Eurofins Scientific SE (ERF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome, and thank you for joining Eurofins' H1 2021 Results Call. Please note that this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] During this call, Eurofins management may make forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements with respect to outlook and their underlying assumptions. Management will also discuss alternative performance measures such as organic growth and EBITDA, which are defined in the footnotes of our press release. Actual results may differ materially from objectives discussed. Risks and uncertainties that may affect Eurofins' future results include, but are not limited to, those described in the Risk Factors section of the Eurofins annual report. Please also read the disclaimer on Page 2 of this presentation, subject to which this call and Q&A session are made. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dr. Gilles Martin, Eurofins' Founder and CEO. Please go ahead, Gilles. Thank you.

Thank you, Guy. Hello, everybody, and thanks a lot for joining our quarterly call or half year call. We will go to Slide 5. And I'm very pleased to present, again, excellent results. I'm very honored to lead an organization that counts so many passionate and talented scientists and entrepreneurs and give me the privilege to report over and over again on excellent results. This is due to the hard work of our teams, but also on our focus since 32 years on -- for you, our shareholders, we have been building a group of laboratories, which are focused on testing for life. We've been always convinced that testing is one of the most cost effective means to make sure we live healthy and protected lives. It's much better to test than do any other measures to prevent risk, to detect contamination, prevent contamination of the environment, of food, make sure pharmaceutical products are safe. And as we saw in the pandemic, clinical diagnostics have an impact on 70% of medical decisions. 4% spend for the health care budget represent -- is used in 70% of the medical decisions. So we see the impact of testing. And we have been patiently building a group that is exclusively focused on testing. And we could be testing vehicles. We could be testing a lot of products. But actually, we focus on the testing areas that have the biggest impact on our health and on life. So that's Eurofins. We were mostly doing testing business-to-business for large companies, large food companies, large pharma companies. More and more, we are also testing for consumers. Clinical diagnostics is, of course, testing for patients. You see here one of our buses. We have set up a lot of COVID testing stations around the world, also for events, for travel, for cruise lines. This is a mobile station that we can move around to carry out testing whenever there is a spot need. At a company here, it's the station, the main station in Brussels. I will go to Page 6, please. So I'm really happy that our company did extremely well, or the companies of our group did extremely well in the first half of 2021. Laurent will say a few words about that. Maybe one comment in passing, I thank all of you who are analysts to -- who got up very early this morning to write notes. Thank you again for all the work you put in covering our company. If it's any comfort, our teams were working late at night -- last night to make sure they were ready. Well, thank you very much for all your efforts. I note that sometimes, you refer to the consensus. We don't talk too much about the consensus because sometimes, we wonder about the composition of the consensus. We've noted, and it's kind of funny, that sometimes the worst bears, those who still have share price targets for Eurofins in the 50s, put the highest numbers in the consensus. And sometimes, they put even higher number a couple of days before the result presentation. So anyway, that's why we don't really talk about it. And -- but I think in all respect, the results in the first half of 2021 exceeded our own expectations, as we had set our objectives at the beginning of the year and exceeded most of your own target. So we're very pleased. We'll go to the next page, Page 7. And I think those results are excellent on all levels. Overall, our total results have set a record. But what is most pleasing is that our core business, the business of testing pharmaceutical products, testing food, testing the environment and also the routine clinical testing, which is not related with COVID, has really recovered strongly in the first half of this year and especially in the second quarter. And the outlook is very, very good. We see a very strong need for our services. In many areas, we're only limited by our ability to build labs fast enough, to recruit teams fast enough, to commission equipment fast enough. So the -- I couldn't say that pandemic is behind us. It's not fully true. We still have areas that are affected or our environmental business in North America still was affected by difficulties to sample in the first half, also by the weather. But overall, things are starting to really recover. And the things that are still affected, we are very positive that they should recover in the next few quarters. And actually, we are exceeding the organic growth targets that we had for our core business. And so I think it's partly due to all the investments we made over the last few years to build a very modern state-of-the-art laboratory network. It's due to our markets, which have seen a lot of funding. The pharma industry has seen a lot of funding, biopharma. But also, we have -- we see strong growth in environmental testing in many countries due to new regulations we see -- and our innovation. We see a strong growth in food testing. The thing is we have been always investing heavily in innovation. We have research team all over the world who develop new tests. It's not only in COVID that we have developed dozens of new tests, but also in our environmental business, in our food business. And we're getting good at spreading those innovations around the world. Something we develop in one country, we have teams that transfer this capability to our labs all around the world and enable us to be ahead of competition. We'll talk about the innovations we've done in our transplant testing business, which are really outstanding and make me very proud of the new possibilities we can bring to patients to extend the life of their grafts. One thing we provided this quarter and this half year is a comparison to 2019. I think we -- many companies have seen a dip in revenues in the first half of '20, and some of that is recovered and then there is growth. So we thought it was better to, in addition, provide these numbers compared to the pre-pandemic period for the first half of 2019. And here, we see really that our company basically went through the pandemic while continuing to grow at more than 5% per annum. We'll go to Page 8. I'll spend a bit of time on organic growth because we've been criticized over the last couple of years by some analysts, I think very few that are here today, but still, and they put into question that aspect. And so we're going to talk about it a bit. So we put a slide and we put some other companies we are sometimes compared with. I think we are more comparable to a pharma CRO than to a TIC company. The balance of our business is more shifted towards life science by far. And clinical and pharma make significantly more than 50% of our revenues. But since a lot of the analysts compare us to TICS companies, we've provided you some data of comparison. And as we can see, in the first half of 2020, we -- our core business, this is data for our core business, it showed a dip, but it's much less than the other TICS companies, which shows our focus on testing for life makes us more resilient. And our rebound in the first half of this year was also much stronger than others. And if we compound both, we see we're at 13% compared to 2019, while on average, the TIC industry is just recovering its 2019 levels. So we are way beyond in just recovering 2019. And actually, we've grown over the period at more than the 5% per annum objective that we had set for ourselves. And if we move to the next slide, please. We've looked at this topic of organic growth over a longer period. There has been some voices in the analyst community that disputed our organic growth. We said organic growth is due to the fact that we've acquired a lot of companies. We brought some growth or whatever arguments, which we didn't really understood and we tried to explain and provide data to prove it to us in true. And in our experience, when we make acquisitions, we spend time to integrate, to move sites, and that has a negative impact on organic growth, not a positive impact. But nonetheless, on the slide here, you see a comparison of Eurofins organic growth in blue and the organic growth of the 3 main TICS companies each year between 2010 in the left. Again, in the middle, the comparison over the last 2 years, 2020 and H1 2021. And to the right, over 5 years period. And what's interesting to see is that the fact that we did acquisition has no impact on no acquisition, because in the last couple of years, we've done very little acquisition, has no impact on the organic growth of our core business. It's close to 6% anyway. And what we can also see on the last bar to the right on Page 9 is that our organic growth on a sustained period, the last 5 years, has been significantly about 2.5x the growth of other TICS companies. So that, I think, should close the debate about organic growth. And of course, we're happy to answer your questions on that topic. And we will move to Page 10 on some key operational highlights. So Eurofins has been very active on many fronts. Of course, on the -- aside from the core business, we've been helping many governments around the world to create the capacity for a very fast turnaround time COVID testing, PCR testing mostly, but also antigen rapid testing, also antibodies testing to see if people have been infected. And we also have a test that on a single drop of blood from a finger prick can tell if someone has antibodies either from past infection or from vaccination. And by the way, this might become a very interesting topic. We'll talk about it in a minute. The most important thing is that in spite of the pandemic, we continued to do our homework. We continued to build our network. Our industry is in an extremely innovative area, but it manages a huge amount of data. So what's going to be on the long term, the main competitive factor is how digital companies are. And since 10 years, Eurofins has been investing millions, hundreds of millions of euros in developing digital applications to run all our businesses. And we've continued to make progress. We will continue over the next few years, of course. And that will provide at some point, we believe, an almost unsurmountable competitive advantage. And that's something we're going to be working on. On building labs, we've done very well. We continue to invest in labs. And by doing that, we also have more modern buildings that will contribute over the next 5 years to our objectives to reduce our carbon footprint. Building new buildings enable us to incorporate the latest technologies to conserve energy. On the M&A front, we're staying at a very modest level. Although now that our leverage is back to a very, I would say, a very normal or low level, we could do a little more. We have a strong pipeline, and we are confident that we will achieve our objective of adding over EUR 150 million of revenues from acquisition this year while doing this at a reasonable multiple. We will see the multiples that are going on in the markets and what -- sometimes some of our peers are paying 18x EBITDA and more. And so we are selective. We do acquisitions where we think they would add value in the long term and not simply to be bigger. I will now ask Laurent to say a few words about our results or financial results.

