Medacta Group SA (MOVE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

March 31, 2021

SIX Swiss Exchange CH Health Care Health Care Equipment and Supplies earnings 57 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

operator
#1

Dear, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call of Medacta Group SA on the 2020 full year results. At our customers' request, this conference will be recorded. [Operator Instructions] May I now hand you over to Francesco Siccardi, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead.

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#2

Thank you. Thank you very much, and welcome, everybody, to this full year 2020 financial results discussion. I'm together with Corrado Farsetta today, our CFO; and Gianna, our Investor Relator. I think we can quickly move through the slides. And at the end, we're going to have some Q&A as always. I still see the first slide

Operator

operator
#3

You can proceed. It's online.

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#4

Yes. I don't see it.

Operator

operator
#5

Did you refresh?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#6

Let me try to do that. Yes. Here it is. So we did discuss and went through the revenues. Medacta managed to have a good recovery in H2 last year. We finished 2% behind 2019 with especially a good second half. We could have done better. We have been hit by the second wave in the last few months of 2020. And we finished at EUR 302 million in revenues. Today, we will focus more on the profitability, cost and financials of 2020. Good results in terms of EBITDA margin, above 29%, which is very close to what we did last year, 29.5%. A solid EBIT margin at around 17%, a good profit for the year. Very good cash flow. We knew in 2020, protection of the cash flow was one of the key aspects for us, almost EUR 32 million. And this did come together with a big effort in terms of investment for our growth. Here, we picked the number of employees that continue to grow in 2020, together with other important investments for our future. We will see it later in terms of CapEx and overall marketing and sales efforts. If we go to the next slide. In terms of key achievements, we did discuss the revenues, the EBITDA, the cash flow. We in terms of strategic investment for the future, our sales force expansion was quite aggressive given the external circumstances, especially in the second half of last year. We did discuss and went through a significant amount of new product launches that helped us refresh some areas of our products in terms of primary hips, enlarge our product offering and enter into additional niches area or specialty products in Knees, Shoulder, Spine, together with some key technologies like the Augmented Reality solution. We did invest significant amount of cash into new surgical instruments that are required to serve new customers, and this is a very good indicator of new number of customers that we were able to generate in 2020, even in those difficult circumstances. We did increase our balance sheet by reducing our leverage, which is now below 1 point ratio to EBITDA. And we are going to proposed to the AGM no distribution of dividend for 2020 in light of the global uncertainty caused by COVID. We want to have as much cash as needed to address future uncertainty. And if the uncertainty is not there, to reinvest in our future growth plan. If we go to the next slide. We did discuss during the year about our obligation. We were forced to redesign our marketing and medical education offering. We launched a lot of web-based initiatives, including the Medacta TV, M.O.R.E. in Touch program. But as well, we did increase and change completely the way we organized the physical meeting, utilizing mobile trucks, for example, in the U.S., more than large events, we prefer to focus on smaller events at national and regional level in Europe, in Australia, in Japan, in the U.S. more frequent with less surgeon. We did try and succeed in bringing those events to the surgeon rather than asking them to travel given the external limitations. Thanks to that, we have been satisfied about both the quantity of surgeons that have been exposed to our medical education, quality and especially, which was the most important conversion rate of those events. If we go to the next slide. I'm sorry, I have a long delay. Strong R&D focus. We mentioned this 2020 has been one of the most rich year in the history of Medacta in terms of new product launch. This was a strategic effort in line with meeting the changes associated in Europe with the MDD to the MDR regulation. So we wanted to have as many product cleared with the older regulation. That's one of the reason behind this increase of new products cleared. You will see something similar in the second half of this year because, as you know, due to COVID they postpone this deadline. So we had another shot for another year of clearance. In terms of key products, we mentioned on the Hip side, the full renewal of our primary implant offering. We did expand into the revision product range, which was one of the few gaps Medacta had in total joints. We did launch new solution in the area of preoperative planning of the hip, intraoperative verification with MyHip Verifier, which, again, can deliver in a very effective way personalized approach on the Hip side. On the Knee, we got our Augmented Reality platform, NextAR cleared. And we did start with total knee replacement. We launched SensiTiN coating, which is a solution that allows to address metal-ion sensitivity, especially in certain markets this is becoming a growing -- fast-growing niche and is important for us to be able to compete in this space. There are very few companies able to offer those solutions. We did further expand both Spine and Shoulder in terms of new implants to expand and complete our product portfolio. In Spine on the cervical portion of the business stand-alone and minimally invasive solution. On the Shoulder, mainly on the revision and fracture, which is an important area of the total shoulder replacement market. Finally, the Sports Medicine, which is very rapidly expanding its product portfolio. We did start with some initial market introduction, and it's going pretty well in certain, very competitive markets like the Australian market where we have then this initial market introduction, for example. Our Augmented Reality surgical platform did receive a warm welcome by the community. We have seen some strong attention from the general news as well. We have seen a Wall Street Journal picking up on the very first augmented reality knee cases done in the U.S. at the Hospital for Special Surgery. In the meantime, we have been introduced the system as well in other centers, both in the U.S. and in Australia, and we expect clearance for the knee application in Europe in the next quarter. We are working, as we announced, to expand the indication for this surgical platform to the hip, to the shoulder, to the spine in the months and years to come. And this is particularly suitable platform for the ASC market in the U.S., given its very, very low impact in terms of financial capital requirement, cost per case and overall space that is occupied by the system, very portable, very easy to use more than one platform in a given location, and we start to see a lot of demand from the market. So good positive early feedback. If we go to the next slide, please. I think we can go over the details of the P&L and balance sheet, and I will let Corrado Farsetta move forward on that aspect.

