Merck KGaA (MRK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Dear ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to Merck's 2021 Capital Markets Day. My name is Constantin Fest, and I'm Head of Investor Relations here at Merck. It's great to see so many of you joining the second fully virtual Capital Markets Day, and we highly appreciate your interest in Merck. As usual, let me start with the legal note. Next to the disclaimer on Page 2. Please note that this event will be recorded both by audio and video. If you have any questions or concerns about that, please feel free to contact the IR team. Please also note that all participants in Darmstadt comply with current COVID-19 regulations. Turning to the agenda for today. We will start with the presentation by Belen Garijo, our Group CEO, followed by the presentation by Marcus Kuhnert, our Group CFO. Right after that, we have reserved time for Q&A with Belen and with Marcus. The second part of our Capital Markets Day will consist of deep dive sessions on each of our 3 business sectors. These will include a short presentation by the respective sector CEO followed by a Q&A with key members of the respective management teams. In terms of logistics, please note that we have 1 dial-in for all sessions. [Operator Instructions] And with that, let me directly hand over to Belen to kick off the event. Belen, over to you.

Thank you, Constantin, and a very warm welcome to Merck's 2021 Capital Markets Day from both Marcus and I here on the stage as well as on behalf of our colleagues of the Executive Board and all their team hosting the afternoon sessions. Of course, we would have preferred to meet you in person as usual prior to the pandemic because this is my first Capital Markets Day, as you know, but rest assured, we are equally excited that once again, as Constantin said, so many of you are joining this fully virtual event. Just recently, we had the chance to discuss our strong H1 performance with many of you. Today, we would like to build on this by sharing our plans and priorities for the years to come, what are the implications for the midterm outlook and, of course, our key drivers of growth. I will start with a high-level perspective of the group, and then present our updated strategy, while Marcus will follow with a more detailed view of the financials. Later today, as also Constantin mentioned, our sector CEOs, Peter, Matthias and Kai, together with their teams, will provide you with an even deeper insight into our 3 business sectors. So let's get started. Here you have the agenda for the presentation. If I had to cut short, this is what I would like you to take away from today's event. Merck is a unique company. It's a globally diversified, leading science and technology company, excellently positioned to capitalize on some of the most important growth trends of the 21st century. Based on our strong innovation platform, we now aim to accelerate our science and technology leadership and to mobilize for growth through focused and disciplined capital allocation. Continued long-term orientation as part of our DNA will be reinforced by stepping up our sustainability efforts, and we will place even greater emphasis on organizational agility, diversity and inclusion and cost discipline. The combination of talent and a high impact-driven culture will power our growth. And my management team and I are firmly committed to further unleash in the tremendous potential of our organization taking Merck to the next level by successfully executing our plans and turning this vision into reality. Today, we would like to give you additional reasons to believe. Reasons to believe in our ability to deliver long-term efficient growth and to generate sustainable value thus for our owners, for our shareholders and for the society at large. Having said this, let's dive straight into Chapter 1. Let me briefly remind you of our very unique and compelling position to capture the key growth trends today and in the future. Over the recent years, we have established a highly solid position resulting from highly mindful portfolio choices. All our end markets are growing structurally above global GDP and our focus markets are growing at an even faster rate. We have strengthened our capabilities and shaped our culture to earn the right to win in high-growth segments. And we will continue to do so even more vigorously going forward. The priority investment focus will be in our so-called big 3, namely Process Solutions; new Healthcare products, our launches; and semiconductor solutions. And more about this later and, of course, in the afternoon sessions. Let me also highlight that COVID-19 pandemic is not only a source of near-term upside for certain parts of our business, it is also a structural accelerator of important trends that we serve and technologies that we have the ability to shape. Think of novel modalities such as mRNA, cell biology, think of digital and data in a world that has only started appreciating the value of virtual interaction, whether in private or professional settings with customers, suppliers or important stakeholders like you, all of you here today. I am stating the obvious, if I say the world has changed and is not going to return to any new known normal. The developments around us are further crystallizing the tremendous potential of our unique setup with leading positions in the fastest-growing science and technology markets. As you are very well aware, we operate 3 business sectors: Healthcare, Life Science and Electronics. All of them are exposed to highly attractive macro trends. And as illustrated here on the slide, they are just not the sum of stand-alone businesses with a bright growth outlook, they are much more than the sum of the parts. Our business holds the promise of becoming increasingly interconnected as we look forward to the future to support and to boost each other to be further diversified and synergistic at the same time. In Healthcare, we are working at the forefront of enabling personalized medicine for chronic diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis and our fertility portfolio helps many couples to realize the dream of having children. In Life Science, we support our customers in speeding up scientific breakthroughs and providing better access to Healthcare by making precision research, simpler analysis, more accurate and the development and production of medicines more efficient. In electronics, we are advancing digital living with our materials and solutions, and we are poised to improve the way we generate access, store, process and display information everywhere around us. And based on this strong setup, we benefit and we are expecting to benefit increasingly from this global and unique diversification, both within and across our business sectors as well as in terms of end markets, end customers and multiple geographies. At the same time, the macro trends that we serve are becoming increasingly interconnected as well from a technology perspective in turn providing us with potentially attractive intersectional opportunities. No matter what the future looks like, our portfolio is at the core of what will drive societal change. And it is a uniquely relevant combination to enable human progress, our purpose. Our globally diversified business provide us with a very solid foundation for continued strong performance in the longer term. And speaking about the longer term, we are convinced that accelerating our science and technology leadership will be a must in order to unleash our growth potential. Disease prevention, personalized medicine and a rapidly growing number of treatment options suggest that we will live longer and healthier more than ever before. This is great news. We will also likely experience unprecedented level of connectedness and augmentation. So the question is, how and when will we get there? What will allow us as a company to push the boundaries of human progress today and become a reality tomorrow? Of course, we don't have a crystal ball. However, we do believe that several innovation fields will make a huge difference, including biotech, next-generation chips or human machine interfaces. Leveraging the knowledge and expertise across several disciplines is going to be also key to harnessing disruptive technologies or participating in adjacent fields. Our leading positions across 3 business sectors, which are at the heart of the future potential put us in a sweeter spot to scout new trends and to drive key innovation. One example is our new bioelectronics innovation field where we recently announced 2 collaborations combining our expertise across electronics, medicines and drug delivery with the neuro stimulation technologies of our partners. Another example, which is known to you, is our [ clean mid projects ]. Here, we are pulling together our know-how in Healthcare and in Life Science and have also established early 2 strategic partners already. Looking ahead, we will focus on expanding our internal innovation capabilities and making our internal R&D model more productive, while further strengthening our broad network with industry leaders, startups and obviously, with academia. Important vehicles in this context are the M Ventures funds with hubs in Europe, in the U.S., in China and in Israel, as well as the global innovation center here at our global headquarters in Darmstadt. As you can see on this slide, we have chosen the innovation center as the background for the introduction of our new strategic framework. So bringing together what I have already said, our direction is very clear, we aim to mobilize for growth with a stringent focus on the big 3 to continue our successful journey of efficient growth. Accelerated science and technology leadership will build a frame, endorsing innovation as the key driver of sustainable value creation. How will we achieve this? Well, through focused and highly disciplined capital allocation based on a systematic and very well-structured approach that puts the enterprise view at the center. We will continue to be guided by our share values and step up our sustainability efforts, consistent with our long-term orientation as a family-owned business with a proud legacy of over 350 years. Finally, we will put even more emphasis on leadership and culture, organizational agility, diversity and inclusion and cost efficiency to fully unleash the potential of this great organization. Moving on to Chapter 2. At group level, our growth ambition can be summarized to 25 by 25. This means we are confident that we will be able to deliver sales of about EUR 25 billion by 2025. Please note that this will largely come from our organic business, including only modest contributions from potential bolt-on M&A. As we have repeatedly said, for the moment, we don't see the need for large transformational moves and we'll stay on focus around complementary, small- to medium-sized deals as more likely. In fact, and I have said this many times before, we are operating already in a very solid position of strength. We face major organic growth potential across significant parts of our business and will step up our investment accordingly. Organic growth has already accelerated and will be further boosted this year by significant COVID-related business especially in Life Science. While it's still difficult to predict, we assume that these COVID-related tailwinds will fade over time. Nonetheless, we expect to add over EUR 1 billion in sales per year organically, and this includes 2021 every year or starting in 2021, every year through 2025 or more than EUR 5 billion in total, which translates into a group organic sales CAGR of around 6%. From a portfolio perspective, about 80% of that growth will stem from the big 3. The rest of the business will also continue to grow. And thinking even longer term, we have good reasons to be confident that our growth story will further unfold in the second half of the decade. As in the past, we are not providing explicit guidance on margins. However, we are firmly committed to efficient growth, and efficient growth goes 1 step beyond profitable growth. It means that we aim to very diligently manage every cost line with a goal to combine attractive near-term earnings growth with sustainable long-term value maximization. The growth that we promised will be fueled by targeted and disciplined investment in a magnitude never seen before. In total, we are ready to invest over EUR 30 billion in CapEx, in R&D and in M&A over the period between 2021 and 2025. This represents an increase of over 50% compared with the prior 5-year period. Of course, actual spending on M&A or in-licensing is highly dependent on opportunities. You know that. However, I can tell you that our deal pipeline is nicely filled, and that we will be ready to move when time comes. In contrast, our R&D and CapEx plans are very, very tangible. We have publicly announced several significant projects in key growth portfolios already, such as single-use assemblies, filtration and antibody drug conjugates. And you will definitely hear more from us moving forward. Today, I would like to spend some time taking you through what is our investment decision-making frame. Given the size of our business and the numerous growth opportunities in front of us, we need a very well-structured approach to strategic capital allocation. And this is going to be now even more important than before. My colleagues on the Executive Board and I are determined to ensure that decisions are taken first at the right level and that the trade-offs are considered with a very accurate level of detail. Hence, instead of looking at sector or product level, we focus at enterprise planning units. As can be seen on the chart that you have in front of you, we have more than 20 such planning units in total, with about half of them within the scope of the big 3. The chart is only for illustrative purposes. And you will understand that we are not going to share any details about what is behind the individual planning units. What I can say is that the size of the enterprise planning units can be different. For example, depending on the strategic relevance in part of future growth and that the number can evolve over time. More importantly, our plans foresee to allocate over 70% of our total investment between 2021 and 2025 to planning units within the scope of the big 3, our key growth engines. And