Maravai LifeSciences Holdings, Inc. (MRVI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome, everyone, joining today's Maravai LifeSciences Q2 2026 Results Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Deb Hart. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us for our second quarter 2026 earnings call. The press release and slides accompanying today's call are available at investors.maravai.com. As you can see from the agenda on Slide 2, our CEO, Bernd Brust, will provide a business update; and our CFO, Raj Asorpota, will review our financial results. Dr. Chanfeng Zhao, our Chief Scientific Officer; and Kurt Oreshack, our Executive Vice President and General Counsel, will join us for the Q&A session. Management will make forward-looking statements and refer to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures during today's call. Actual results could differ materially from expectations. We will undertake no obligation to update them. We refer you to Slide 3 for details on forward-looking statements and Slide 4 for our use of non-GAAP financial measures. The press release and the slides provide reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, and we also post reconciling schedules to our investor website. Please also refer to Maravai's SEC filings for additional information on risks and uncertainties that may impact our operating results, performance and financial condition. Now I'll turn the call over to Bernd.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. We are very pleased with our second quarter performance, which builds on the strong momentum we established in the first quarter. Our results reflect solid execution across the business and reinforce our confidence in both our near-term outlook and long-term strategy. During the quarter, we generated revenue of $51.4 million, representing 9% year-over-year growth. TriLink revenue increased 12%, driven by strong demand for GMP consumables and continued strength in discovery mRNA, particularly from larger preclinical programs, building our potential GMP pipeline as customer programs advance into clinical development. Because TriLink supports customers throughout the drug development life cycle, we believe today's discovery success will create tomorrow's GMP opportunity. Cygnus also delivered another solid quarter with revenue growing 3% year-over-year, marking its fifth consecutive quarter of growth. Through its industry-leading HCP and ELISA portfolio, combined with expanding analytical services, Cygnus continues to provide stable, recurring, high-margin revenue while strengthening customer relationships across the biologics workflow. Our profitability improved significantly. Adjusted gross margin expanded more than 1,600 basis points year-over-year to 58.9%, while adjusted EBITDA improved by $19.1 million to $8.7 million. These results reflect higher revenue, a favorable product mix and the benefits of the operating model we've built over the past year. We also significantly strengthened our balance sheet. In June, we refinanced our debt, reducing borrowings to approximately $150 million, essentially cutting debt in 1/2 since the beginning of 2026, while extending the maturities to 2032. Combined with improving profitability, we believe Maravai is well-positioned from both a liquidity and financial flexibility standpoint. Now let's turn to Slide 7 and discuss our progress against our 3 strategic priorities: innovation, commercial execution and operational excellence. Innovation. This remains the foundation of our long-term growth strategy. During the quarter, TriLink launched its new GMP-grade enzyme portfolio, expanding our ability to serve customers as a differentiated single-source innovation partner. Increasingly, customers are looking for integrated manufacturing solutions rather than individual components, and this launch meaningfully strengthens our competitive position. We also continue to see outstanding adoption of ModTail. Just 1 year after commercial launch, more than 125 customers are now actively using this technology, including many of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. Customer adoption continues to accelerate through new accounts, repeat orders and broader use across multiple applications. Later this year, we expect to launch GMP-grade ModTail, extending this platform into clinical manufacturing. Customer interest has been strong, particularly in cell and gene therapy applications, further demonstrating how discovery innovation creates future GMP growth opportunity. Cygnus also continues to expand its innovation portfolio through the launch of a new residual Prism A Mix-N-Go kit while continuing to invest in mass spec analytical services. Although services have a longer sales cycle, we are encouraged by growing customer engagement and increasing repeat business, and we expect this capability to become a more meaningful contributor over time. Finally, we continue strengthening our intellectual property portfolio across CleanCap, ModTail and Cygnus assays. In addition to 2 new European patents we received in Q1, during Q2, TriLink received a new China patent covering our full family of CleanCap capping analogs, further reinforcing our global IP position. Commercial execution. Our commercial momentum continued to build throughout the first half of the year. Greater customer engagement has improved forecasting, increased visibility and strengthened order conversion, and those improvements are clearly reflected in our results. Within Discovery mRNA, we added 67 new customers in Q2, a record quarter for new customer acquisitions, while our e-commerce platform also delivered record quarterly revenue. GMP consumables remained a standout performer, growing 55% year-over-year, driven by large CleanCap clinical orders and our first GMP enzyme order. We had no COVID GMP-related revenue in Q2. Operational excellence remains a key driver of our financial performance. The restructuring actions we implemented last year are now largely complete. Combined with our debt refinancing, the company has fundamentally reset its cost structure. Importantly, our manufacturing infrastructure is already in place. Between our state-of-the-art mRNA facilities and new GMP enzyme facility, we believe our operating model is now built to scale, and we can support meaningful future growth with relatively modest incremental fixed costs. This operating leverage is central to our long-term financial model. Now let me switch gears for a minute and share how we think about TriLink. As part of our recent long-range planning process, we concluded that investors may appreciate greater visibility into the distinct growth engines within TriLink. While we continue to report and manage our business to 2 operating segments, TriLink and Cygnus, we increasingly think about TriLink through 3 distinct market categories: mRNA, CDMO and specialty chemistry. mRNA is our largest and most strategically important business out of these 3. It spans the full development life cycle through discovery, clinical trials and ultimately, commercial programs. Discovery mRNA, which grew 17% year-over-year in Q2, includes our research use products such as CleanCap, ModTail and related reagents. This spans the full research spectrum, academic and basic research customers on one end and biopharma and biotech conducting advanced preclinical screening and program development on the other. This business not only generates revenues today, but also seeds future GMP demand. GMP consumables, which grew 55% year-over-year in Q2, is the clinical grade supply business within mRNA, GMP CleanCap, GMP enzymes and soon GMP ModTail. This is where TriLink's operating leverage becomes most evident. The growth potential for TriLink here is straightforward. As customer programs advance through clinical development, we expect their demand for GMP materials to increase significantly, while our infrastructure remains largely unchanged. During the quarter [Audio Gap] 4 new GMP customers. More importantly, with additional GMP product launches, we expect to increase the number of products each customer sources from TriLink, deepening relationships and expanding our share of wallet. The third stage is commercial programs. Today, this revenue consists of COVID-related CleanCap, which you'll recall was $14.3 million in Q1 or approximately 7% of estimated 2026 revenue at the midpoint of guidance. Over the longer-term, we expect commercial launches from our current non-COVID clinical pipeline to become a meaningful growth driver. As customers' programs advance towards commercialization expected to begin around 2028 and 2029, we believe TriLink is well-positioned to support commercial scale manufacturing using infrastructure that already exists. Overall, excluding COVID CleanCap, mRNA represents approximately 35% of expected 2026 revenue, and we continue to expect this business to grow at high single-digit to low double-digit rates over time. The second component within TriLink is our CDMO business, which represents less than 5% of expected 2026 revenue. While project-based and inherently variable, it serves a select group of highly strategic cell and gene therapy customers with programs progressing toward commercialization. Finally, specialty chemistry. This is a stable recurring research tools business consisting of oligo services and reagents, NTPs and other related reagents. This business represents a little more than 20% of our expected 2026 revenue. While we expect lower growth than mRNA, it remains an important contributor with strong customer relationships and attractive profitability. To be clear, our external financial reporting remains unchanged. We continue to operate and report through our 2 segments, TriLink and Cygnus. The additional framework we are providing today is intended to help investors better understand the different growth drivers within TriLink and how they contribute to our long-term opportunity. In summary, we delivered another quarter of strong execution. We advanced innovation, strengthened commercial momentum, improved profitability and significantly enhanced our financial position. Perhaps most importantly, we believe the investments we've made over the past year have fundamentally changed the company's earnings profile. Our infrastructure is in place, our balance sheet is stronger. And as customer programs continue advancing from discovery into clinical development and ultimately commercialization, we believe we are well-positioned to deliver attractive long-term revenue growth, expanding margins and increasing cash generation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Raj to review the financial results and discuss our updated outlook. Raj?