Corrado Farsetta

executive
#7

Thank you, Francesco. I have as well a delay in the slide projection. So please tell me if there is something which is not working well. But if we go to the slide revenue bridge, I would like just to recap what has happened in terms of growth for business lines. We said the core business was affected by the COVID pandemic with negative results. The new business lines did perform very well with the growth, both Extremities and in the Spine segment. If we move the next line where we see the performance for the -- our geographies in Europe was the market most affected, North America in line with last year results and the Pacific with positive performance in growth of 9%. If we go to the profit and loss slide, I think that you all are in this page. We see that the gross profit margin in 2020 declined from 72% to 70.8%. And this reduction say is primarily attributable to 2 main factors. The first one is COVID, of course. And the second one is pricing and FX effect. With regard to the COVID effect, which explained about 50% of the GP reduction, this is a negative impact which is mainly due to the depreciation, the amortization of new instruments we used later. That increased at a higher pace than revenue, as we say the increased customer base in 2020 did not express all its potential in terms of revenue. But the quota of depreciation is now a profit and loss already. And the second point is the direct manpower, increased its weight as a result of the temporarily lower level of revenue. In addition to the COVID effect, we also have pricing, which are, as expected, going down and even if offset by the positive geographical mix evolution affected in a negative way of a profit and loss, sorry, and we experienced also a negative effect from the currency evolution with, say, the strong devaluation of the U.S. dollar against the Euro. This had a negative translation effect, which combined with pricing, the negative trade prices of about 50% of the gross profit margin decline. If we look to the cost and the cost of the company. In 2020, we see that there is a reduction, the OpEx reduced from $204 million to $164 million. And this is mainly due to the limitation, let's say, to the traditional sales and marketing activities imposed by the COVID restrictions and you see -- and this is a marking line in this effect. In that line, it is also reflected the increase in region salaries that we have seen due to the sales force expansion in all our geographies, with the -- in the U.S. and in the Japanese market. Another positive effect on the OpEx side derived from the cost containment measures that we implemented and by the Board -- decided by the Board in terms of salary cuts and postponement to 2021 of the long-term incentive plan, for example. The final positive effect on the OpEx side is the government -- the $2.7 million government subsidies we recorded in 2020. I would say that the rest is in line with last year, but those are the key aspects that has the company to keep its profitability. Thanks to this evolution of the OpEx, the EBITDA adjusted from the U.S. legal expenses was equal to 29.1%, which is slightly below the adjusted EBITDA of last year. If we look now to the financial result line, you see EUR 9.5 million of financial costs. And this is almost, say -- the increase compared to last year is almost entirely attributable to the exchange rate net loss due to the already mentioned devaluation of U.S. dollar, but this time against the Swiss franc. The reason is that we have a big amount of receivables between Medacta U.S. and international. And the change in the closing value of the U.S. dollar change exchange rate against Swiss franc determine this increase, which means that the biggest part of this increase is unrealized loss. So depending on the evolution on 31st December this year, you will see another number there. And the interest costs this year were lower, mainly due to the reduction of the interest rate applied on the debts in U.S. dollar. And we have debts in U.S. dollar to partially over to edge the risks just described in terms of U.S. dollar against Swiss francs. Overall, the average cost for our financial debt is around 1.2%, 1.5%, which is very good. Finally, if we move now to the income tax line, we see here the positive effect of the already mentioned in the past, Swiss tax reform. As a result of this reform, the average tax rate of the group reduced by 7% from 20% last year to 13% in 2021 -- in 2020, sorry. Let's say that this 13% can be considered the tax rate acquired also for the future before extraordinary effect. But if you see -- what you see, let's say, in the profit and loss is