Marcus in his presentation will talk a bit more about portfolio roles and the financial framework that we have for strategic capital allocation, further adding to the high-quality approach that we pursue. So let me now move on to the updated view on the midterm outlook by business sector, starting with Life Science. One of the most frequently asked questions we received about Life Science these days is what is the outlook in the context of COVID? What has changed and what does it mean for their growth profile? As the chart indicates, the Life Science market has witnessed a significant boost from COVID. In the early days of the pandemic, the base market was pulled back by the lockdown effects. You know that. That is significantly reduced lab activity, especially in academia. However, this was more than offset by businesses related to COVID, diagnostics to COVID vaccines and to COVID therapeutics. Since the middle of last year, the base market has started to progressively recover. And by now, activity levels are largely back to precrisis levels. In the medium term, we expect the base market to emerge on an even slightly higher growth trajectory, with our model suggesting growth in a range of 5% to 7% versus the 5% to 6% prior to the pandemic. Important drivers include the arrival of novel modalities and the rising demand for services. Getting back to COVID, demand related to diagnostics has recently picked and is set to fade with rising vaccination rates, at least this is our assumption. Demand related to vaccines remains high. And while it should eventually fade as well, the outlook is highly dependent on virus mutations and on the potential need for booster shots, which by the way, have already started. Rest assured, we are preparing for alternative scenarios, numerous scenarios and that we, most importantly, will supply what is needed. So turning to the outlook for our Life Science business. In essence, the message is stronger for longer reloaded. We are absolutely committed to fully capitalize on the tremendous potential on this highly promising business. Yes, we are not a process solution pure play, but our business model will be shaped to operate as such. We will invest more than ever before. We will expand our capacity and our network significantly to be able to fuel the growth of our industry-leading portfolios, especially in bioprocessing. We will aggressively scale up our service offering across traditional and novel modalities including mRNA, and we plan to complement our offering and capabilities by targeted bolt-on M&A. Research and Applied will be selectively strengthened and those remain vital to our diversified portfolio and not only for cash or resilience, but more importantly, for innovation and trend scouting. Our focus on innovation, digital and rapidly evolving markets in APAC, especially China, will increase significantly. And I encourage you to join Matthias and his team for even deeper insights in the afternoon session. In his presentation, Marcus will also speak more about the composition of growth and what are our assumptions around COVID-19. But above all, we reiterate our bullish stance on Life Science and remain confident in continued above-market growth. Thus, despite the expected negative effects from fading COVID business, we also raised our midterm guidance further to an organic sales CAGR to -- going from 7% to 10%. Now turning to Healthcare. Let me start with a brief comment on the market trends. Growth in oncology, our largest therapeutic area continues to be highly attractive, and the movement towards precision medicines remains fully intact. At the same time, cost pressure is rising across the industry. And pricing, we are expecting pricing to be likely more volatile. Against this background, we are confident in growing our Healthcare business sector further based on our strong track record and a solid position in key therapeutic areas. We are at the forefront of driving innovative models of treatment personalization such as in infertility. We have developed a long-term strategy in oncology with a diversified clinical portfolio. Our globally diversified footprint in terms of R&D, manufacturing and commercial provides us with significant competitive advantages. For example, we have limited exposure to the U.S. pricing reforms. We can react quickly to local market trends and we enjoy the benefits of a broad spectrum of payer types. Our overall R&D strategy is evolving further. We continue to explore different assets, but intend to be significantly more focused in terms of therapeutic areas. As such, we are moving from correlated to distinct and correlated risks. The variety of pathways that we explore will be supported by new modalities, and we will focus on market segments where we can really make a difference and have the ability to win. And the licensing of xevinapant is a great example in this context or think about our focused approach when it comes to the development of other late-stage assets such as evobrutinib and tepotinib. Commercially, we continue to build on a highly resilient portfolio of established products. And we will further drive the uptake of recent launches such as Mavenclad, such as Bavencio and of course, tepotinib. To sum it all up, we are introducing our new midterm financial ambition for Healthcare today. This calls for organic sales growth in the mid-single digits and will be supported not only by our confidence in the trajectory of established products and recently launched products, but also by risk adjusted contributions from pipeline assets. Longer term, optionality could be even more compelling and Peter and the Healthcare team will be delighted to provide you with additional color on key initiatives later today. Moving into electronics. Here, the environment couldn't be more vibrant. Major technology trends such as 5G, Big Data and the Internet of Things are on the rise and will inevitably continue to drive exponential data growth. This data will need to be generated, processed, stored and interacted with one way or another, requiring semiconductors and displays in countless applications and implying strong and sustainable demand for our solutions for the electronics industry. You have seen that semiconductor companies and governments around the world have announced billion of investments in the field which provides clear evidence for further acceleration of our end markets. Following the very successful turnaround of our electronic business sectors, we are in a very solid position to capitalize on these promising opportunities. I would qualify this as excellently positioned. Not least, thanks to the very successful acquisition of Versum, and thanks to that, we have established one of the broadest and most relevant portfolios in the industry. We are firmly committed to fully capitalizing on the potential of semiconductor solutions as one of our key growth engines. We are enabling breakthrough technologies in high-value areas of wafer processing, helping our customers make smaller, faster, more energy-efficient and more sustainable devices. Together with our customers, we are pioneering in exciting areas, such as the high throughput experimentation for novel wafer processing materials and big data and artificial intelligence projects that would allow us to post once again the boundaries of quality and innovation in the materials space. Overall, our focus have shifted from building a platform to executing on growth, and we will significantly accelerate our investment and innovation in full sync with the plans of our customers. Kai and his team will, today, providing you with additional details on how we will achieve this during the afternoon session. But to make a long story short, if anything, our excitement for the outlook of electronics has also further increased. As such, we are raising our midterm guidance and now expect organic sales growth in a range of 3% to 6% for the whole sector. So now let me move to the final chapter of this introduction today, covering what I consider to be fundamental enablers of our performance. I firmly believe that our culture and the way we operate as an organization will be vital for continued success. Different dimensions need to go hand in hand. And while Marcus will cover a bit more on processes and systems, let me speak about our operating model and our people and talent strategy. Our pioneering concepts for flexible and remote working, which we have implemented already before the pandemic have paid off extremely well. Obviously, during the pandemic, even better because we were very well prepared, and we are now accelerating new principles to further leverage our positive experience in terms of employee performance and employee motivation and engagement. We continue to work to cut hierarchy levels, micro teams and bureaucracy overall to enable faster decision-making and to drive increasing organizational agility as key accommodating factors of growth. The Board and our HR teams are increasing efforts to attract new talent in accordance with our expansion plans, including different skill sets, such as data scientists and geographically placed in regions of growing importance for our growth, such as the U.S. and China. We are also putting extra emphasis on continuous learning and development of our managers to further strengthen our leadership culture. The focus will be on driving encouragement, empowerment and accountability and the focus will be on creating a working environment to foster innovation and also an environment where our people can thrive. Above all, our people strategy is deeply rooted in a commitment to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion. Allow me to address this important topic a little bit further. Diversity, equity and inclusion contribute to our financial ambition. I consider that to be a competitive advantage, contributes to our talent objectives and enrich our purpose. We need people with different cultural backgrounds, thinking, talking and living differently, most importantly, post COVID. The more diverse our human capital is the better we can address the current and the future challenges to make a positive difference in people's lives. We have made great progress on several fronts and have set ourselves new ambitions for the near future. This will be supported, of course, by a range of initiatives and led by a newly appointed Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer. The proportion of women in leadership roles already increased to 35% by the end of last year, and we are now aiming for gender parity by 2030. Achieving this will come with different challenges across the different industries that we operate. However, we are prepared to tap into the growing pool of talented women and to motivate them to further develop at Merck. This will be back by focusing some of our mentoring, sponsoring and talent programs. Thanks to our excellent geographic footprint, we can leverage local talent and diversity across racial and ethnic minorities in key markets to better understand our customers. And as such, we aspire to increase the share of underrepresented ethnic colleagues in leadership positions in the U.S. from 20% to 30% and the share of nationals from Asia, Latin America, Middle East and Africa in leadership roles from 16% to 30%, both by 2030. Beyond our aspiration to foster specific types of diversity and equity, we will continue to accelerate efforts to create a truly inclusive culture for all our employees. This means that through to 2026, all our leaders will be participating in programs, which will help them reflect on how they can live more inclusively. Diversity is an expression of flexible structure and forward-looking behavior. And the same is true for sustainability. The world is facing numerous societal and environmental challenges, and we, as a company, are fully committed to mitigating issues today and turning them into opportunities for the future as best as we can. Almost a year ago, we introduced new strategic sustainability goals built on what we have achieved and aimed at delivering much more in the coming year. First, in 2030, we will advance human progress for more than 1 billion people globally through sustainable science and tech. Second, by 2030, we will integrate sustainability into all our value chains. And last but not least, by 2040, we will achieve climate neutrality and significantly reduce our resource consumption. Earlier this year, we introduced concrete targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, water and waste. And in May, our general assembly approved the new Executive Board compensation system, which will be directly linked to ESG. Meanwhile, we made progress in developing a set of suitable KPIs for external reporting, and Marcus will certainly update you on the ongoing and upcoming rollouts. I am absolutely convinced that accelerating our science and tech leadership will be the key enabler of our positive impact on society and the environment. Sustainability not only guides our behavior in our day-to-day operation, our stakeholder interaction and the development of our people is a key element of our R&D road map across all business sectors. And this means that more and more of our products and technologies will directly mitigate ESG risk or contribute to solving more of the greater sustainability issues that we face, resulting in mutual benefits for society, the environment and importantly, our business performance. So let me conclude by summarizing my key message for you today. We are operating this company from a position of strength, solid strength. We aim to accelerate our science and technology leadership to mobilize for long-term efficient growth. We are significantly boosting our investment based on a very well structured approach for capital allocation with a clear focus on driving further innovation around the big 3 pillars. Last but not least, we will put greater emphasis on culture and leadership and sustainability as key enablers of our performance. Rest assured, we are absolutely committed to executing our plans with vigor, and we are highly confident to deliver on our ambitious goals, taking Merck to the next level and creating sustainable value. Thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to reconnecting with all of you during the question-and-answer session. And with this, please Marcus come to the stage to continue the discussion.