Thank you, Bernd. Our second quarter reflects solid execution across both segments with improving margin flow-through. I'll focus on the key drivers behind the quarter, including revenue composition, profitability and our updated outlook. Let me start with a closer look at revenue on Slide 10. Our business remains well diversified across end markets. Revenue by customer type was 30% biopharma, 35% life sciences and diagnostics, 5% academia, 7% CRO/CMO/CDMO and 23% distributors. By geography, revenue was 62% North America, 20% EMEA, 11% Asia Pacific, excluding China, and 7% in China. Turning to Slide 11. Our GAAP net loss before noncontrolling interest was $21.6 million. This compares to a GAAP net loss before noncontrolling interest of $69.8 million in the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, was $8.7 million for Q2, exceeding our expectations and improving by more than $19 million year-over-year. This was driven by stronger revenue, favorable mix toward higher-margin GMP and mRNA discovery as well as continued OpEx discipline. Basic and diluted loss per share in Q2 was $0.08 compared to a loss of $0.27 per share in Q2 2025. Adjusted EPS was a loss of $0.02 compared to a loss of $0.08 per share last year. Moving to the balance sheet and other financial metrics on Slide 12. As Bernd mentioned, in early June, we significantly reduced debt and refinanced our term loan, extending the maturity out to 2032. We ended the quarter with $70.1 million in cash and $147.1 million in debt. Depreciation and amortization was $11.8 million. Net interest expense was $3.7 million and stock-based compensation, a noncash charge, was $10.2 million for the quarter. Turning to segment performance on Slide 13. TriLink represented 67% of total revenue in the quarter and contributed $7 million of adjusted EBITDA, benefiting from high-margin GMP product mix and improved operating leverage. This represents an improvement of more than $14.2 million year-over-year. Within TriLink, mRNA and specifically the GMP consumables and Discovery mRNA categories were the primary growth drivers. Specialty chemistry was steady. CDMO was down year-over-year and in line with our expectations based on the timing of customer programs. Cygnus represented 33% of total revenue and continued to deliver strong profitability. Cygnus generated $11.4 million of adjusted EBITDA with margins of 68%. Cygnus saw steady demand for HCP and ELISA kits and strength in China due to distributor ordering timing. Corporate expenses impacting adjusted EBITDA were $9.7 million in the quarter. These expenses include HR, finance, legal, IT and public company costs. Turning to our guidance on Slide 14. We are maintaining our expected 2026 revenue range of $205 million to $215 million, representing growth of 10% to 16% over 2025. We expect TriLink to grow in the high teens, driven by continued strength in GMP and Discovery mRNA consumables. For Cygnus, we continue to expect low to mid-single-digit growth. We are raising our full year adjusted EBITDA guidance to $33 million to $35 million, representing an improvement of $64 million to $66 million year-over-year, primarily driven by improved performance in TriLink. We continue to see strong demand in higher-margin areas of the portfolio, including GMP consumables, our high-margin mRNA Discovery consumables and key Cygnus product lines. That mix shift, combined with the structural improvements we've made, is driving the outperformance in EBITDA. Additionally, we see further upside in gross margin expansion and now expect greater than 1,400 basis points of improvement, supported by restructuring actions, cost discipline, favorable product mix and a strong first half of the year. The remainder of the guidance framework provided in our Q1 call is unchanged. The adjusted EBITDA guidance raise reflects higher confidence in profitability expectations rather than a change in our prudent revenue assumptions. We are maintaining the expected revenue range because 2 meaningful parts of our business, CDMO and large GMP consumables orders, are program driven by nature. Individual orders can be large and their timing can vary meaningfully quarter-to-quarter. It's simply how these businesses work and our range is sized to reflect it. Overall, we are encouraged by the momentum in the business, improved commercial execution, a more efficient cost structure and favorable mix are driving meaningful financial progress, and we remain confident in our outlook for 2026 and increasingly excited by the longer-term commercial opportunity Bernd described. With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question from Matt Stanton with Jefferies.