the effective tax rate, which is even lower than 13%. And this is due to the one-off positive effect in this line from adjustment of deferred tax liabilities coming from the revision of the tax rate. So the effective tax rate that you will see this year is 7.1% compared to 13% of last year. As a result of the above, the profit after tax increased to EUR 37.1 million, equal to 12.3% on revenue. If we now move to the investment slide. Here, we can see the split of 2020 investments. The blue slice of the cake represent the new instruments we put into the market in 2020 for EUR 18 million and that is what affected the GP margin, as we said before. Other investments are composed by research and development for EUR 8 million, the green slice, which is in line with the past and other tangible investment for EUR 5.6 million, which includes also extraordinary investment for the, let's say, the expansion, the creation of new offices in the building of Rancate new building. The rest is in line with the past. Overall, we are talking about EUR 44 million of investment in a year where revenue were defining. If we now move to the cash flow slide. Okay, here, we see the increased cash flow generated from EUR 22 million to EUR 32 million, the adjusted free cash flow. The cash flow from -- adjusted cash flow from operation, of course, reduced because of the lower EBITDA generated in 2020 and the increased level of inventory. This increase in inventory was decided to face potential disruptions in the supply chain potentially generated by the COVID pandemic or other risks in supply chain and industrial side. The investments you see here from EUR 41 million to EUR 34 million already discussed, lower than last year, allowed the company to reach a strong cash flow generation which adjusted for normal is even more is higher than last year. If we now move to the final slide, the evolution of the net financial debt. We see here that the net debt of the company reduced from EUR 105 million of last year to EUR 83 million this year. This is the result of cost of the cash generated and the investment in CapEx. The leverage is now equal to 0.95x the adjusted EBITDA, so below 1x EBITDA. I think we touched almost all the important points of our 2020 financials. And I would like now Francesco to close the presentation with the outlook on 2021.

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#8

Thank you. Thank you, Corrado. I believe the outlook is a very important aspect given the current uncertainty on the pandemic and how this pandemic would impact our ability to restart growing. So I would say that we remain highly committed and focused, first of all, on our future growth. This has been the case already in 2020, that is the reason why we did continue to hire, we did continue to invest. And there's no reason now that we hopefully start to see some light at the end of the tunnel, at least in certain areas of the world, not to continue or actually to accelerate further in order to recover some of the growth we missed in 2020. We believe we can and we will deliver some good growth in '21 and in the following years. We have further expanded our presence in terms of geographies. We have been able to increase and reinforce our product mix, together with some very relevant innovation. We did continue to hire in -- even in the first quarter of '21. What is at the moment, I would say, calling for certain level of being cautious, let's say, is clearly what happens in Europe. We have been -- we would have expected by now to be almost out of the pandemic. We still see countries which are in rough and tough lockdown. Italy is clearly one. Last week, they did close down Paris again. Until few days ago, we were expecting a tough lockdown in Germany, and then they changed their mind. So there is still a good level of uncertainty, especially in Europe. I was surprised to read as well yesterday, the Head of the CDC in the U.S. to say that she is scared because of the surge of cases of COVID. And so if she is scared, I should be cautious as well. This is the reason why we have been cautious in releasing our top line guidance, which remains significant growth, especially compared to the market. We are talking about 15% of growth with an EBITDA largely in line with 2020. So this is clearly feasible if the external condition will allow us to do to do better. And that's basically what we are betting on and the more the external condition will let us work, the higher will be our ability to continue to expand and especially realize most of the work of expansion we have already done in 2020. I think this was our last slide, and we have hopefully, good time for a good Q&A.

