assessment is relatively minimal in our sales strategy. The way we look at it is that we provide a portfolio to our clients that will maximize the -- for us to be able to get a share of the wallet of the client. So a lot of times, we actually start working with them in Safety Assessment. And then because of the reputation, the quality, the service we provide to clients, they actually backwards integrate and give us some Discovery services. So rather than starting necessarily with a very early stage and it goes into Safety Assessment, our clients are picking and choosing throughout the portfolio and not just in DSA, but also in manufacturing and RMS, where they want to enter with us and what the work they want to do. So everything we look at -- the way we look at our services and products is how can we maximize the share of the wallet. So that said, about a year ago, we decided that it would be more synergistic for us to operationally and from a go-to-market perspective, run our DSA business holistically as one DSA. That allows us to utilize scientists, leadership, sites and our sales organization and marketing organization better and more holistically. And particularly for small clients there, we're touching on a lot of times the same contact or at least the overall same decision-maker in an organization. So for our sales reps to go into a client, and have this holistic discussion, not just a point-in-time discussion or point of service discussion is helpful to create that synergistic buying pattern. And so this is why we went there and did that. So that's about a year in now. I think it helps us to understand the client better and in some cases, helps the client to understand our portfolio better.

Thank you for that. That confirms what I had thought you had done. So thank you. Let's talk about China as it relates to this. So first of all, you do have some lower-cost competitors to your DSA business in China. And then I want to get to the growing licensing activity by Western Pharma out of China. So talk about how kind of that competitive interplay with China preclinical CROs.

Yes, certainly. So China is actually a story of a few different legs for us. So I'll start actually with the in-licensing of programs from China by many of the larger companies here in the U.S. and Europe. So about 30% of all the programs are now in-licensed from China. This is something that we are watching very closely out of 2 reasons. Number one, most of that work is already done in China, the preclinical work and often the clinical work. So by the time it's in-licensed by one of our clients, the need for preclinical work is minimal. Sometimes they will redo a study. Sometimes there is post-IND work that still needs to be done. Sometimes it's just some pushback from a regulatory agency. But generally, the touch from us for Charles River on this work is minimal. So obviously, we -- that's one reason we continue to watch it. Second reason is just the impact on biotech in general. How will this impact the funding, the studies that are being run in the U.S. by biotech companies, which programs will they do versus what comes out of China. So definitely a concern of ours. The other area that we are watching with China is particularly drug discovery going to China. So that's a trend that has happened now for a few years. A lot of the chemistry work is done in China. Some of the biology work is now done also in China. So there are some really good providers. You might remember one of the acquisitions we were trying to do with WuXi. So now basically one of our main competitors in China is there. This is a train that seems to have left the station a little bit. So obviously, we'll continue to see what other services they will take market share from. Regulatory work is still very, very infrequent. But certainly something we will be watching. And then thirdly, the market that is China for China. That is an area that is of interest to us. Obviously, a market that we are not playing in a lot right now. We have some RMS products and services in China. And -- but we are looking to see if, when and how we will expand our services portfolio there.

So the -- that expansion, I wanted to make sure we got to. And I think of the -- in China for China being more of the low-cost development work for products to be commercialized in China and perhaps in China only as distinct from global pharmaceutical companies wanting to develop at GLP standards to commercialize ex China or globally, is your interest in both?

The interest is in both, but the market there is quite split. So there's players that are servicing outsourced work from Western countries into China. And there's players that are primarily servicing the China for China. So at this point, we're learning more about the Chinese market -- the Chinese players. And that's why I said if, when and how, we need to learn a lot more of the market, the right timing. We're certainly watching the geopolitical pressures that are going on as well. And so there will be quite a bit more information gathered before we do anything there.

Got it. So let's transition to RMS. You had some benefit in the third quarter from NHP shipments and the timing of those pulled from third quarter to fourth quarter. Maybe using that as a step off, where is the NHP market today in terms of quantity of use, price stability, sourcing, all that fun stuff?

Yes. Happy to talk about it. So for RMS specifically, what we talked about was an NHP shipment that we had planned for in Q4 that was pulled forward into Q3. So the full year guidance was still accurate, but the timing between the 2 quarters just shifted. So just see it as a shift as of such. Maybe as a background, so the nonhuman primates are being used in our Safety Assessment DSA segment on studies, but we also have nonhuman primates from farms that we own that are sold in the open market, both in China as well as in Mauritius. In China, we're doing that because we don't have any activities in China right now and can't get the animals exported. And then in Mauritius, when we took ownership of the Noveprim supply source, there was contract in place, and we are honoring those contracts with sale directly to a customer here in the United States. So that said, the supply chain of nonhuman primates, I would call as stable. We have done considerable amount of finding new suppliers, firming up new suppliers, finding different sources of supply, but also firming up how we oversee those farms. And we feel that we are in a pretty good state right now, and we'll have enough nonhuman primates going forward for the upcoming years. Maybe also good news. We closed out the DOJ and SEC investigations in the past few months. SEC actually just announced that this week with no indication that there was any concerns about the animals. So we are really happy about that. And with that, took the opportunity to just implement a lot of improvements such as genetic testing and expanded audit programs, expanded oversight of the farms. So overall, we're really feeling good about that.