Thank you, Gilles. Good afternoon, everyone. It's my pleasure to walk you through our financial results for the first half of 2021. Moving to Slide 12. You can see a summary of our first semester results. First, with very strong revenue growth of 41% year-on-year, which enable us to reach the mark of EUR 3,272 million, which I will detail a bit later in the deck. From this very strong revenue base, we generated a record adjusted EBITDA for the first time, over EUR 1 billion, 2x what it was for the same period last year and with also a record margin at 30% and 80 basis points. This also followed through as we -- you can see a very strong drop-through to the net profit. Despite one-off refinancing costs, we were able to post a net profit at EUR 450 million, 4x what they were for the same period last year. And this also concluded into a record earnings per share at EUR 2.17 for the period. Moving to Slide 13 for the revenue bridge. As you will note, we had almost no impact from M&As, and we had also to fight a negative FX headwind of 3.3%. But still, we were able to generate a very strong growth of 41% year-on-year, which is coming from mostly 2 components, the 2 big blue bars in the chart: one, which is the COVID revenues, which was close to EUR 750 million for this semester; but also and even more importantly, the strong core business growth. You will note that we had record organic growth, 17% year-on-year, which even when we compare it to the year before was still at double-digit level at 13% growth. We have now largely caught up with what we estimate we had missed from the travel restrictions in terms of revenues for the full year of 2020. And on top of this missing revenues, which we estimated at EUR 250 million, we still grew by more than 5% organic growth. Now moving to Slide 14, where I will walk you through our cash flow. Our record EBITDA of EUR 989 million converted into record free cash flow of EUR 489 million, which is plus 55% year-on-year despite very unfavorable comparatives. I will give you a bit more details on the net working capital, which was artificially reduced through support measures by some governments in 2020. And you will also see that our CapEx was abnormally low last year as we were into a CapEx freeze for the second quarter of the first period last year. But we are now -- and the cap expense is in line with our full year objective. You will also note at the bottom of the chart that we have reduced our cash by EUR 272 million to repay some of our debt instruments and lower our leverage to 1 turn. Now moving to Slide 15 on net working capital. So as I mentioned it last year, our net working capital was artificially reduced by support measures. Aside from this onetime effect, you will note that our DSOs and DPOs are largely stable. And our inventory level is also quite stable year-on-year, though it's a bit higher due to the COVID fight versus pre-pandemic times. And now to conclude, moving to Slide 16, on leverage and debt profile. This very strong cash generation that we had last year and for the first semester of this year enabled us to do quite a few notable actions. First, we were able to reduce our debt, EUR 500 million gross debt and EUR 230 million net debt. We were also able to reduce our leverage from 2.5 turns last year at the same time to 1.6 turns at the end of last year and to 1.0 turn at the end of this semester. We were also able to refinance our senior debt with a much cheaper and long-term instruments. And we will enjoy from the second half of this year a finance cost below 1.8%. And we were also able to confirm a second investment-grade rating after the one received from Moody's last year by Fitch this year. So overall, we ended this first half with a very strong balance sheet structure. And I'm now turning back the mic to Gilles for the operational review.