Operator

operator
#9

[Operator Instructions] One moment please for the first question. And we've received the first question. It is from Alex Gibson of Morgan Stanley.

Alexander Gibson

analyst
#10

I have 3 right now. The first one is just on the guidance. And thank you for the explicit guidance. That's helpful. But to help us put that in perspective, what has been the trend in the first quarter of this year? And maybe you could add some regional color as well in terms of growth, and the expectations for growth in margins in the first half of the year as well just to help put that in perspective? And then second, what are you expecting in terms of pent-up demand? Do you forecast a large bolus of procedures coming back in Q3 like last year? Or should we anticipate a more normal Q3? Do you not see as much pent-up demand anymore? And then lastly, on the margin forecast for the full year, are you baking in incremental sales force hiring on top of what you already have in place? And -- or a return to travel in that margin forecast? Or is it -- are you done for now in terms of the investment?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#11

Thank you, Alex. So of course, your question is all about the future, and that's what is more interesting. The Q1 has been, on a regional basis, very, very different. Asia Pacific is the region of -- so in particular, Australia and Japan, that's what we're talking about when you talk about APAC at Medacta, they have been able to work without COVID impact. So this -- with the exception of a few regions in the north of Japan, particularly COVID-free area when it comes to business. So we have seen a very good performance in Q1, we were not particularly affected in Q1 last year. So we are comparing numbers which are comparable. We are not yet done with the end of the month, but we have a very good visibility. Europe, on the other side is exactly the opposite. We were comparing our January, February with a very strong month of last year. The performance has been, of course, behind January and February last year. But on the other side, March was particularly hit in -- negatively hit in 2020, while in 2021 March is clearly stronger than last year. And overall, the quarter could be almost in line with the previous year. And then finally, in the U.S., it's similar, I would say, to the European performance, but March was significantly stronger. So overall, I think we're going to close Q1 with a positive growth, which is already a very, very good news for us. And it's all based, especially in Europe and the U.S. on March performance. Because, as I said, January and February, outside of APAC, were clearly negatively impacted by the tail and did not allow us to grow in the first 2 months of the year. The second question was around H1 margins. I think, in general, we tend to have a significant amount of hiring in the beginning of the year because we want to try to maximize the development of sales of those new hires. I think this partially answers your fourth question about are we done with hiring. We are never done with hiring. Medacta is growing because we are constantly hiring new sales force in new areas where we are not present, and they do come because they see potential, thanks to our products and to our services and marketing to grow faster in their territories. So we constantly hire sales force, either direct, and you see it in the employees, or through agents, especially in the U.S. market, less on the Joint side, more on the Spine side. So H1 margin will probably be in line with the historical pre-COVID margins given that we're going to probably struggle a little bit on the European side sales-wise, but we definitely still have benefits in terms of savings coming from travel, congresses, which are basically not there. So it is helping us on the margin side. Last point, I think, was on the pent-up demand. When it's going to come and when it's going to finish. I think it will be different in different areas. So we do see some pent-up demand in Australia in Q1 in certain areas, in particular, in Melbourne area. That's happening now, partially. We will see, I believe, some pent-up demand definitely in quarter 2 in the U.S. This will probably last longer than a quarter. And we will not see pent-up demand until quarter 3 or quarter 4 in Europe. And given the fact that certain countries have been in lockdown for a year, if I think about, for example, the U.K., the pent-up demand will probably be there or at least a strong recovery of waiting list probably still next year in 2022 in certain countries. So it's very different, very variable. But I would say the biggest pent-up demand, we will see it in quarter 2, quarter 3, probably quarter 4 in the U.S. and the second half of this year, potentially with leaking into 2022 in Europe.