Good morning, everybody. A warm welcome also from my side to this year's Capital Markets Day. And I'm here actually to provide you the financial perspective on what Belen has just outlined. So I think Belen has given you a nice overview on the priorities what we plan to do actually where we put our bets in order to mobilize our company for growth in the next couple of years. So the financial perspective, actually, I want to focus a little bit on performance and efficient growth. That is actually, as you know, nothing new for us. After the investment year 2018, we have been geared our organization, our company strongly towards profitable growth, as you know. And as Belen has explained, the notion of efficient growth is relatively similar to profitable growth, but, however, with a different twist with a very strong focus on cost. Actually, from my point of view, there are 3 aspects, which I want to mention here to highlight a little bit this performance and efficient growth priority. On the one hand, and that will be tackled later in the presentation, strategic capital allocation will become more important than ever. The reason is, as you know, in the past, we have been engaged in big transformational acquisitions. The current situation going forward will likely call more for a string of pearls approach, which makes strategic capital allocation decisions more multifaceted and also in a way more complex. So we will dive into that. The second aspect, which is a little bit different is, I would say, an even stronger outward perspective. I would summarize this in a short sentence saying success only starts when and where we beat competition. And thirdly, as Belen outlined, strong focus on costs, but also on cash and capital. Also this, we will take it later in the presentation, and that is basically the agenda, which we dive into over the next 25 to 30 minutes. Let's jump into the topic and start with capital allocation. In the last couple of years, we were basically very often or almost -- yes, I would say, quite regularly, facing the challenge that we have more growth opportunities than what we can fund. And I can tell you, this "challenge" is more true than ever. So that means the ever repeating question, where do we get the best bang for our buck is also very relevant over the next years to come. The good thing is that we are looking into the future from a position of strength, and that has actually 2 very concrete implications. One is the already mentioned focus more on smaller bolt-on acquisitions over the next couple of years rather than 1 big transformational move, simply because we don't need it at this point in time. And secondly, and that is a direct consequence out of that, we want to strengthen all of our 3 businesses going forward. So having this in mind, let's have a look on how concretely we do strategic capital allocation. You can see on the slide the metrics on the X-axis, market attractiveness; on the Y-axis, capabilities and competitive positioning. So what we have been doing is actually, we have segmented our portfolio in so-called enterprise planning units, as Belen said. And those enterprise planning units are actually guiding, driving our decisions in the future for the allocation of capital. We have had 2 things in mind. First of all, the enterprise planning units need to exhibit or the necessary the important characteristics of the businesses, so it's a kind of steering unit in our portfolio. And secondly, also, it needs to reflect -- secondly, it needs to reflect the appropriate level or aggregation where we, as an Executive Board, still want to engage ourselves. And as Belen explained, sector level is way too highly aggregated, but I think it's quite obvious that we would also not involve ourselves on the level of single products. So that led to the enterprise planning units. And the third aspect that we should have in mind is, when looking on strategic capital allocation decisions based on these enterprise planning units, that we need to keep the cash flow balance for the company. That means we have to have a balanced picture between enterprise planning units where we invest, and on the other hand, those who generate cash and to finance our investments. So in a nutshell, when we look on the portfolio of enterprise planning units, we can say we have currently a strong and well-positioned portfolio. That was also, I think, evidenced in the most recent corona crisis. Secondly, from, let's say, we look on it from a rating perspective, we have also very, very clear advantages of our 3-pillar structure of 3 distinctly different business sectors, which simply gives us more financial headroom when it comes to financing growth opportunities. And thirdly, when we look on it from a guardrails perspective, we can say we are very satisfied with this 3-pillar structure, and that means do not expect over the next couple of years that we are going to divest one of our sectors, but also do not expect that we are adding a fourth leg to the company. Of course, I mean, regular portfolio reviews, as you know it from us, we will do from time to time. Moving on to the next slide and shedding a little bit light on what kind of concrete actions do the portfolio roles trigger? So what does it concretely mean when it comes to strategic capital allocation. You can see here on this slide, that we have 4 categories actually in the portfolio, invest for growth and invest for leadership, manage for cash and evaluate. So as Belen already said, the big 3 are predominantly rooted in the invest for growth and invest for leadership categories. And the most important characteristic of these brackets is they are eligible for M&A money, and they are also eligible for, so to say, bigger CapEx investments, bigger means, which goes beyond just maintaining the asset base. Additionally, obviously, we have much higher expectations when it comes to top line growth. And at least for the invest for growth bucket, we would be willing, at least for a certain period of time, to compromise a little bit on margin, although it goes without saying that over a long period of time, all of our businesses have to earn their cost of capital. When we look on the manage for cash bracket, so why I'm not supposed to give you a lot of details, which enterprise planning units are in which bracket, I think it is not too difficult to guess that, for example, parts of our base business in Healthcare or liquid crystals are located in that bracket. And here, the focus is on, let's say, moderate growth, but strongly on margins and on cash flow. And those businesses located there, they are not really eligible for M&A money. I would say, opportunistic acquisitions are thinkable in rare circumstances, but only when they provide an excellent financial profile, but it also does not mean that we are not investing there at all. Of course, we want to keep the engine running. So that means maintenance CapEx, of course, is being done in those businesses. And last but not least, briefly, the evaluate sector is reserved for businesses that we consider partnering that we are considering for divestment or where we have a, for example, a turnaround job to do. Moving on to give you a little bit more flavor on, let's say, the strategic capital allocation decisions we have already taken the approach that is likely over the next couple of years. So first of all, I want to start with the statement that on the back of a very swift deleveraging after the Versum acquisition, we have been able to digest this move over the last 2 years, and that has led to a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio now well below factor 2. And let's say, if we would be doing nothing in terms of M&A until end of 2022, a financial headroom in the high single-digit billion euros. So quite comfortable starting position. I also want to reiterate again that we are and will be committed also in the future to a conservative financial policy. That means we do not walk away from the clear prerequisite that we want to maintain a strong investment-grade credit rating at all times. So having said this, still, when we look on our 3 most important spend buckets, namely M&A, R&D spend and CapEx, we will -- in order to support to foster our future growth, we will significantly ramp up the spend to more than 50% or by more than 50% in the time period 2021 to 2025 compared to the time period 2016 to 2020. At the same time, following a focused approach behind our capital spend, as Belen already outlined, more than 70% of our capital allocation will go to the so-called big stream. If we look a little bit more into the details, what is in front of us, on M&A, I think I made my point. Just to reiterate once more that we will continue with M&A activity, but more bolt-ons, more string of pearls approach rather than a big transformative acquisition in the future. In terms of R&D, I think it is pretty clear, if we are a science -- a leading science and technology company, innovation is amongst the thing that matters most to us. So that means R&D will play a critically important role going forward. We will continue to spend the major part of our R&D investments in Healthcare, obviously. So to increase R&D productivity on the one hand, on the other hand, also to build and further develop our pipeline. In Life Science, R&D efforts are mostly behind developing robust tools for gene cell and viral therapies, and at the same time, enhancing our lipids portfolio further nonviral delivery. And in Electronics, Belen already mentioned it, it is mostly enabling smaller, faster and more sustainable devices going forward. And last but not least, looking on CapEx, I mean, all of you know that there are plenty of unprecedented growth opportunities, especially at the moment in Life Science and in Electronics on the back of the dynamics of COVID-19. So where we are actually aiming to ramp up our footprint in the CDMO and CTO space. For example, there are a lot of opportunities and also to support our customers in the semiconductor industry, we are currently investing billions of dollars. So if we want to remain a strategic supplier, we need also now to ramp up our capacities. All this will lead to an increase in our CapEx spend from currently a level of round about EUR 1.5 billion to relatively soon in the future to a level of EUR 2 billion where we expect to stay over the next couple of years. So moving to a little bit more to the cost and efficiency part. Belen has elaborated on the people topics and on our operating model going forward. I would focus a little bit more here on processes and systems. When we look on performance and efficient growth, we believe that organizational agility is a prerequisite to keep costs under control and ultimately then to deliver against our ambition of efficient growth. When we look a little bit on the slide here, we are not definitely not starting from 0. We have a proven track record by -- or driven or built up by big transformational programs, think about the Bright Future program in Electronics, the recently started Thrive Program in Healthcare, think about successful integrations after big acquisitions. So we have gained a lot of experience over the last couple of years. What matters when we look on this topic? It is continuous simplification and harmonization with a global scope. I mean, with 3 distinctly different sectors, with a global footprint, we have a certain degree of complexity and simplification and harmonization will drive cost efficiencies going forward. At the same time, we are moving away step-by-step from a functional view on our company more to end-to-end processes. We are leveraging new innovative technologies, smart process automation as 1 keyword. We have more than 100 robots meanwhile, for example, in several finance areas under service or in service. And last but not least, also, important to mention quality or service improvements and cost reductions, cost efficiencies is not a contradiction at all. And when saying this, I want to move to the next slide and explain a little bit our journey in MBS. MBS stands for MAC Business Services, and it is basically our shared services backbone of the company. It is a journey we have embarked on in 2016, and it has, for example, already a proven track record of delivering savings over the last