Thank you very much, Laurent. So when we started talking to some of you 5 years ago, we said we're embarking on a big investment program 2005 -- 2015 to 2020, spending lots of money to build a true global group. And our commitment to you, our investors, was to deliver a mature company, a true global leader. And this encompassed investments in all directions, including in building our back office and building our corporate governance, in building our disclosures. And I hope you can observe that beyond the financial results, which are outstanding, we also are making progress on all those levels. We have expanded our Board, and we have disclosed much more in our annual report. We have -- we are disclosing a lot more about what we are doing about sustainability. And so I'm pleased to say that after this period of 5 years' investments, Eurofins is becoming a much more mature, large international company. And you are really welcome to share with us the areas where you still would like us to improve and we'll take it into account. Not everything can be learned in a day. But as you can see, we are determined and systematic, and we try to improve steadily on all measures. So in the first quarter, as I mentioned, we -- operationally, we continued to do very well. And as you see also in building large laboratories -- because in our industry, it's all a matter of scale. The type of profit you see we generate, why can we generate so high margins is because we have scale. And of course, COVID testing has higher margins because it's highly scalable. It's just one test, and we've invested massively in robotization, automation. We are the leading company in Europe, but this is the same thing in all our divisions. And that's why we spend so much money in building those large labs. Because when you have high volumes, you can make testing very efficient and have a very good drop-through. So this is what we've been doing since pretty much 10 years, and we continue to do that. But I'm really looking forward to hosting Investor Day again, so you can see where your money went and the type of infrastructure that Eurofins has built and that is now covering an increasingly large percent of the whole group. We'll move to the next page. One topic, which we talked about a bit and was a bit obscured by COVID is why are we in clinical diagnostics. So frankly, we've been observing the clinical diagnostics field for the best part of 20 years. And for a long, long time, we decided not to go in human clinical diagnostics because, frankly, most clinical labs simply buy reagents from large clinical IVD suppliers like Roche or Abbott, and they run routine test in their labs. They don't really innovate. However, Eurofins turns out to be the second largest provider of genetic probes in the world or something of that nature or in the very top. And we saw in the -- since about 2010 a big increase of new applications of genetic and genomic testing that involve the type of probes we are using. And overall, a huge amount of new tests have become and will become possible using genetic and genomic testing. And those tests can have a big positive impact for patients in detecting illnesses earlier. And if you detect illnesses earlier before they become too acute, something can still be done about it. And of course, in terms of oncology treatment, knowing exactly the type of the tumor enables to target the treatment, and I will talk more about that over the years to come. So we decided in 2012 to invest in clinical diagnostics, not to become another lab corp like Quest or SYNLAB, but to become one of the best specialists of advanced esoteric testing, developing new tests that brings very significant medical benefits to patients compared to existing tests. And what we did in addition is build a global network of labs so that we can deploy those tests very fast internationally. The same thing we do in food and environmental testing or pharma testing, we develop a test in America, and then within 6 to 12 months, we can provide exactly the same test with the same quality assurance to our clients in Asia and Europe, in Latin America, et cetera. This is what we intend to do in clinical diagnostic, not to be the biggest, but to be one of the most innovative worldwide and deploy worldwide the best tests. And of course, this served us when the COVID crisis hit because we were not fully developed with our network of labs, but we had started. And that enabled us to test COVID not only in Europe, not only in many countries of Europe, but also in North America, in Latin America, in Asia, in the Middle East. And to share the method, we even produce our own reagents, and that has enabled us also to rotate capacity. When the wave hit one country, all the labs in that country were overwhelmed, where we could use the capacity we had in another country to help the public health authorities in that country. Well, one example of what we want to do with clinical diagnostics is on this Page 19. This small company, Transplant Genomics, our first acquisition in clinical diagnostics was Viracor that we did in 2014. Viracor is one of the best infectious disease testing laboratories in North America, has a stellar reputation for that, had a strong focus in providing this type of testing to help transplant hospitals, keep patients and their grafts alive for as long as possible. And we have been developing our own circulating DNA test to detect rejection. We were able to acquire a small company called TGI, Transplant Genomics, which also had developed a test that was even better than the test we had in our development labs, because it can detect silent rejection before there are a detectable impact, so we had the best time to stop it by adjusting, for example, the immunosuppression. And of course, we have been a bit hurt by the COVID situation because hospitals were busy with other things. So they were not able to spend time on changing their protocols, for following patients and other companies where -- which had weaker test in our opinion, where -- had been earlier in trying to put their test in the protocol. But anyway, this half year has been very good. We launched now the second test, TRAC, which is focused on acute rejection. So now we have a portfolio that can do acute and subacute rejection. And we also have a range of other assays that support transplant hospitals. And we have been starting to ramp again the communication with doctors and nephrologists and transplant centers and doing even more investments in the clinical trials because there are other medical benefits that are not yet supported by clinical trials that we can show with our test. And we're quite bullish about this little company. You see we have a quarter-on-quarter growth of more than 40% year-on-year. It's incredible numbers. So the total numbers are still very small, the company is still losing a lot of money, but we are quite encouraged by this -- the development of this type of test. And of course, the U.S. is leading the world in this innovation, although China is not far behind or sometimes ahead in some areas. But the same need are -- exists all over the world. And therefore, once those tests will become more established in North America, we think they have a very important potential worldwide. So this is something we intend to continue in other areas of clinical diagnostics. We already do it in noninvasive prenatal testing, but we are now investing more heavily in oncology, for example. On the next page, Page 20, we'll talk a bit about what we do in COVID. You see many things. We had several announcements during this half year. We were very happy to have been selected by the U.S. government, the Department of Health and Human Services to provide very large numbers of COVID testing to underserved population in -- especially K-8 schools and the public that have difficulty to access test, we'll be able to provide those tests free of charge because they are covered by the U.S. government. And as we hear now that unfortunately, the Delta variant is spreading in some part of the United States, we hope to be able to contribute in letting people know that they have infections, so won't infect other people. This is just one example, but we have a very small clinical diagnostic network in North America. And we won the largest contract for this type of testing, which shows we're starting to get some recognition for the quality of our work. And one of the reasons we got that contract is because we had developed a very innovative pooling testing and the associated IT to make it happen, so we can offer those tests also very cost effectively to the U.S. government. Another interesting thing is what will happen now because people are vaccinated, but you have all heard that unfortunately, the last studies from Israel and the U.K. are showing that the immunity provided by the vaccine in some patients, it's not clearly known if in all patients, can reduce over time. So the question will be at what point do people need to be vaccinated again with what vaccination. So the focus might shift in following the immune status of people and deciding what to do with further vaccination or not. And therefore, we have developed a range of antibodies tests, as I mentioned, to detect the level of antibodies. But also the other aspect of immunity is T cell immunity, which plays a big role. And again, Viracor was one of the first companies to develop a very good test to