Operator

operator
#12

The next question is Chris Gretler of Crédit Suisse.

Christoph Gretler

analyst
#13

My first question is just on your guidance as well. Kind of, does this kind of the margin guidance, is this geared towards the lower end of your sales guidance? Or in other words, if you're kind of doing more towards the upper end on the sales line? I know there should be upside or is it basically kind of, let's say, to the midpoint? So it will also be more at the lower end in terms of routing if the top line is at the lower end?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#14

Yes. So I think, as you can imagine, we have to have a relatively high variability in terms of top line range, given the external circumstances, we were hoping to be done with COVID at the end of Q1. That's why I was more comfortable when we were discussing previous consensus. Now with Europe in this situation, definitely impacted in Q2, we have been revisiting and be a little bit more cautious on top line. The consequences in Europe are probably linked somehow to marketing expenses, third-party events, which have been canceled that were planned in quarter 2. I'm talking about third-party events that were planned in May, June, European congresses, et cetera. It is probably helping us to offset some of the lower sales contribution that we would have had if we are on the lower end. So basically, I think we will be able to remain close to our last year EBITDA even within certain changes in top line because this will have, as a consequence, some cost saving as well. So quarter 2 will come weaker. But it will probably bring some cost savings as well. So I don't expect a huge variability in our EBITDA given the top line variability. We have seen it this year that we are able to adjust cost relatively well and relatively fast, especially those expensive third-party events that carry lot of cost on marketing and sales side, together with some hiring postponement based on the ability or not to be active. So if we don't see the ability to serve our customer in quarter 2, we might postpone some hiring in certain region by a quarter. So this is what we have been doing in 2020 and probably what we will have to do until the end of H1 in Europe. It's not the case in the U.S. where we hope not to have additional surprises and be able to further accelerate. So in general, I would say, we did target cost and hiring to be aggressive on the top line. This is the reason why you don't see any margin expansion because the faster we grow, the less is the chance that we can expand our margins.

Christoph Gretler

analyst
#15

Okay. And then just basically kind of in terms of understanding. I mean, considering your comments, it's fair to assume that kind of the second half is fairly -- your assumption implied in the guidance is a fairly undisturbed kind of market where you can grow kind of in the range of historic growth rates in kind of low teens or something. Is that kind of -- or is there still kind of more conservatism baked into the second half as well?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#16

No, if you wanted the hypothesis we made is that basically, we can restart working on a normal pace in Asia Pacific and U.S. from quarter 2 onwards. And Europe should be resolved by end of quarter 2. So starting from with the second half, we should be hopefully able to work on a normal basis, that's where we hope to be at the end of quarter 2.

Christoph Gretler

analyst
#17

Okay. And then my last question is maybe just on kind of about CapEx and instrumentation investments in '21? Could you maybe make a comment on that? What kind of plans you have with substantial step-up again? Or kind of also more in line with kind of '20?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#18

I think it will be probably in line with '19 more than '20 because if we are able to stay at the upper end of our guidance and potentially if the situation is not worsening as we all hope, but is actually finally opening up, we might -- we definitely never want to be short on the supply side because we know that if we don't use those sets in a given quarter, we will just absorb it on the next one and then moving forward. So the last thing we want to do is to have customers and not to be able to serve them. And there is a potential upside in the second half of the year. We might need to prepare ourselves with this upside. We do have a significant amount of new products introduction and new products very often do bring a significant amount of CapEx without the immediate sales. So I would probably take 2019 more as an indicator of our potential CapEx to sales ratio.

Operator

operator
#19

The next question is from [indiscernible]

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#20

The first question is on -- just on the NextAR Knee. When you introduced it in Australia, not so long ago, what was the major feedback? You said it's good, but what is so special from the surgeon point of view with the ease of use or the reduced cost per case? If you can shed some more light on that? That's my first question.