couple of years. Against the baseline, the cost baseline of 2016, our ambition is to deliver EUR 80 million savings, of which we will have achieved 95%, so EUR 76 million by the end of this year. I was, over quite a time, really optimistic that we cracked the EUR 80 million also. But unfortunately, here, the COVID-19 restrictions, especially when it comes to a lot of transformation projects that have to be done has delayed the schedule a little bit so that we will complete the EUR 80 million most likely by next year. We have seen, at the same time, personnel cost reductions by more than 20%, almost 1,000 people shifting to our global shared service centers, which are located in Manila in the Philippines, in Breslau in Poland, in Montevideo in Uruguay, and we have also a center -- an IT center of excellence in Bangalore, plus some onshore centers in our big locations in the headquarters in Darmstadt in Boston and in China. The main driver of the efficiencies in an early phase of shared services, obviously, is labor arbitrage, but we are meanwhile already in Phase II, where efficiency come from further harmonization, automation, an increased focus on end-to-end processes, what I already mentioned, plus the utilization of new technologies, and ultimately also extending the service scope beyond finance, procurement and HR, which are currently in scope of shared services to other group functions and potentially also in, let's say, MBS 2.0 maybe at a later point of time, possibly also to the businesses. When we look on cost consciousness on the next slide, important to note that it is much, much more than just a single cost-reduction program. We really want to anchor cost consciousness and diligent cost management in our culture as part of our DNA. And let me outline 4 factors here, 4 different aspects. First of all, we are tackling basically with our cost, I would say, review and management efforts, a spend base of around about EUR 5 billion. So that is a big ticket item. And let's say, careful and diligent management of that cost base allows us not only to reduce costs, but also, let's say, to stop spending, which goes completely in the wrong direction or to redirect funds and resources to initiatives that are really supporting our growth. At the same time, in this context, we have to mention COVID-19. Why? Because on the one hand, it was fortunate for us that we have started this more diligent approach, much more diligent approach to cost when COVID-19 came on us because simply some of the work was already done. We were not starting from scratch when imposing or having to implement all the COVID-19 restrictions, we have to deal with since almost 2 years now. So at the same time, we have also observed that with the necessities that come along with COVID, we are finally in certain, let's say, cost items much, much more radical than we ever thought we could be. And that is, at the same time, a big opportunity for the future because you can rest absolutely assured that Belen and myself, we are super vigilant and super attentive that we would not easily switch back to pre-COVID cost levels, but leverage the learnings, leverage the experiences from the pandemic in order actually to start into the future from a very different and much lower cost base than what we had in the past. Very importantly, also here the cultural aspect. From my point of view, there are 2 success factors to make this effort sustainable. One is transparency. If -- when you want to have individual accountability, you need to be able to trace cost developments into the most granular wrinkles of our organization. We have made a big step -- big progress here introducing, for example, a global cost object hierarchy this year, which allows us now to track costs and responsibilities, responsibles on a very granular level. At the same time, what is also learning over the past couple of years, if you want to see behavioral changes, you have to anchor this into processes and systems. Only then you will be able to check behavior and to push the organization in a certain direction. And of course, we have solid proof points. I mean, EUR 400 million savings, basically, as I said, admittedly, supported by COVID-19, but that is a big plus point driving also margins on top of the strong growth that we currently see. Main -- strong contributors here, categories like or cost items like, for example, travel and entertainment, services and professional fees, communication and events, but also spends like marketing or warehousing and logistics. Moving on to the outlook. H2 outlook or let's say, the entire year 2021, as we have guided in August, will be a good year. We have seen very strong growth in the first 6 months driven also by strong business dynamics from COVID-19, and we will see also a good H2, however, lower growth rates. And that is not very surprising if you just remember that the COVID-19 recovery basically started in June last year, so we already had a pretty strong H2 in 2020. If we look on this a little bit more in detail and per sector, let me summarize -- yes, let me summarize what is coming. So in H2, please keep in mind that the growth in Healthcare will be a little bit lower than the first half, first of all, because the comparables are much, much tougher; and secondly, because H1 was benefiting from onetime milestone payments. So for example, for the Bavencio renal approvals in Europe and in Japan, but also from the onetime Lilly effect, so the supply agreement where we had the major part of the EUR 90 million in total, namely round about EUR 50 million in the second quarter and another round about EUR 30 million we had in Q4 2020, which means it increases our comparable basis in the second half of this year. In Life Science story it's relatively short, namely a declining tailwind from COVID-19, as Belen has already elaborated on. And in Electronics, actually, we foresee a pretty good -- very strong second half of the year with even a little bit more growth dynamic than in the first half of the year on the back of a very strongly performing semiconductor business. Remember Q1, the start into the year was a little bit softer and now also DS&S strongly delivering in the second half of the year. I make a short expose to our ESG targets and KPIs. Before then, I will finalize the presentation with the financial perspective on the midterm outlook on the 3 sectors. On ESG, here are a couple of topics which we are working on. And let me just mention a few of them. First of all, still ongoing analysis of the requirements on the -- let's say, or having in mind a very dynamic environment when it comes to stakeholder requirements on the one hand, but also activity from regulators and lawmakers. So we are -- we see a very dynamically changing environment, and we need to be up to our toes in order, let's say, to get the latest developments and also to adapt our action plans and strategy forward to the latest developments. What we are currently building up is a data platform that is super important actually to fulfill in the future the necessary ESG reporting and also to be able to get the most important KPIs for reporting, but also business steering on a systems-based -- or from a systems-based platform. I mean imagine you would have to drag everything what is relevant in the ESG context permanently with manual efforts out of our systems all over the world, that would be a big hassle. So we need a database in order to have a kind of automated reporting and steering. At the same time, and I'll come to that on the next slide a little bit more in detail, we will include sustainability metrics in our Executive Board compensation. And last but not least, to mention also business steering in the future will be influenced by ESG metrics. Just think about 2 examples. One is we need to include ESG criteria, for example, into our due diligence approaches when it comes to M&A. And we need to find a way to incorporate ESG considerations, metrics, targets when it comes to, for example, decision-making on CapEx projects. Just 2 examples. On the next slide, you see for the first time KPIs, which we consider relevant on the one hand, to achieve our 3 targets that Belen has outlined in her presentation, but also on the other hand, to do business steering to report. And finally, also a combination of those KPIs will actually be then or find entry into the sustainability KPI that we will use in the future for Executive Board remuneration. We will publish this KPI for Executive Board remuneration latest at the AGM 2022, latest. So now we move to the outlook for the 3 sectors, starting with Life Science. Belen has already made the pledge 7% to 10% organic sales growth, continuously ahead of market and also a slight upgrade to -- from where we were coming from. The main driver, 1 of the big 3, not a big surprise, Process Solutions with an 80% contribution to this 7% to 10% organic sales CAGR over the next couple of years. The main drivers will be products for traditional modalities, so mainly for monoclonal antibodies. And here, we need capacity investments and network expansions as already outlined. We also want in the future to build scale in services for other modalities and monoclonal antibodies. That means we will be moving from a focus on monoclonal antibodies now to a more multi-modality game in the future with focus besides monoclonal antibodies on high potency APIs, antibody drug conjugates, viral vectors and, of course, based on the recent breakthroughs also on mRNA. And also, we will be templating products for novel modalities going forward. Applied and Research are supposed, after a temporary COVID boom at least in Research Solutions, to return over time to the historical growth trends and to deliver low single-digit and mid-single-digit growth, respectively. On Healthcare, the major growth driver over the next couple of years will be our new products from the pipeline. In, let's say, the near future, it will be the usual suspects, Mavenclad, Bavencio, tepotinib. In the more distant parts of the midterm guidance, so in the later years until 2025, new products, think about our BTK program, so evobrutinib on the one hand, berzosertib to be mentioned and also xevinapant which is supposed to contribute strongly beyond 2025. And last but not least, looking on Electronics, here, the message is we are moving from transformation to executing growth. We have built our platform over the last couple of years. Now we are ready to harvest basically the fruits. Just a couple of proof points from our successful development, Bright Future transformation is close to being completed. We are delivering all of the savings, but earlier than planned. We are very well on track regarding the Versum acquisition integration. We have built a strong, attractive growing portfolio with basically 10 almost equally sized portfolio units. The major part of this, so 6 out of that 10 located in semiconductor solutions, which will drive our growth going forward. We will see accelerated CapEx spend, as mentioned, and we have managed well. We have stabilized display and managed well the turnaround in Surface Solutions. So all that will lead to a 3% to 6% CAGR going forward, supported by a new growth program that we are just about to start in Electronics, which is called Level Up. Display Solutions will see continuously a low single-digit decline over the next couple of years. And until 2025, we will see it, let's say, on the way, the turning point and finally, the OLED growth will be overcompensated -- overcompensating liquid crystals decline and will bring also display back to growth and surface post-COVID supposed to grow low single digit. With that, just few words as executive summary. Our finance priorities will help us to accelerate our science and tech leadership. We are starting from a position of strength. We will be executing clearly defined enterprise portfolio unit roles in order to secure a targeted strategic capital allocation approach. We will be very disciplined going forward, continue to be disciplined, and we will further work on our cost structures by leveraging organizational agility and also will add this focus also on cash and capital in order to maximize our financial value creation over the next couple of years. Thank you very much. And back to Constantin.