Maybe first one, just on the guide. I think you talked about as being prudent. And obviously, there's a lumpy part of the business, but you did a little over $100 million for the base business in the first half. Back half seems to imply that steps down closer to a run rate of mid-40s per quarter from the low 50s you did in the first half. Just talk about kind of line of sight into that, any areas of potential conservatism there as we think about the back half guide, some of the timing dynamics due to projects you talked about? And then can you remind us what you're penciling in for the GMP ModTail in the back half of the year? And then also anything for the recent enzyme launch as well?

I'll let -- Matt, this is Bernd. I'll let Raj answer most of that as far as the guidance is concerned. I mean, Q3 inherently is a lower revenue quarter in this business. So that's what you're dealing with, certainly in the second half of the year. And the reality is we grew, I think, our GMP business 55% in the second quarter, which is obviously an unusual number. No COVID in there whatsoever. And you just have some variability here. There's a couple of larger deals out there still. I mean a business our size, a couple of hundred million bucks since you have -- it's not unusual to have multimillion dollar type of orders in there. It just unfortunately shifts between quarters at times. There's a couple of deals out there that we'll see where they come in this year or next year, and we'll adjust it accordingly at that point, but we want to be just careful in how we position that.

Raj, do you want to take the ModTail and Enzymes?

Yes. It's actually just before we go there. So I think like Bernd mentioned on the second half cadence, and like I said in my prepared remarks, our range has a couple of meaningful parts of the business, both again, CDMO and large GMP, which are more program driven by nature. So these orders can be very large, like Bernd said, and the timing is -- can vary meaningfully quarter-over-quarter. So that's just simply how they work. And what we are doing is giving you a prudent guide based on where we see these -- like how this changes. But really kind of it's the timing fits with our customers' program schedules rather than with us. So our practice is not to assume those orders until we can see them. So I just kind of want to emphasize that. And Matt, you had another question on ModTail. Could you repeat that?