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#21

Yes, it's -- the combination, I would say, basically of 3 factors, which is the marketability of the system. You can sell it to the patient as a very good innovative platform, which is very important in certain markets. But at the same time, it does not slow you down. And it does not cost a lot of money, either in terms of investment required in capital or which is even more important in terms of cost per case of disposables, et cetera. So those are the key aspects. The sustainability of the system, the ability to communicate to the patients about the innovative procedure, the fact that the procedure is again, based on personalized planning, the personalization is one of the key areas where Medacta is pushing. So its minimally invasive approach and personalized approach. And together -- today, the Knee, NextAR is clearly supporting the personalization that Medacta is launching, if you want, across the different product lines. So it's those 3 factors together can become very competitive in the market.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#22

Okay. And how much is the cost per case cheaper, roughly, big picture?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#23

The point is the absolute value varies significantly from market to market. Always to be significantly lower than the cost per case of our competitors. So if, for example, Stryker is charging $1,000 in Australia for a case and you have to account into that the service agreement, the disposable, the depreciation, et cetera, we can come in at maybe half of this cost or less. So roughly that's our positioning at the moment, but knowing that our cost structure is very, very competitive, we can be extremely competitive in our business model. That's -- I think I did answer. Then you have to change it according to the price points of the implants which are very, very different from market to market.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#24

Okay. Very good. And the last question is, I mean, a bit more than a month ago when Zimmer Biomet announced these are spin-off of Spine and Dental, saying that they reduce complexity with that. It's -- I have a lot of question marks about this. I mean, actually, you are combining all this, of course, much smaller in Spine than Zimmer Biomet with $500 million sales just in Spine, but is that for you? How can you explain that? I mean, for your company, it still makes sense to have all these business combined? Or is that even maybe a chance for you to get some market share? Or can you get some reps or the reps there may be now also positive because they are part of a new company, maybe which is a bit more dynamic, I don't know, just your view on that?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#25

Yes. What I think is that the Dental segment of Zimmer is clearly a different market -- even with outside of orthopedics is a different business, it would make sense for me. It's actually surprising that it is still there. I do not understand why they did spin-off the Spine business, but it is true that if you look at the history of the Spine division of Zimmer, it has been always very, very marginal for them. So they might have -- and the last question I still have is why do you spin-off those 2 businesses together when they have nothing to do in terms of synergies. So that's a third question, but that's a question for them and not for me. If we come back to our situation. And the reason why we have, if you want, added business line in our portfolio is because we wanted it to have the ability to play at the same table where most of our competitors are able to play when it comes to dealing with administration, and this was happening 10 years ago when hospital power was clearly growing, especially in the U.S., it's not anymore the case. But we see markets like Germany, the U.K., certain other areas, for example, in Italy or in Spain, where it's useful to have the ability to sit with the administration and to offer products beyond the hip and knee or hip, knee and shoulder and discuss spine and sit at the table and bring more value for them. So there are some synergies, as you can see from the NextAR platform, it is going to be applied on spine as well immediately or the MySpine technology, which is clearly part of our MySolution. So there are a lot of synergies in terms of technologies, some synergies in terms of marketing and branding, but you clearly have to invest in a fully dedicated structure. And I am not sure that Zimmer did that, and that's probably one of the reason it did remain marginal for so many years. We want to run it as almost an independent business, the synergies, and that's something we are starting to see as a doable thing.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#26

And the sales reps, is that an opportunity to get some good reps? Or doesn't that influence the things?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#27

If you're talking specifically about the spin-off of the Spine, I would say, is one of the many opportunities we see. We were still benefiting actually from the acquisition of Zimmer of LDR but there are always K2M and Stryker. So whenever there are mergers and acquisition, there are probably more opportunities than spin-off. Because spin-off, they will basically remain within the same company. When there is a merger, you know that some regions are covered by too many people, and they will need to cut. And then when you can again engage people probably more than when spin-offs are happening.

Operator

operator
#28

The next question is from David Adlington of JPMorgan.