monitor that, which can be used for clinical trials, obviously, as we do now for many clients that are developing vaccines, but also that could be used for more broad-based population screening. So the virus is unfortunately not gone. And hopefully, we will be able to find our lives -- our normal lives again and travel again and meet again. But there might be a level of monitoring required for quite some time, and we are also getting ready to do that. And of course, we have to watch for reoccurrence of the virus. We were the first to develop very targeted tests that can very quickly detect new variants so that the -- when there is the occurrence of new variants in a region, more measures can be focused on that region. We have a broad range of tests to detect variants in wastewater, which is very good for early warning, and many countries will set up monitoring with that. And again, we are developing our direct-to-consumer approach. So that has several aspects. We got approval for tests that people can carry out themselves while keeping very sensitive PCR test. And the benefits of PCR test and getting a sample in the lab is that you can do a sequencing. If the test is positive -- if you just do an antigen test, it doesn't tell you which variant it is, which is an information that can be very important for authorities to control the pandemic. So getting samples in the lab, even if you do pooling and it's very cheap, enables you to sequence the positives. And now we have tests that are approved by the FDA for self-sampling. We are getting better at selling online. We bought the company DDC this year, which has a lot of experience of direct-to-consumer. We can use that company to scale this offering and learn from their experience in selling direct to consumers. So this is all quite encouraging. Our test has also been cleared to use for children. That's very rare. And unfortunately, as we see now with the Delta variant, the younger part of the population can also get more infected than it used to be the case with the other variants. Next slide, please. I'll just briefly mention that we are continuing to deploy our capabilities to support coming back to work. There are many areas where testing is required. Many countries are doing experiments to reopen events, but it's often associated with testing. We've been supporting many sports federation to continue to hold their events, sometimes with public, by providing on-site testing. We are supporting many airlines, cruise lines, airports, the travel industry to restart. And we've won more than 3,000 contracts to do that, to help employers provide safe working environment. It is, of course, very hard to predict the needs and the duration of needs for this type of testing. But there might be a very long-lasting needs, we hear, because the various prevalence and the type of variants present here, there or in other countries might be different, which may mean that governments will require some level of testing in different areas at different times, but we will see how this evolves. And in the world, there will be various prevalence. And actually, the countries that went for 0 -- for elimination will be slightly more vulnerable as we see now in other countries that had lower virus before are having more virus now. So the fact that we have all those abilities enables us to react to any situation basically and provide a whole range of solutions. Next slide, please. Sustainability. We've always done a lot. We are an enabler of sustainability, helping our clients produce less, control their emissions, control their -- many of the things that they do that could harmful impact on the environment. But we also internally invested a lot to reduce our footprint. And we just didn't talk a lot about it, but we're doing more about that. We are -- we have set ESG targets to all our leaders of our 1,000 businesses and above. And we're going to following that -- been following upon that. We have a very large initiative on equality throughout our group and inclusion. And this is something you will hear more about. And we are committed to increasing our disclosure about all the good things we are doing in this area. And our goal is also to be CO2-neutral by 2025 through a mix of CO2 reduction and carbon credits. And on governance, as I mentioned, we have expanded our Board. Our Board is balanced between men and women. We have 5 independent directors. You now have a lead independent director you can talk to. He happens to have been a partner in PwC. So he can talk to you competently about our accounts and how conservative we are and what we do in this area. And then I will go to Slide 24. So we have raised our objectives for this year by 13% for revenues and 36% for EBITDA. We are not in the business of predicting the future. It's very difficult for everybody. Concerning Eurofins, it's slightly easier for us, as Eurofins, than for you looking from outside. So we try to give you some pointers of what we believe could be a reasonable objective. Usually, we try to err on the side of caution. It doesn't say that -- sometimes we might not miss our objectives. Objectives are no guarantee when nobody knows the future, but we try to set objectives that are realistic and we think we can achieve. And possibly, usually, we exceed those objectives. But you shouldn't be too bullish, of course. But one of the problems of the situation now with the virus is we are dealing with a biological phenomenon. And frankly, nobody in the world can predict how this virus will mutate, where it will mutate and what will be the implications of those mutations. And the other thing that nobody else in the world can predict is how governments will react to that and what measures they will implement that might have an impact on testing. So we try to be conservative. We continue to test a lot for COVID. And so that's why we upgraded our objectives and put an objective of EUR 250 million of COVID testing for the second half. Frankly, if things continue like they are for many more months, we'll be way above that. But nobody knows that. So we -- our duty, we think, to investors is to say something that we think we can achieve. And if we think we can do much more than that with a high degree of certainty, we'll update you on this. We kept our objectives for 2022 and 2023. They are without any COVID, and they are only implying a 5% organic growth. So we hope that potentially we could do better than that. It's just too early to communicate on '22 and '23, especially with all the uncertainties around COVID. But I hope you will understand that. And you're welcome, each of you, as analysts to make your own guess as to how much COVID testing we'll do in the second half. I think it's not so material in the greater scheme of things long term. But we think the objectives we set we should be able to achieve. And as I conclude on Page 25, so I'd like to thank all our teams for working very, very hard in spite of difficult conditions again in those last 6 months and enabled us to provide the best result of our history, the best half year, very strong performance. To be 13% above the pre-pandemic time is really exceptional. There are not so many companies that are able to do that. And to continue a trend of very strong organic growth for what is now in the meantime a relatively large company. We are proud of our contribution to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. While we do that, we've continued to invest massively in our labs, in our IT solutions and to innovate on many levels. We have reduced our indebtedness. So whoever has been worried about the level of debt at Eurofins should be now satisfied that we are very conservative at that level and we intend to stay conservative. And the future looks bright, we think. Our core business is doing extremely well. The outlook and the visibility is very good on our core business. We think we can grow for many years. And there are many exciting things. If you all look at the -- all the publications in the genomics, genetic field, in proteomics, in all the biomarkers are being developed and all the breakthroughs that we see in life science, we are providing the pick and shovel for the pharma industry or some of those to develop the drugs of tomorrow, the vaccines of tomorrow. There will be massive breakthroughs in agriculture, in breeding of animals, in how we fight the environment -- how we fight the global warming, how we protect our environment. We are right in the middle of that. And life science is bringing us new tools that nobody could have dreamt about. You've heard about Cas9. There are many other applications, how we're going to provide -- develop the new enzymes that create new product and chemicals. We have also an activity, microscopy. We're the largest in microscopy that is also helping the semiconductor industry break new ground. So we have an incredible focus on high-growth areas for the future, which makes us very optimistic and little-by-little, we are doing our homework to be worthy of your consideration as a large mature company. And we're not quite there yet, but we are close and we are committed to do what it takes to fulfill your expectations on that. So thank you for your time for this long introduction. And I would now propose that we go to questions and answers. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And we will now take our first question from Andy Grobler of Crédit Suisse.