Thank you, Marcus. This means that now we will be ready to begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And with that, let me directly hand back to Serge, our operator for the day, in order to kick off the Q&A. So over to you, Serge. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Matt Weston, Credit Suisse.

Thank you very much for the detailed introduction. My question is on your commitment to add more than EUR 1 billion a year in sales organically. It looks like in 2022, this could be very challenging given based on your previous comments, we should plan for you losing somewhere between EUR 300 million and EUR 400 million of COVID sales, you lose 70 million Erbitux to Lilly, EUR 100 million GSK upfront and I think EUR 50 million Bavencio by the milestone. So my question is in 2022, that would suggest you need EUR 1.5 billion to get to the growth commitment. And I just don't know where that is coming from. Can you help me?

Marcus, go ahead.

Yes. Matthew, thanks for the question. So it comes -- or it's supposed to come from a further ramp-up of our new products, Mavenclad and Bavencio, which are supposed to drive Healthcare growth like in the past and to overcompensate for some onetime effects that might be missing going forward. In Life Science, we will see, let's say, in 2022, I would say, a COVID-19 tailwind, which is ballpark-wise, nearly close to the same level to what we have seen in 2021, plus, don't forget, we have also seen a nice acceleration in our base business, which we expect actually to continue and to see also in 2022. And in Electronics, we have the strong growth trend dynamic in semiconductor materials plus the DS&S business, which will drive the growth in that sector. So putting all this together, we are confident. I mean, it won't be a walk in the park, that's for sure, but we are confident that we can reach this ambition even also in 2022.

If I could just have a quick follow-up to understand then. It would seem that you've changed your guidance around the COVID effect. So previously, I think, Belen, you said EUR 1 billion this year moving to at least EUR 700 million in '22. It now suggests that you can do meaningfully better than the, at least, EUR 700 million in 2022. And that...

Matthew, we haven't changed our guidance for Life Science. We said at least EUR 700 million incremental sales in Process Solutions, not COVID sales only. Remember, our growth in Process Solutions is driven by our core business and COVID equally. And the outlook that we have presented earlier this morning is integrating the numbers that we have mentioned before for process.

Just to reiterate, Matt, yes, the EUR 1 billion that we have given is all in. So that means it's Process roundabout EUR 900 million and also more than EUR 150 million roundabout in Research. In Process for 2022, we said something more than EUR 700 million. And I also said it's not exactly the same, it is in the same range. So it might be relatively close.

The next question comes from Peter Verdult from Citi.

Marcus or Belen, I realized you probably don't want to put on the spot, with respective margins. So I'll frame my question as follows. You've highlighted your revenue outlook. Consensus is around EUR 7.5 billion of EBITDA in 2025. That implies a broadly sort of flat margin to what you are going to do in 2021. So that seems to allow for investments in the business, perhaps margins at Life Science easingly so. But is it right to think that the spirit -- the way we should interpret it is that very much leads risk to the upside given your comments on driving efficient growth. So I'm just trying to push my luck and to see how far you're willing to discuss the margin outlook midterm.

Peter, thank you so much. You know that we are not going to guide on margins. We have never done it before. If you combine growth expectations, which is our main gold at this time towards the coming years with a stringent cost management in which we already have a significant track record, we see opportunities. When I speak about efficient growth, I take it a notch ahead of profitable growth because we are already operating on profitable growth. So for me, efficient growth, and I am very confident that we are extremely well placed to deliver on that. Means that profitable growth is not enough. Basically, we will manage every cost line of the P&L to keep it very efficiently driven. But of course, as you rightly said, we need to fuel growth at the same time. So I mean, I already gave a perspective of where are we investing, how much investment is behind growth. So up to 70% of our investment is behind the 80% expected growth of the Big 3. And I am very relaxed that we will continue on a good trajectory and deliver efficient growth.

Our next question comes from Wimal Kapadia from Bernstein.

So I just wanted to ask a little bit about M&A and your bolt-on strategy, within Life Sciences and semis in particular, which parts of the value chain, what skill set do you think Merck is actually missing that ideally you would like to bolster? Or you're actually happy with 2 of the 3 big growth drivers and those businesses are more about internal investment which you've highlighted already today?