David Adlington

analyst
#29

I have 2 questions. A most of them have been asked already, but maybe just on, again, on the guidance. If we think about the components with respect to your product lines. Maybe you could just talk to where you're seeing the most opportunities for absolute growth, particularly within the Hips and Knees?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#30

Yes. Thank you, David. I think what we are looking is the recovery of the Hip and Knee business, probably higher than the historical rates we had, especially in the second half of the year, it would have been nice to have...

Operator

operator
#31

We can't hear you at the moment? Are you still there?

Corrado Farsetta

executive
#32

Yes, I am. I'm Corrado in the line of Francesco. The line of Francesco dropped.

Operator

operator
#33

Okay, I can't still see him. Maybe he has a problem with his line.

Corrado Farsetta

executive
#34

Yes. Let me check.

Operator

operator
#35

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, just a few seconds. Please hold the lines.

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#36

Sorry. So I don't know where you lost me, I will basically repeat what we have been -- what we expect to see is contribution from the Hip, the Knee, the Spine and the Shoulder in this ranking in terms of growth rate coming from the different business line, and this is to be expected given the past performance of those lines and probably in hip and knees, we have a little bit higher pent-up demand in the second half of the year. So on a yearly basis, it will be probably slightly higher than what we have seen in '19, hopefully, if the external circumstances allowed.

Operator

operator
#37

We now have a follow-up question of Alex Gibson, Morgan Stanley.

Alexander Gibson

analyst
#38

I actually have 3, hopefully, quick ones. Just in the U.S., what are you seeing in terms of ASC volumes or outpatient volumes in the last few weeks? Are you beginning to see volumes move back to the hospital as hospitalization rates full? Or is there still an outflow from hospitals? And then secondly, on your adoption of single-use products, how did they perform in the last year, I would have expected they would have done quite well, but I haven't seen much of a mention in your releases and things. So I'm just wondering if this is still an area of growth for you. And then lastly, just wanted to touch upon your comment earlier about EBITDA margins in the first half being in line with 2019, which is pretty close to your full year guidance. I'm just trying to understand, if it's in line with your guidance in H1 or close to, why would the second half margin not be an improvement over that?

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#39

Yes. So maybe I can start quickly with the last question. In the second half of the year, we do expect to have, hopefully, a restart of third-party events, marketing, travel, et cetera, which is not the case in H1. So that could increase our marketing costs, but together with an increase of sales and margins. That's why we don't make a difference between H1 and H2 in terms of EBITDA. But as you know, it is the changes and up and downs in the top line in H1 and a lot of moving parts to be precise around the EBITDA, but the EUR 29% plus or minus something will be more or less our target throughout the year because of those 2 variables. ASC volumes, I have not received a specific update on that in the last couple of weeks. So I was more focused on the pickup and the acceleration of the overall volume. I know for a fact that many hospitals, even major groups, like Zinger were completely shut down in January, February. And this was not the case in March. Clearly, that means that on our sales, the ASC volume is expected to go down a little bit, but not because the ASC will go down, but because the overall hospital volume will pick up again. Last question was on the efficiency. Our efficiency did help a lot to gain market share in the ASC in 2020, the percentage of knees done with the efficiency did increase a lot, but it was on a number that was overall decreasing. So again, we were mainly missing hospital-based cases, which are traditionally done with -- or let's say, more often done with traditional metal instruments reusable. So it's clear that we have seen an increase of efficiency. It does remain very significant. We are talking about almost 1/3 of our knees. And given the fact that the knees are growing or are expected to grow significantly to maintain such a percentage means that you continuously have to sell this solution to new accounts, which is the case, and it's one of the key driver of our total knee in ASCs at the moment.

Operator

operator
#40

As there are no further questions, I would like to hand back to you.

Francesco Siccardi

executive
#41

Thank you. If there are no further questions, I would like to thank you all for your attention and mention again and hopefully for the last time, the great results in 2020 were coming, thanks to the effort of all our employees from manufacturing to the President of the board, and we all did exceptional efforts and sacrifices to achieve these results, and I would like to thank them all once again. Look forward to the next call.

Operator

operator
#42

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect.

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