Just if you're penciling anything in the back half of the year for both the GMP ModTail and also the recent enzyme launch.

No GMP ModTail in the second half of the year. No, we will release our GMP ModTail in the second half of this year, but we don't expect orders until 2027 for that. Enzyme is launched, enzymes we have our first enzymes order shipped, in fact. But ModTail, it's a little bit too early, right? It's been about a year now since we launched that. It's been great uptick, 125 or so customers so far. And we expect some of that to hit a GMP requirement sometime next year. But first step is for us to make it as a GMP quality product and then sell it in 2027.

Okay. And then I appreciate the color on the kind of subsegments within TriLink. Just would love kind of your view on -- as you talked about TriLink having potential for higher growth and maybe some upside, the drivers of that. It sounds like maybe the commercial programs are more '28, '29, earlier biotech funding coming on, maybe that's earlier, we see upside there, some of these bigger product launches taking hold. Just how do we think about kind of the mid-term upside drivers to some of the color you gave in terms of the 5-year CAGRs for the subsegments?

I think one of the most positive signs in our business that we're seeing incredible uptick in the discovery world, right, at all levels, basic research as well as into later-stage clinical trials, preclinical trials. So the fact that, that business is growing materially, and we see continued growth there that should certainly lead into more GMP opportunities as those programs progress. And so I think short-term, that's where we look at. And again, all the indicators are positive there. So on the commercialization front, yes, obviously, we don't control the speed of what that moves as our customer programs and our customers that are driving that. But from what we see, we expect that sort of in '27, '28 to take place.

Yes. Maybe I'll add a little bit more there. And I think in the near-term, we expect TriLink to grow at a high single-digit rate. And then it's really again driven by discovery and GMP consumables. And as clinical programs convert into commercial supply, we expect that to move to low double-digit rate. And then ModTail is a lever layered on top of that, that can really create like an inflection point for the business. So the commercial conversion here is a mixed story, which is why we expect margin expansion to also accompany this revenue growth.

We'll take our next question from Subbu Nambi with Guggenheim.

This is Whitney on for Subbu. Wondering if you could share anything about MockV growth in the quarter. And previously, you've had some comments around positive regulatory feedback and the potential for this to replace traditional viral clearance studies. Do you expect any guidance from regulators or any endorsements that could potentially accelerate adoption there? And maybe just how should we think about its contribution to the Cygnus growth this year and next year?

Yes. We don't really give the MockV growth rates, but it's a small base and is continuing to grow and contribute to Cygnus' growth profile. In terms of regulatory, we just -- it's a little too early to get any intel from that.

We'll take our next question from Matt Hewitt with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

Maybe first up, congratulations on the record quarter with the new online strategy. I'm just curious how that's kind of playing out relative to your expectations and how we should think about that ramp over the course of this year into next year?

I'll maybe give a higher-level answer to this, and Raj may make some specific statistics on that. I mean the short answer is it's going much better than we even had anticipated. The adoption is incredible. The number of orders and revenues flowing through now without really any human interaction is pretty significant. Now this largely happens in the smaller discovery world, of course, if somebody places a $0.5 million order, it's hard to kind of assume e-commerce takes that over. But when you look at what we are currently seeing, the largest uptick of orders coming through in TriLink come all through our e-commerce platforms.

No, I was just going to add to what Bernd said just in terms of top line growth, this whole e-commerce AI strategy is improving our ordering automation. We've got a lot more data-driven customer engagement and predictive analytics. So that's kind of producing into nice commercial opportunities.

We shared with you, I think, 60 some new customers in the second quarter. A lot of that is driven through e-commerce.

That's great. That's great. And then out of curiosity, so you noted that the CleanCap patent that you received during the quarter. How important was that to, I guess, going after that market in a bigger way, having that patent protection behind you? Was that something that was critical and now you kind of put your foot on the gas? Or were you already kind of going after that market hard and this is just kind of providing a little bit of protection behind the scenes?

I think the new patent is evidence of the strength of our patent portfolio around the world. I think we are still -- the business in China at the moment is still small, but is a focus of ours as that market continues to develop.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our next question from Matt Larew with William Blair.

This is Jake Krahenbuhl on for Matt. So I guess, just want to start on the guide, just a quick one. I know it's kind of been touched on, but I just wanted to confirm that the rationale behind not raising it is just purely prudence and not really related to any nuances in end market demand, customer behavior, customer orders slowing or anything around that and really just prudence and understand the -- or appreciate the fact that you're not including any of the big -- or your business is subtle like the big lumpy orders quarter-to-quarter and really just don't want to include that. So yes, I guess I just wanted to confirm.