Thank you, Wimal. Look, we are not looking at M&A to fill gaps, right? We are looking at M&A to drive growth, right? So that is the frame guiding us. And therefore, you could expect that we are enhancing our service business and really looking for opportunities and targets that will actually fit the strategic frame that I have already presented during the introduction. Marcus, I don't want to -- I don't know if you want to add anything? But keep in mind that we are not filling up, right? We are absolutely aware that driving Life Science growth and delivering on those growth expectations will require organically -- I'm talking now about the organic piece, will require that we prepare the organization to deliver on that growth. And this is something that is a top priority for the Board, right? When it comes to M&A, no gap filling, simply growth contribution, additional growth contribution on what you have seen.

Our next question comes from Michael Leuchten from UBS.

My question is on payback period. I guess this is more Marcus. Marcus, you've grown the top line since 2018 all-in excluding currencies by about 8% a year, I think. And now the investments are going up by 50% across CapEx, R&D and the like, and the growth is 6% going forward. So when I think about this from a return on capital perspective, is that CapEx sort of investment increase, a reflection of a slight underinvestment over the last few years? Or is the capital intensity increasing going forward such that the growth that you get from the incremental investment will just be lower than it has been in the past?

Let me speak a bit of the strategic perspective, and I'll let Marcus to deal with the financial piece. Look, our CapEx investment, once again, is mainly dedicated to expanding capacity for Life Science, mainly process, mainly single-use, mainly filtration and other modalities, and then new technologies both Life Science and Electronics and a smaller intensity in Healthcare, which, of course, is more driven by R&D. So that is basically the reason why we have significantly step up our CapEx investment, once again, to be able to deliver on the growth expectations that we have promised this morning return?

Yes. Maybe 2 comments to add to that. First of all, Michael, do not forget that we are also, let's say, in the years now 2021 to 2025 are laying the foundation for strong growth beyond 2025, yes. So that means we always have a kind of mismatch over time because investments come earlier than the returns. That is one thing. The second thing is when we look on our midterm financial projections, return on capital employed as well as economic value added both play a major role in our considerations. So we would not enter into an investment plan by when this would mean that we would be reducing return on capital employed or EVA. Acquisitions is a little bit a different story because then you always have a jump in capital employed and, let's say, [indiscernible] fix decline in EVA as well as in ROCE. But when we look on organic growth plans, they are accompanied by an increasing return on capital going forward for the company and for the [ semis ].

The next question comes from Richard Vosser from JPMorgan.

Just going back on the M&A. If we think about the contribution that you mentioned from M&A to your sales growth targets for each division, should we expect in the M&A to take the growth to the top end of those ranges with the middle more an organic level of growth? Belen, you mentioned a small contribution from M&A, but how should we put that in perspective to the growth?

Thank you, Richard. I'm not going to give you the exact breakdown, but assume that the majority of what we have presented this morning is coming from organic sales. The very high majority, very modest contribution from potential bolt-on M&A.

Yes. I mean just to make the math, Richard, so the guidance for this year is 19-point something, yes? So in 2025, we aim at being at 25%, and we say each and every year more than EUR 1 billion plus from organic. That doesn't leave you a big gap actually as a residuum and that obviously has to be filled with M&A. And don't forget, we have 1 variable included, which nobody of us can foresee today, which is currency. So that is -- that's not a precise guidance, it's an ambition that we want to achieve in 2025, with organic growth as a major contributor by far.

The next question comes from Gary Steventon from Exane BNP Paribas.

Great. I'll just come back on M&A as well. So when you talked about M&A and bolt-ons, just wondering how much of a consideration it is in maintaining kind of a balance between the 3 divisions, really particularly considering that looking at larger M&A longer term, Life Sciences is now quite large within the group?

Thank you. Thank you for your question. I already hinted a bit during the introduction that we are going to be extremely disciplined to focus our M&A investment on around the big 3. So are we going to equally distribute? No, this is not coffee for all, right? So it's going to depend on how much value we create with what opportunity. And of course, as I said, I feel very comfortable with the deal pipeline that we have at this time in the company. And we will make choices according to the very rigorous process that I have sketched during the introduction, looking at enterprise planning units rather than sectors. And of course, forget about it, this is not going to be allocating equally to each and every sector, but rather driven by what is -- who is the winner in terms of -- which one is the winner in terms of the value creation when we look at this at the planning unit level?

The next question comes from Luisa Hector from Berenberg.

I wanted to come back to the sales guidance, and sort of explore your relative level of confidence in achieving the guidance by division? And what the key risks would be to -- of a disruption that would mean you didn't achieve that level of growth? And I noticed that you had that little footnote on the Life Science with some guide as to the growth rate sort of with and without COVID in 2025. I wonder if you could just expand on that a little bit, please?

Luisa, thank you for the question. I think we have -- Marcus has elaborated on the growth contribution. I mean, we are -- I said during my introduction, we are bullish on our Life Science outlook. We have reflected that on our increased guidance. We are confident and encouraged by the signals that we are receiving in 2021, coming out of our launches in all geographies. And when we look at the very vibrant semiconductor segment when our customers are investing billion, we are once again confident that this is going to be realizing. I mean 80% of the growth we have presented comes from these 3 pillars. So if you look back, right, I feel reasonably confident that our core business in health care will continue to behave as we have communicated before, that our core business in life science will continue to grow and that in electronics, we are going to be mainly driven by semiconductors, with the liquid crystals business or display business declining in the range we have said. So all put in the analysis, I feel reasonably confident that we are very well placed. And we have a track record, right? So Marcus, anything to add?

Nothing to add. I just said I'm as confident as...

You share my confidence.

Yes. Yes.

So equal levels of confidence across the big 3?

Equal level of confidence across the big 3. You mean -- yes, that's what I meant.

Yes. Yes.

The next question comes from Falko Friedrichs from Deutsche Bank.

My question is on the investments and that 50% increase over the planning period. Could you briefly summarize for us what that means in absolute terms? And out of this absolute amount, what would be the split between OpEx and CapEx? And then a brief follow-up for Marcus. I think you mentioned that this EUR 2 billion CapEx spend in 2023 is something we should also assume for the years thereafter? And did I understand that correctly?

Go ahead.

Yes. So thanks, Falko, for the question. So when we look on the 3 spend buckets, M&A is, in a way, a placeholder because we don't yet exactly know how this is going to play out. CapEx, you can think about some EUR 20 billion from 2016 to '20, raising to EUR 30 billion from -- roundabout ballpark from 2021 to 2025. In R&D, we think about further increasing spend numbers in absolute terms, but declining ratio in percent of sales. And the EUR 2 billion CapEx bucket, you will see or we will see already quite a significant ramp-up to a level relatively close to the EUR 2 billion in 2022, but then a much more flattened development over than the coming 3 years from '22 to '25.

Our next question comes from Sachin Jain from Bank of America.

Just one question on the life science guide. It's clearly been conservative over the last year, understandable, given the uncertainty. I just wanted to understand better what is included within the EUR 700 million floor for '22 and the new low to mid-teens process guide and what is upside as we think about mRNA modalities beyond COVID, such as flu and you mentioned the initial receipt of booster jabs. So just want to clarify what's in and what remains upside?

Sachin, I think you will have the chance to look at the life science outlook with a lot of granularity today with the team. But we have been speaking very often, including in the last quarterly call on this topic. And we have already acknowledged that based on the expectations that have been communicated to the market in terms of vaccine doses and boosters, we have -- we are expecting at least EUR 700 million for our life science business. And I don't know exactly how much this is coming from COVID, but we can assume is...

The EUR 700-plus is COVID tailwind for Process...

Exactly. It's COVID -- EUR 700 million COVID sales for Process in 2022. So we have assumed that the vaccines doses will be as communicated, right, and forecasted as such. And yes, small quantity for boosters as well.

Yes. But that's important, small quantity. So we have not included in that forecast, let's say, a massive ramp-up of big booster programs all over the world. That is not included. If this comes, that would represent a further upside from our today's perspective.

And then on mRNA modalities beyond COVID, just what's assumed there and what's upside?

mRNA modalities. Sachin, can you say again, beyond COVID -- beyond COVID industry or...

So just for example, if we see mRNA [indiscernible]

Yes, yes. Sachin, I didn't hear you well. No, no, absolutely. We have -- we -- the forecast is assuming mostly vaccine and a small quantity of boosters. No other therapeutic areas, if this is what you mean.

The next question comes from James Quigley from Morgan Stanley.