Can I ask 3 questions, please? First one on margins, margin progression in the first half was very strong indeed. Could you talk us through whether you saw an improvement in both the core and the COVID margins? And in the light of that performance, does the margin embedded within your objectives for the next couple of years look a bit conservative? Secondly, just on the balance sheet, given how far you've moved in the past 2 or 3 years, do you get to a point where you have to start thinking about use of excess cash over the next couple of years or not? And then thirdly and a bit more niche, you talked earlier about the kidney transplant market in the U.S. and the progress you're making. Pre-pandemic, that market has been estimated at a couple of billion dollars. Do you think that's still kind of the right kind of ballpark for market opportunity? And how much of that can you access in the next few years?

Thank you very much. Yes, you're right. Well, we've had margin progression on both segments. The segments, the parts -- our core business and COVID. In COVID, we have higher margins than in our core testing business. And the reason is it's just one test that we can highly automate. So it's easier than when you test a food sample with 50 different tests. We're making progress in our core business, but our core business is a big mix of lots of things. So we have big labs that are highly productive and make 30% or 40% or 50% EBITDA margins. And we have a lot of labs, which are smaller, which are competing to become market leader in the local markets. So we have a range of margin. And that's why it will take time to get massive margin uplift in our core business. I think we have set an objective of 23% or 23.5% EBITDA for 2023 or something like that. And I think we'd like to stick to that for now because we need to have room to really take share and build enough start-up, build capacity. It's -- on the long run, as more of our labs become large and mature, there's potentially more there. But we would caution you in expecting that too fast, and we still have to deliver that. But we are optimistic about the margin progression also in our core business step-by-step over the next 5 or 10 years. Balance sheet, again, we have to see what's ahead of us. We have a lot of organic opportunities. We might not need so much cash. We might have some acquisition opportunities at the right multiple. And we also have some hybrid that we could retire at some point. So we'll -- we haven't decided on that. And we should not think about how we're going to cook a bird before we killed it. So let's go step-by-step and first deliver the cash. And the kidney market, yes, we think the market could grow. It's -- and that's only the U.S. market, and it depends highly on the reimbursement level. We have a couple of competitors, which basically have been publicly listed, single focus, making huge losses and spending a lot in publicity and market access. We continue to be convinced that our tests provide much better data to doctors and patients and, that ultimately, our test will prevail on their merit, on their benefits for patients. We need to make it more known. It will take a bit of time. And we -- rather than publicity and more salespeople, we intend to make it known by better publications and clinical data. So we hope to capture a large part of that market over time. But it's not going to be an immediate thing because we are fighting also some time with companies which make claims that we say we dispute to some extent on the capabilities of their tests versus what they really bring. So it's going to take a few quarters or maybe a couple of years to know exactly which part of that market we can capture and when. But we are quite bullish about the potential of this little company. And overall, we are very strong in the kidney transplant space. We are expanding our network of laboratories that support the organ procurement organization. So we have very deep connection in this whole area of health care. And we think over time, this is a solution that will prevail rather than outlandish claims and publicity, but time will tell.

We'll take our next question from Will Kirkness of Jefferies.

I had a couple, please. Firstly, just on the core business and looking at the first half versus 2019. It looks like perhaps second quarter was a little bit -- the rate of growth is a little bit lower in the first quarter and maybe that slowed slightly through the second quarter, but my math could be out on that. So if you can help there, that would be great. The second thing just around SAFER@WORK. I think in Q1, you said there was about -- you secured about EUR 550 million of revenues. I just wondered what that number looks like now and how that sort of flows through. And I guess, as for the last question, sorry, just regarding how you see sort of shape of demand in U.S. and Europe and particularly if we see any changes in the demand profile from reimbursement mechanisms related to the COVID testing.

Yes, it's really nice to work with you all because you're all very smart and looking at the slightest comment or a slightest change of tone and interpreting it. So I saw some of you noting that we said that for the first 4 months or something, above 13% and close to 13%, and you're interpreting that. We have to say that we're talking of sometimes 1 month, April, we have effects of working days that might influence this or that or 1 month is maybe slightly off by some reason because of when Easter is or not. So I think what we can say between Q1 and Q2 is we have strong growth in both cases. We also have the correction for the cyberattack of June 2019, which is a correction. And we think we have recovered all that. The question is whether we really did or not. So overall, I would not over-interpret those differences. If I consider that, we have not done the correction, the slightly positive correction for working days that we will have on the full year -- on the full half year. So that's your first question. Then SAFER@WORK, yes. Well, SAFER@WORK, we do have a huge amount of bookings. And we include in that the contract we have with the U.S. government to support the K-8 schools. It's a very large amount. What is unknown is how we're going to burn this booking. Because obviously, nobody is going to get tested if they don't need or don't want to get tested. And we prefer to err on the side of caution into how much of that will be consumed. Also, a lot is around travel. The restrictions on travel are very hard to predict. You had the U.K. that overnight put France on basically no travel zone, amber plus. So nobody could really travel to France. Otherwise, they would have to go on quarantine when they return to the U.K. Apparently, this will be lifted from Sunday. And it's just a small example to highlight the difficulty of planning how much of that -- those contracts that we have won we will be able to convert into revenues. We will see. And it could be very big. But on the other hand, half of me hopes it will be not much because that means we can go back to our normal lives and we don't have to get tested all the time and we can travel. I hope -- I'm looking forward personally to go back to London and meet all of you in person more often and meet our teams around the world. And I'd rather do that than do hundreds of millions of COVID testing for the next few quarters. Unfortunately, time will tell. So I'm sorry, I can't tell you more. Some of you can take an optimistic -- well, I don't know if it's optimistic or negative or pessimistic. But some of you can take a view that we're going to do a lot more than EUR 250 million. Others can say, okay, probably COVID will go away, and in Q4, we're back to our normal lives. And that's what we're going to think Eurofins will do. Unfortunately, we can't help you much more than that.

Okay. And the last one was just about the shape of demand as it relates to the reimbursement mechanism. So if consumers have to pay more for tests versus the state or whatever, are you seeing that happening? Is that coming up more? And therefore, you will have an issue with demand?

Yes, it's a good question. We could do more analysis on all of this than we do. I mean clearly, there's more testing in Europe than North America. The U.S. has a bit of a, let's say, fair attitude and nobody gets tested unless they have to or they really want to know. And so people, when they get sick, they usually get tested, wherever that is in the world. If they have to travel, for example, they only will get tested if they have to. And so whether it's reimbursed or not reimbursed or they have to pay out of pocket doesn't really play a role. If it's free, are they going to test more? I think there are other factors that are even bigger. Like in France, for example, the way the tests still are, for the most part, is people have to put a stick in someone's nose and go pretty deep and there are countries where you don't have to do that. So people, even if it's free, they don't want to put -- to have somebody with a stick through their nose almost to their throat. And so they won't get tested unless they really have to. So beyond price, there is coercion, there is requirements, a very combination of all things. And also there's prevention. In some areas, we do a mass testing prevention. One big unknown is what will happen in September when the kids go back to school. We know now that the Delta variant is affecting kids much more than we thought or was previously the case with other variants. And a lot of countries are going to start serious training programs of kids. Of course, you can't do that by putting a stick in their nose. So you have to find other test methods. Some countries allow it, like with saliva or like sucking a sponge or something like that. There are other methods that -- and our labs are working on those. In some countries, there will be strong demand. Other countries will say, well, we don't care. We prefer to have the kids stay at home. And there are countries who will say we want the kids to go back to school. And if need be, we'll do regular testing programs. And this is really not related to reimbursement, not reimbursement -- level of reimbursement. It's a lot of a very local health policy decisions that change all the time. So I'm personally -- I tried to follow up on that, but I'm a bit losing track because there are really contradictory decision made by one country to what the next country is doing.

We will take our next question from Neil Tyler of Redburn.

Two from me, please, Gilles. Firstly, on the -- well, both related to the outlook, I suppose, and the first one relating to margin or rather mix. When you stand, when you do and look forward to the pipeline of opportunities that are now available compared to, for instance, for example, 2 years ago, is that pipeline offering margins -- more profitable business or businesses, any difference to those on offer previously? And that's the first question. And then I -- and then on the second question, the longer-term targets. I appreciate the difficulty and the uncertainty that still exists. But those 2022 and 2023 targets were both founded on a 5% organic CAGR. Your earlier introductory comments pointed to the 5-year period to 2019 having delivered somewhere between 7% and 8%. Over the last 2 years, you've achieved something similar. So is there anything in that outlook that suggests that the business might migrate back toward that 5%? Or is that simple conservatism?