Got it. So you mentioned with the Noveprim contracts, you're honoring external clients. I think in our previous meetings, you had said that one of those, you have kind of a step function increase in your access at the end of '26, gradual increase and then a fairly significant increase in the end of '26. Maybe walk us through that. And like how many customers is Noveprim servicing that will kind of expire over the next couple of years?

Yes. So what we're talking here is really about one major client. We have some other spot sales from Mauritius when we don't need the full amount, but they don't make out a quantity that we should even size here. So there is a step down after 2026, at which point we can use the animals on our own safety studies if we need to and then a more gradual decrease over another few more years. We bought the Noveprim farm primarily for having supply for our own safety studies. And so this is giving us additional supply for doing that. I should maybe point out that the -- there's 2 major supplies in nonhuman primates. One is from Mauritius and one is an Asian supply. They're genetically different. So we will always have 2 different sources at minimum, Mauritius and another Asian source to make sure that we have the right animal for our clients. So -- but that is why we were diversifying and that is why we are maintaining different source farms here.

Yes. When you have greater access to internal owned vertically integrated supply, how does that change your cost structure -- for those studies?

It certainly does change the cost structure from our -- on studies from -- for our DSA segment. That's also one reason why we're doing that. What it does take away is the external sales. So there's a little bit of a wash in there, but it will make us more competitive for safety assessment studies, allows us to be a little bit more flexible in our cost structure and with our pricing. So it's definitely a competitive advantage. However, I would stress that the availability of animals and having the steady supply is the biggest competitive advantage we have.

Okay. Let's transition to the small animal part of the business. It sounds like Europe and China have held up relatively well. North America has been the area where volume has been a little soft compare and contrast the regions for us on small on [indiscernible] ?

Sure. Happy to. So when you look at the different markets, what we're really looking at here is a different client segment. So in the U.S., we have seen a heavier volume decline in research models than we actually expected, and that was driven by the biotech segment. And if you think about Europe and China just has different dynamics in biotech and different funding opportunities in biotech. Just like with our Safety Assessment organization, we believe that when biotech funding stabilizes and the demand comes back, we will also see the research models volumes to come back equally as strong as with the Safety Assessment. That said, it's important to note that research models volumes have come down year-over-year for decades, and that is because of our 3R programs, so using fewer animals on studies. And generally, we have enough pricing power in this business to offset any volume declines. When we talked here about the impact on the North American market, here, we were not able to use price enough to offset the volume.

Let's skip forward to a couple of topics here in the last 1.5 minutes or so. With the third quarter and with a little bit of an update on the strategic review, the company also added to your longer-term cost saving initiatives, $70 million. What are the sources of those $70 million? What levers are you pulling to be able to top that up?

Yes. So you should look at the sources very similar to the initial cost savings that we announced. So we announced about $225 million cumulative annualized cost savings with some carryover that is still going into '26, an additional $70 million that we will annualize cost savings into '26 as well. Those are everything from some site consolidations, putting efficiencies in our G&A is a big focus area, some outsourcing of maintenance activities in our facilities. There's always, always going to be some procurement initiatives. And then really looking at how we operate in our businesses, particularly in our safety business, digital savings, automation, putting efficiencies in place. So this will be an ongoing initiative. And with that, we should be able to protect or improve margin.

Okay. So protect or improve. Still -- you're not guiding yet, so still to be seen on that, but -- but either of those could be on the table.

That's what we're trying to do.

Okay. Maybe a last -- yes, so getting close on time, I know. In terms of deployment, you talked about proceeds from the strategic review. You have relatively low leverage. I think you talked about repurchases on the table, but then also maybe some acquisitions. Where would those acquisition targets be?

So we have a clear strategic road map for acquisitions. And what we are looking here is areas that are core to our business that will help us to get a bigger share of the wallet for our clients. There are a few different areas that we are very interested in. Some of -- are in the bioanalytical area. So we do a lot of that work already, but we would like to expand our capacity and our outreach in this space. We already talked about China being a potential there. Obviously, it has to be seen. And then there are some ancillary other areas such as potential NAMs opportunities that we will look at.

Okay. That's great. Nice efficient answer. I appreciate that. I appreciate the audience's attention and enjoy the conference.

Thank you.