I've got one on the EPU structure. So where are -- what are the key benefits of an EPU structure? And how deep does it go? Is it -- is it more of a Board management tool? Or are there individual units or areas within the business actually managed that way? And then are the managers within those EPUs, are they compensated on an EPU basis or more of a divisional basis? And then what's -- how are you going about extracting synergies between EPUs? Or is it a case that each EPU is stand-alone, so there wouldn't be that much internal synergy?

Right. So what I mentioned during the interim, we have the -- going below sector and even business units allows us to better understand the trade-offs and make better strategic capital allocation decisions. That's basically the point. So we don't look at the sector. We don't use the sector exclusive view for making our capital allocation decisions. We see much more benefits on actually isolating the planning unit and integrating the strategic importance of that planning unit, mainly the contribution to growth and what the potential inorganic move will bring over the baseline. So that's basically the high-level perspective. As I mentioned to you, we have 20 planning units and half -- more or less, half of those are associated to the big 3 pillars that we have been discussing this morning. So I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Marcus. But to us, it's really giving us the chance to be more strategic and to do not be biased in a way, right, by the sector view, but rather by the strategic importance of the specific planning unit and the increasing value creation that we can generate over a baseline scenario.

Maybe just one thing to add. There is individual accountability behind the enterprise planning units. So we can catch the people who are running the EPUs. On the other hand, there are, of course, let's say, when certain EPUs are belonging to one sector, there are synergies on the one hand, but also, let's say, common cost bases, et cetera, which we cannot easily fully allocate to the EPUs, yes? So that's also important to note.

But it's definitely -- it has -- you have to disconnect this -- I mean this is not an organizational topic. So several planning units can be led by the same leader. And some of our leaders can be accountable for several planning units. So disconnect that from the operating model.

Our next question comes from Daniel Wendorff from ODDO BHF.

It's also a follow-up question on M&A. Can you imagine at all that there might be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which would require a bigger investment? If yes, would this be considered at all? Or can you just simply say from the pipeline you see from your portfolio, we just don't see that there is once-in-a-lifetime opportunity visible for you? So any more color whether you can really completely exclude big M&A would be appreciated.

Look, I said, for the moment, we believe that we are well-placed, we have to invest on increasing the productivity of our internal innovation, and we see opportunities to accelerate growth, potentially accelerate growth beyond what we have communicated to bolt-on M&A. That's basically the frame that we are using today. Are we open to something bolder? I mean we are always open to something bolder if the opportunity comes, right? But at this time, we don't believe that this is the right time, right? And it's not because of cash constraints or anything like this, it's because we are very well-placed for growth. We are very, very, very well-placed to drive the growth of the company to the years to come. But if the opportunity presents, we will definitely -- we look actually at bolder options.

The next question comes from Rosie Turner from Barclays.

I just wondered if we could actually talk a bit more about sustainability. You certainly have one of the most impressive profiles in that area amongst the companies that I cover. And just what are your specific targets in terms of those going into management variable compensation? And I wonder if it's possible to give us an idea of kind of what percentage of variable compensation is tied to sustainability targets?

Indeed, since 2018, the Board compensation in the profit sharing component is actually integrating sustainability and diversity, including diversity objectives. As of next year, the weight -- as of 2022, the weight of sustainability in this component of profit sharing in the Board compensation will be further enhanced. So the answer is yes.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we have time for an additional very short relevant questions. [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Simon Baker, Redburn.

It's been a comprehensive review of the business, but one word that hasn't been mentioned today is dividend. So I wonder if you could give us an update or refresher on the dividend policy, particularly in light of the comments you've made about CapEx and then particularly in M&A going forward, how dividend payment fits into the broader picture. And then one just very small point of clarification. On M&A, I assume that means net M&A, net of any divestments that you should make over the period.

Go ahead, Marcus.

Thanks, Simon. On dividends, the update is that there's no update, actually. So that means our dividend payment policy will not change going forward. We stick to a corridor of 20% to 25% of EPS pre to be paid out as dividends also in the coming years. M&A?

The second part of the question, Simon, please? M&A. Can you please come again?

Yes. When we're talking -- within the EUR 30 billion, the M&A element, is that M&A net of any divestments, any receipts from divestments? So it's not a gross figure.

The EUR 30 billion, Simon, was CapEx, not...

It's CapEx. We haven't communicated any M&A investment, is...

I'm sorry, let me clarify. When you talk about the investment in M&A, CapEx and R&D, should we think of the M&A part of being M&A minus any divestment gains?

Look, obviously, if we would ever plan to make a divestment, I would say, yes, this would be net, but we are -- for the time being, we are not planning any of this. So you should consider this as M&A without any impact, without the impact of any divestiture at this time.

[Operator Instructions] And as there are no further questions in the queue, I would like to hand the call back over to Constantin for closing remarks.

Thank you, [ Sergei ]. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the first part of our second fully virtual Capital Markets Day. We look very much forward to welcoming in you back after the lunch break for the second part. This will include deep dives into our 3 business sectors, hosted by the respective sector CEOs and their management teams. We will start with health care at 1:00 p.m. CET, followed by the life science deep dive at 2:00 p.m. and then electronics at 3:00 p.m. And with this, over to you, Belen, for any closing remarks of the morning session. Belen?

Well, first of all, thank you, Constantin. And most importantly, thank you to all of you for participating today and for your continued interest in our company. First, I hope you really found the session productive and useful for you. It was a bit long. Remember, we wanted to update you today on multiple dimensions, and I hope that captured your interest. But most importantly, I really encourage all of you to join the afternoon session with the health care teams and Peter, with the life science teams and Matthias. And of course, with the electronics teams and Kai, so that you can get deeper insights into our 3 business sector. As a global leading science and tech company, I believe that we are uniquely positioned to capture these macro trends that have accelerated after COVID -- within COVID and post-COVID. And we are absolutely committed to deliver on the growth aspirations that we have shared with you today and continue to create value for our owners, for our employees, for our investors and for the society at large. So we will stay in touch. I look forward to seeing all of you during the coming conferences, quite a few in September, and this will give me the chance to continue to further build on the messages that you have seen today during my first Capital Markets Day. Thank you very much, and I look forward to meeting many of you soon. [Break]

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the health-care session as part of Merck's Virtual Capital Markets Day 2021. [Operator Instructions] I now hand you over to Constantin Fest, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Serge. Dear, ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome back to the Merck 2021 Capital Markets Day. My name is Constantin Fest. I'm Head of Investor Relations here at Merck, and we're now ready to start the afternoon sessions of this day. And now we have the health-care deep-dive session, which is starting with the presentation of Peter Guenter, CEO of Healthcare, directly followed by a Q&A with Peter and his top management team. Please also note that we have a legal disclaimer, which you should see on your screens right now. With this, I'd like to directly hand over to Peter to kick off this afternoon. Over to you, Peter.