Thanks a lot, Neil. Well, there are a lot of things that are changing compared to, let's say, 2 years ago. One of them is we've done our homework. So we start to have our group in order. In '17 and '18, we bought a lot of companies. And we have labs all over the place. Some were subscale. We had overlap. We did a massive reorganization in North America of our environmental and food testing lab network. We built brand new big labs, and we aligned the IT solution. So we are much better prepared now to serve our clients than we were 3 years ago. We're also bigger. We are more able to provide global solutions to global companies. And of course, when companies look for local suppliers, they can -- they probably have 5 or 10 local suppliers that can compete. When companies look for a global supplier, they have 1 or 2 or 3 that can really meet the bar. And we like to think that we stand out as being better. And we are more efficient by all the investments we did. And we're not done. We still can do a lot more in automation and digitalization. That's our -- that's what we are going to do over the next 5 years. But yes, the profitability of the contracts we are looking at now and can win, we think, on balance should be better. And there is a range and there are exceptions. We also have many areas where there's just simply not enough supply. We cannot cope with the demand. And of course, then we don't overcharge, but we will not fight for the cheapest for the last contract at the lowest fee. Because we'll first provide those funds who are our traditional large clients and are prepared to pay the normal price for it. Yes, longer term, we've been fortunate over the last 5 years -- I wouldn't say our growth has been 8%, but I think probably more like 6%-plus rather than 5%. This 5% organic growth objective is something we set probably more than 10 years ago. Each company likes to, let's say, focus on different investors. We like to focus on investors who are there for the long run. And I try to put myself in the shoes of that investor. You can look at 50 different companies, hundreds of companies, you can invest anywhere. You can buy gold, Bitcoin or anything. And so why would you buy Eurofins? And we try to say, okay, we try to give them something that we think is achievable. And there might be plus or minuses. There might be a year where we do 4% or 3%. But if we look at it over a decade -- I mean if I'm a long-term investor, I look at putting some money in the company. And unless there is a disaster not touching it for 10 or 20 years until I retire, I'd like to see something that I can somehow think, okay, it's going to happen over the next 5 or 10 years. And that's -- in that sense that we've set this 5% organic growth objective, considering we have a mix of businesses, a mix of geographies, a mix of different things. And yes, we've done over the last 5 years, it's clear. We've done on average significantly better than that, 20% or 30% better than that. There's no guarantee we will do that. And I'm not pessimistic. I'm actually more optimistic now than I ever was, considering all the changes brought about by our own efforts and by the recognition by the world after the pandemic of the benefit of testing. But we prefer to say, okay, look, if you're happy with 5% organic growth, if you're happy with this EBITDA target by the share, if you're not happy, then buy something else, don't take the risk. And if you buy the share and we do better, then good for you. So that's -- and what I'm convinced is that we have a company that is going to be a sustainable growth company because we are in very good sectors, we contribute a lot. And thanks to our investment, we have a very good starting point in those exciting markets. If we -- can we do better than 5%? Can we do better than 23% margin? Probably yes. But I would hate to say something and then 1 year, I have to say, sorry, we missed it by 0.5%. So that would be -- that would not be beneficial to our investors, I think, at least our long-term investors.

We'll take our next question from Nicolas Tabor of Stifel.

The first one would be on -- first, if you can give us some idea of the exit rate at the end of Q2 and beginning of July. And then on your second semester guidance of 5% core organic growth, which implies a slowdown after 2 years' view. Is it conservative from -- conservatism from you? Or is there some actual headwind we have to think of thinking into H2? And then thinking of 2022 as well, do you think that the strong demand you're seeing right now and the demand from biopharma, for instance, will support the trends and you're very confident with the guidance? Or should we be prudent regarding a higher comp base coming into 2022, still for the core organic growth, obviously? And then finally, on the margin expansion you were talking before and the investments you're making. I was wondering once you accelerate robotization, and I know that's something you prefer to talk during a Capital Markets Day, but how much more CapEx and OpEx will you need to spend to robotize more the tools you already have? And is it just reallocation of previous costs in OpEx and CapEx just from the lens to robotization and it's just falling forward? Or is there some incremental investment? How is it unfolding?

Thank you very much. The exit rate, I'm not sure exactly whether you mean of the whole business or just the COVID testing. And COVID testing is still running at a high level. It's maybe a bit less than it was in the peak months in the beginning of this year, but it's still significant. I mean it will go down at some point. Hopefully, we will all get vaccinated once we hit in the west 90% vaccination. And hopefully, there will be less of an issue with COVID. So we -- that's why we give you 2022 objectives with 0 COVID, so you can do a base case or a conservative case on anything -- any COVID testing that we'll do. And we'll do some for sure next year. I can only come on top of that. And for the H2 at 5%, I'll go back to my comment -- my answer to the previous question. We are not in the business of giving you an updated growth objective every quarter or every half year. This is noise. Our objective of growth is a secular one. We think over 5 years, over 10 years, we should be able to grow this company 5% organically on average over a long period. I think that's a more important message, whether one quarter we do a bit more, a bit less. And yes, I don't see why the second half would be any different than the first half. And I don't think the comps for next year are going to play any role because they are -- we exclude COVID. Of course, COVID -- some COVID will go away at some point. And I'm the first to hope that COVID will go away, so we have our normal life back. But -- and that's why we are transparent and give you the data without COVID. I think -- I don't see why there's nothing different from before. So I don't see why our growth would be any different, our organic growth. But now okay, 5% is an objective we said we'd give to our investors because if they want to buy a share, they'd like to know what the management thinks can be achieved, and we think we can achieve that. And if we over-deliver, so that's good. And that applies for the second half of this year or for next year. And in terms of margins, yes, you know we have about EUR 400 million CapEx. That's a lot of money. That allows a lot of investments in different things in IT and robotization. And we spend a lot of money in buying sites. A lot of our CapEx goes in just real estate that other companies would be leasing. And we buy those labs because we want to have our campus. We don't want to be held at ransom by owners of buildings. And we're very pleased to have done that because of course, the real estate in labs has really exploded in the last couple of years. So that's why we invest a lot. And in the long run, we'll see the benefits because that will flow in our cash flow. We will have to pay rent. So that allows some room for robotization. And actually, the limitation for robotization is not the spend. It's just that we have so many different tests. It's not easy to have one-size-fits-all robots. And it takes a lot of time, a lot of development effort to have the right tools. But okay, the good thing is once we have them, we can spread them globally, and we can share the hard learning that we've made in one lab with many, many labs. But we are very early days. Our industry, except for blood testing, is not robotized at all. Very little is done, and there's a huge runway ahead of us to get the benefit of scale. But to robotize, you have to be bigger. It doesn't make any sense to robotize something you do 20x a day in the lab. If you do it thousands of time a day, then okay, then it makes sense to robotize. And that's why we first made all those investments to be digital because robots need to have software drive them and to have large labs.

We will take our next question from Suhasini Varanasi of Goldman Sachs.

I just have 2 questions, please. On Slide 19, it was helpful to see the sequential revenue ramp up of the tests there. Can you just give us some idea about the scale of this? I know you mentioned it's not very material, but maybe it's about EUR 50 million in Q2. Just want to get some understanding there in absolute terms. And then the second one, there has been some news flow recently about, let's say, Moderna trying to use mRNA technology to target other diseases. And obviously, the -- now that mRNA vaccines work, are you seeing more interest from your customers in terms of using this technology to develop the next breed of, let's say, drugs, vaccines, et cetera, for the next 4, 5 years and something that can help you?

Yes. Thank you very much. Yes, the, what is it, transplant genomic volumes are not very material. I think we're talking EUR 10 million, EUR 20 million, something of that. It's not going to move the needle for Eurofins as a whole for a little bit. And before we get EUR 200 million, it's going to take some time. And we talked about a market of EUR 2 billion. It's going to take a bit of time. Now of course, a lot in those things relate to adoption. If our test really managed to be adopted as the standard of care, then at some point, it could ramp very, very fast. If it gets in the protocol and those large hospitals, it takes some time, 1 year or 2, for the board of nephrologists of an hospital to decide a test is part of the standard of care. And then they need to put it in their electronic interfaces, ordering system, et cetera. But once it's there, it can ramp a lot. So I hope to talk about it a bit more in a couple of quarters, and it also depends on some of the clinical trials that we have. And we have a couple of product launches that we are awaiting. And also, we need to create a fair playing field with some of our competitors. We frankly have had practices that we wouldn't have. And then we'll see. I mean, it's a big market, EUR 2 billion, and there is a very nice upside. Right now, we are conservative, and we're targeting very small numbers for the next couple of quarters. But I think there is a very big upside, and we'll see how we can capture it. And as to mRNA, I think it's just one example. It is enormous, the potential. And it is just one of the technologies that is just emerging. But if you look at CRISPR-Cas9 or if you look at many other innovations, it's just unbelievable, the number of possibilities. And it's not only Moderna. We are one of the largest DNA producers. We produce those strands of DNA. So the people doing research in that in academic or in companies, a lot of them come to us. There are a lot of people working in this thing, in this field. And some are, of course, more advanced and more public than others. And the scale of investment that is done in biotech generally is unprecedented. And of course, people see the potential of those technologies to improve our lives. And that's why I'm so excited and so bullish about the future of Eurofins is we are involved, we are supporting those companies on a very bold front. And it's not even only in pharma, for producing food, for producing replacement proteins, to replace animal proteins. There are a huge range of things that can be done once we can harness the genes and harness what a cell can produce and harness change of DNA of a cell. So it's really a fascinating field, which with little by little will drop through in practical application, also in energy, in so many aspects of our lives.

We will take our next question from James Rosenthal of Barclays.

I've got 3, please. The first is on the acquisition of DNA Diagnostics Center. Could you talk to us a bit about that business and your plans for it? What does it bring to the group? I think you mentioned earlier that it's good at selling direct to consumers. So if you could share your thoughts there. Second, could you tell us what the COVID revenues were for the month of June, please? And then finally, depreciation as a percentage of sales was much lower in the first half. Could you give us some guidance on what that figure could be for the full year and potentially into next year as well, given your planned investments?

Thank you very much, James. Yes, DDC. DDC is an interesting company. And it's interesting from us -- for us from a couple of angles. It is a direct-to-consumer company that sells very much online. And it is also a very large forensic testing company. And we are the leader in forensic testing in Europe. So that gives us a foot in forensic testing in the U.S., paternity testing, immigration testing. So all those areas are interesting testing for us. But they have refined over the last 10, 15 years, or especially the last 10 years, their way to -- their understanding on how to sell tests to consumers online. And they have a fairly large volume, and they gain a lot of experience. They are not so much into the health care testing, selling wellness tests or clinical tests online. But it fits very well because we have been working to develop tests that we are allowed to sell to consumers in various markets. But we're not very good at marketing. We're not marketers. We are more scientists. Our teams are more scientists. And I think it will -- I mean we're hoping this company will help us to accelerate our bringing of clinical tests directly to consumers. And there is definitely a trend for that. After the pandemic, we're all using our devices more. We used to just go to a lab to be tested or call a lab. Now more and more people are used to booking appointments online to be tested for COVID. But then when they do that for COVID, maybe they want to do it all the time so that they don't have to wait in line. And the next step is, why do I have to go to a lab to get tested? Why don't I do it from home? And more and more, there is opportunities to develop tests that can be done on a finger prick -- a drop of blood from a finger prick. So this is an exciting area. It's early days. Of course, you have all kinds of issues. People prefer to get tested. If they don't have to pay, if it's paid by insurance, so it will take some time for all the insurances to accept this or the national health care system to accept this. But we want to be one of the pioneers of that direct-to-consumer health care and consumers taking a bit more of the health in their own hands. And it's early days. Maybe it's a 5- or 10-year journey to -- for this to be something very material for a company of our size. But the only way to be good in 5 years is to start learning now. And we think this acquisition is -- while not so material for Eurofins in numbers, is an interesting way to save time in climbing on this learning curve. And then the COVID, June, well, I don't know. I mean it's slightly less than it was in the peak months, as I said, but it's EUR 100 million plus. Exact number, I don't remember. But whether it's EUR 5 million or EUR 10 million, more or less, it doesn't really matter. It's still material with testing. It does not like drop off the cliff, if that was your question. And so the numbers are relatively even for this quarter, I believe, from month-to-month, maybe slightly less. And it's trending down overall, obviously. That's why we -- and as I mentioned, we don't know what this virus will do. We don't know how this virus will infect people, get more lethal, less lethal, how governments will react to it. So I don't think there is anything we can interpolate or extrapolate from especially 1 month. Depreciation, we have less depreciation in COVID testing, too, because it's highly automated. And we did a big effort to depreciate all this equipment fast. So that's why it's a bit lower than our core business, and we benefit from that overall. Otherwise, I think I don't see why 2022 and '23, if we have 0 COVID, it should be so materially different in depreciation than, say, 2019 was. Except, of course, we will have improved our productivities, which will be a bit better, but not hugely better. It should be a bit better, but not hugely better.

We'll take our next question from Rajesh Kumar of HSBC.

I've got 3 questions. Can you give us some color on the current mix of revenues between consumer and corporate/business for COVID-19? The second one is just thinking about your '22 guidance, how do you think about the staff or FTEs involved in COVID tesing? What assumptions you are making about redeployment -- with their redeployment or even the fully depreciated lab capacity? I'm assuming your thinking of redeploying them or that capacity to some other purpose. That will be helpful to understand what your assumptions are there. And finally, just on the pipeline, and the transplant market is an excellent example. Clearly, testing will help patients on transplant drugs and all of that. But what are other types of depth you have in the pipeline, which targets such huge attractive market?

Thank you very much. Well, the mix of -- I guess, your question -- the first question refers to the mix of COVID-19 testing between consumer and corporate. I wouldn't know. I think the bulk of it is still clinical testing and then comes events and travel testing. And we have also government contracts with various countries, which -- how to say that, will be in the mix. I'm not exactly sure of the percentage, I'm sorry. But I think the majority is clinical testing for health care bodies or in the context of health care and quite a lot now in the summer of voluntary testing for travel and events. And in 2022, we planned 0 revenues, either for -- I mean we planned, at least in the objectives we set, we've included 0 revenues from COVID-19, nor from the reuse of equipment. That would all come on top. If we use all that equipment for providing panels of flu testing or STD testing or other types of testing that we could provide very efficiently -- or actually a likely thing is when the winter will come, people will start coughing and sneezing and everything. And they will want to know whether it's COVID or it's a flu or something else. So that means -- and that's why probably COVID testing will not go away. Because when people before were just coughing and sneezing, they would either go to work or stay home. Now answering that question will be a much trickier one. Because if you might have COVID, then you really go to work. And again, that will depend on what are the recommendations of governments in the various countries for people who have symptoms while they are vaccinated to go to work or go to parties or to anywhere. So yes, so we could have -- but that is -- would be a total upside to the objective we set. We haven't implied anything. And on the pipeline, yes, I mean, the 2 main areas -- I mean transplant is a micro niche of testing. It's a very, very small market with potentially very strong impact on health and saving lives and extending the life of transplant of organs. A much bigger market is a noninvasive prenatal testing, and we are the leader in Europe and Japan. And so that's a market where it is really in its infancy because only in Europe, so far mostly the high-risk pregnancies. So women after 35 get tested and reimbursed. But this will increase and the accessible market will increase. The much bigger market is oncology. We have a test for follow-up after first intervention to see if a tumor reoccurs. And we have tests for somatic cancer. So for hereditary traits that can increase the risk of certain cancers. And the test for de novo cancer, we have some tests in our pipeline. Those are, of course, very, very large markets, which have not yet stabilized and the reimbursements are still on specific tests. But there are some broad-based tests that could become a possibility. And so of course, we'll aim to participate on that. We offer it with some hospitals. We have a very interesting test in Japan, and we don't necessarily always develop those tests ourselves. We also have collaboration. It's not standard of care yet to test for de novo mutations. But at some point, it will become. And we -- of course, we -- like a market in its infancy, we want to be there when that happens, and we want to participate significantly in that market.

On the redeployment of capacity, so what you're saying is that suppose I feel unwell, you'll have to find out whether it's COVID or just flu. And -- I mean we see similar scenarios for heart attack where or shortness of breath. And in winter season, you see BNP test volumes shoot through the roof. But then there are very specific reimbursement guidelines. So do you have any insight on how that reimbursement discussion might go?

Well, I think the answer -- you will have as many answers as you have countries. I mean that has been our experience for COVID is that the responses to COVID have been all over the place. And even in the U.S., from state to state, you have different reactions. I mean, not for reimbursement specifically, but for health care measures. And I think this is yet open. I don't know what will happen. And same thing for vaccine and testing for antibodies prior to doing additional shots is something that is -- there are very different decisions from country to country. So that's why if we set an objective for 2022, it simply puts 0 revenues from COVID and 0 revenues from redeployment to any other tests because this is highly unknown. But -- I mean in some places, something will happen, obviously, because it makes sense.

Understood. And staff will just be absorbed in rest of the operation?

Yes. I mean we also have a lot of temporary staff for those activities of COVID. All right. I'm going to have to go to the last question maybe. And then we're going to have to close the call, I'm afraid. We're running a bit over.

Would you like to take the last question?

I'll take one last question, and then we'll close the call, if it's okay.

Okay. We'll take the next question from [ Mike Dennis ] of Bloomberg.

I was looking at your core U.S. growth relative to the figure you gave for the group of 16.6%. And I was wondering what that core growth rate is for the U.S. market? And my second question is, if I'm right, the U.S. EBIT margin in dollars is flat second half last year on the first half this year. I'm wondering what does that imply about your core U.S. margin. Is it falling? And why is it falling on the basis that, obviously, COVID revenues have a lot higher margin?

Yes. Thank you. I think our U.S. business is doing incredibly well. Our food testing business or our pharma business is doing extremely well. Our advanced microscopy is doing extremely well. What might have happened in the second quarter, especially or first half, is that we used to do a lot more COVID testing in the U.S. in the first half. That's why we started to do the most COVID testing last year. We started earlier in the U.S. than pretty much anywhere else and at fairly high reimbursements at the beginning. And we're doing much less in the first half. So that probably explains why in the total numbers that you see that include COVID, the margin in the U.S. hasn't progressed maybe as it has in Europe, where the ramp of COVID testing was lower last year. And so it's a flip, if you want, and where the bulk of the COVID testing was before -- between last year and this year tangentially. But our U.S. growth -- core U.S. growth is excellent. I think actually, it's probably better than in Europe, the growth of our core business. But I don't have the exact data in front of me. I would guess from what I know, our biggest business is in the U.S.

Yes. But logically, that doesn't make sense. I mean the U.S. is your biggest country. But obviously, the growth rate from COVID in Europe is obviously -- contribution from COVID revenue is obviously far greater. But the contribution of U.S. dollars incremental growth is obviously far smaller. And therefore if, say, 30% of your total group COVID goes into the U.S., then the inference is that the core growth rate in the U.S. has slowed quite significantly.

[ Mike ], you're simply wrong. I'm not sure I follow what you're saying, but I don't think this is the case. All right. I guess that will conclude this call. And so to summarize, I think we're a bit beyond schedule. So I will not make longer concluding remarks. But I thank you all very much for joining our call. And I -- again, I'm very pleased about the development in the first half of the year. And the outlook, as we can see today, is very good. We try to be conservative in the objectives that we set for our group as a whole. So you can rely on what we are planning. We will be updating you after the third quarter. And at the end of the year, obviously, we'll review the objectives for 2022 and 2023 when we publish our 2021 results. And I hope we can meet in person soon and that travel will become possible again between Europe and North America. So we can hold our Investor Days. We haven't yet confirmed whether we will be able to hold our Investor Days in person, but we still plan one Investor Day in Europe and one Investor Day in the U.S. in the fall of this year. And we hope that will be possible. We welcome any follow-up questions to our investors team. And the last question, I'm sure, will take more than a few minutes to really understand and answer, but we'll do that gladly. And we thank you all for the time you spend in covering Eurofins, for all your questions today. And I wish you a very nice summer, and I'm looking forward to meeting you in person in the fall at the latest. Thank you very much. Goodbye.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The conference call has now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day.