Well, thank you very much, Constantin. And also from my side, a very warm welcome to Merck's 2021 Capital Markets Day. I'm delighted to kick off the second part of the day with the first deep-dive session on health care. For today's event, I'm also joined by members of my health care executive committee. It goes without saying that we all are excited and well-prepared to give you an update on our health-care strategy, and we're really looking forward to a lively Q&A session. So let me take a few minutes to walk you through our strategy update first. Having now been with Merck for 8 months, I'm excited to zoom in how focused leadership will drive long-term growth. This morning, we introduced mid-single-digit medium-term guidance for Healthcare. Let me underline that also beyond 2025, Healthcare is very well-positioned for long-term growth. The foundation is what we refer to as the established portfolio. We define this as all our commercialized products, except the recent launches, namely Bavencio, Mavenclad and TEPMETKO. This established portfolio is highly resilient. It has a broad geographical footprint and is based on deep local market understanding. We are prepared for continued growth, enabled by a diversified manufacturing network around the globe and with biologics accounting for a substantial part of that portfolio. Looking at our recent launches, we will further drive the uptake of Bavencio, Mavenclad and TEPMETKO. I will come back to these 3 assets in a moment. Turning to our late-stage development pipeline. Evobrutinib in MS and xevinapant in CIS-eligible and CIS-ineligible patients are exciting. This is about being smart and focused, building on strong proof of concepts and TAs Merck understands best. But now let's move on to fertility. Some of you might be surprised right now, speaking about potentials and proof of concepts on the previous slides and then covering fertility first. Well, you know, I must admit that it didn't take me long after joining Merck to realize what a gem we have in our portfolio. Basically, it's pretty straightforward. We are solid market leaders in a market that continues to generate consistent growth. 2020 was the exception, clearly impacted short term by COVID. The fertility market is driven by structural tailwinds such as an increasing prevalence, an improving awareness and finally also a better access to treatments. Building on GONAL-f, we will further strengthen our leadership position, supported by Pergoveris, the only recombinant FSH + LH in the market. However, we will not limit ourselves to treatment options alone. Strengthening our leadership position requires a holistic view. We are at the forefront of driving innovative models of treatment personalization. The Philips partnership we announced at the beginning of the year is a great example in that regard. Now let's turn to neurology. Another great example of leadership is our commitment to MS. Merck is pioneering patient benefit in MS for more than 30 years. It all started with Rebif, our platform therapy, that still holds a significant share of the interferon market. Then we launched Mavenclad. Mavenclad is a one-of-a-kind MS treatment that has already benefited more than 30,000 patients globally and is well-positioned for future growth. It is the only high-efficacy treatment shown to demonstrate full antibody responses to COVID-19 vaccines. As we all know, the MS field is becoming increasingly competitive. However, let's remember that, today, even with the most effective therapies, 50% of MS patients still continue to have ongoing disease activity, which brings me to evobrutinib, our internally discovered BTK inhibitor. Evobrutinib has first-in-class potential and is designed for best-in-class efficacy, designed for high and constant BTK occupancy impacting immune cells in both the CNS and the periphery. I mentioned to you earlier that we will sharpen our profile, especially within oncology, you're going to see an evolution towards us building, defining and consolidating what we call focused leadership positions. What do I really mean by that? Bavencio has changed the standard of care in metastatic UC with a significant opportunity for further growth as the global rollout continues. Also, we are looking into opportunities to further strengthen Bavencio in that space with novel combinations. Then think about MET-driven tumors. Our TEPMETKO launch demonstrates our ability to develop and commercialize precision medicines in oncology. With the foundation for expansion in MET-amplified tumors post-agresso, where I can tell you, we are recruiting very well. Last but not least, we will expand our leadership in head and neck. Xevinapant has a novel mode of action with a strong proof-of-concept in a large segment with high unmet need that is complementary to Erbitux. Xevinapant will build on our heritage, expertise and longstanding commitment to the head-and-neck cancer community. We are absolutely committed to realizing the full potential of our asset here. Let's now move to our pipeline, and let me comment on selected growth drivers in early and mid-stage. Most of you will recall that we touched on our antibody drug conjugates during our R&D update call in 2020. With M1231, this year, we brought the first bispecific ADC into the clinic, plus we have a pipeline of next-generation ADCs in our discovery portfolio. With Berzosertib, we have a leading investigational ATR inhibitor in our pipeline. It's being evaluated in more than a dozen of studies, including a collaboration with the NCI. Berzosertib is part of our scientific efforts in DDR and one of the strategic pillars of our oncology pipeline. TLR 7/8 inhibition, also referred to as Enpatoran, is a novel pathway with many potential avenues in the autoimmune and autoinflammatory space. We have evidence that Enpatoran has the right profile to address significant unmet need in CLE and SLE. As you can imagine, I would love to go on as I'm truly excited about our pipeline. However, my management team is sitting here as well, eagerly awaiting your questions. So in that regard, I would love to invite you to join us on November 22 for our R&D deep dive. You'll have the chance to hear and talk to us about the full pipeline and get an update on our research and development strategy going forward. So what are my key messages. Our Healthcare business at Merck is unique. It's unique due to its combination, significant additions from our pipeline are augmenting rather than substituting a solid established portfolio. This gives us confidence in our solid growth outlook. With this, thank you very much for your attention, and I'm looking forward to your questions. Over to you, Constantin.

Thank you, Peter. And with this, we are now ready to transition to the question-and-answer part of this sector deep dive. We are now having on the panel for this Q&A, Peter Guenter, CEO of Healthcare; who is joined by Danny Bar-Zohar, Head of Development; Joern-Peter Halle, Head of Research; Andrew Paterson, Chief Marketing Officer; Chris Round, Head of North America; as well as Andreas Stickler, Head of Healthcare Controlling, Strategy and Business Development. [Operator Instructions] And I would like now to hand it over to our operator of today, Serge, in order to start the Q&A. Over to you, Serge.

[Operator Instructions] Wimal Kapadia, Bernstein.

Can I just ask about TEPMETKO, please? Having recently launched in the METex14 indication, I'm just curious how you actually think about the contribution of this indication and really in relation to the EGFR MET amplification opportunity. How much of a contributor is the second indication through 2025? And is it to suggest that actually it could be a bigger contributor than METex14. Just trying to get a sense of excitement between the two indications.

Yes. Thanks. It's Peter speaking. Thanks a lot for your question. It's clear for us that the METex14 skipping is only a first step in, hopefully, what's going to be a long and fruitful journey for TEPMETKO. But I would ask perhaps Danny to provide some insights on the clinical development side. And Andrew, you could comment on the size of the opportunity in the respective segments. Danny?

So thanks, Peter. It's a very good question because I think that you answered it. Just to give you a little bit of a flavor of what we're talking about, TEPMETKO, in terms of how we made an advancement so far in METex14, we have achieved approvals in Japan, U.S., Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, [indiscernible] if I'm not mistaken. And the following is currently under review by the European authorities. Now it is the stepping stone, METex14, and we have very strong data across all lines of therapy, once-daily administration, safety and tolerability, which is clearly competitive and a clear upside for the usage of liquid biopsy. So whichever indication or setting that we will use at metco in oncology, these will be an advantage, a clear advantage. The biggest potential is in MET amplification as a resistance mechanism to EGFR mutated post-TKIS, mainly osimertinib. Andrew will give you some more details about the size of the opportunity. We have a great proof-of-concept for that in INSIGHT 1 study. And as Peter said, INSIGHT 2, which addresses this population, is moving forward very nicely. Other avenues may include moving the METex14 forward to maybe adjuvant or even neoadjuvant, something that we are seriously looking into as well as very, very interesting proposals for I-O combinations in metastatic lung with MET overexpression. So there is a variety -- quite a broad variety of opportunity beyond METex14 and a very high potential. And this, without even mentioning the potential in MET amplification in other tumors outside of lung or other resistance mechanisms to other TIGIT inhibitors. So I guess at the end a couple of months in the R&D Day, we'll be able to give more flavor about our thinking. I'll hand it over to Andrew.

Yes. Thanks, Danny. And thanks for the question. I guess in the interest of time, I'll be very brief. You're absolutely right. The EGFR mute MET-amplified population. Certainly, post Tagrisso, we see as a much, much bigger opportunity, possibly around 2x the size of the METex14 opportunity. And so yes, we see great opportunity there. And as Danny has explained, we see these 2 indications as being beachheads perhaps for further opportunities in different tumor types.

Great. So can I just ask one quick follow-up or clarification. You mentioned liquid biopsy in your comments. Am I incorrect in saying that your main competitor in METex14 also, it has an ability to use a liquid biopsy, not made in-house, but am I incorrect in saying that? Or just if you could clarify, that would be great.

Yes. Capmatinib, I don't believe has that as part of their label. So we have that as a unique feature within our label.

The next question comes from Peter Verdult from Citi.

Just one big-picture question for Peter, please, on capital allocation and prioritization. Obviously, you're highlighting your internal assets, but I just wanted to understand how much of a priority is further in-licensing to perhaps buttress that mid- to late-stage pipeline? I realize it's more than a shots on goal. But in terms of where your minds are, are you very focused on just the internal assets that you have today developing? Or are you equally prioritizing further in-licensing as you've done already? So just a sort of cap allocation question as it relates to the pipeline.

Yes. Thanks for the question, Peter. So even if you have, hopefully, it came through the enthusiasm of our internal pipeline and the internal capabilities, of course, we do remain also very active in screening the external field. In any other, let's say, high-value, big -- very good strategic fit that would complement further our portfolio. And I think I also said it at one of the earlier earnings calls, I think saving up on this really a case in point. It is an asset with a very, very strong proof-of-concept in Phase II. So cutting overall survival prolongation, very, very, very strong data. It's an indication that fits us like a hand in a glove. It's a field that we know extremely well. And it is also a field where we go a little bit away from those super platforms where the competitive intensity is just enormous, right? And if we would come across similar opportunities, whether that is in oncology, whether that is in NNI, we were very, very looking at it. And of course, we have a pipeline of opportunities that we are screening as we speak. And Andreas is also on the call with not only the CFO but also Head of BD. So Andreas, perhaps you can add a little bit to my comments.

Yes. Thanks, Peter. Actually, not too much to add. I think you covered the risk assets. If we come across some, we would definitely look at them. And I think also selectively, within earlier stages, if there are things that are fitting well to our areas of expertise or through our portfolio and would selectively also look at those. So we are definitely active here.

Our next question comes from Gary Steventon from Exane BNP Paribas.

Just at a high level, when looking at Slide 44, you provide that overview of top line growth. It looks like kind of the recent launches bar in green begins to only modestly decline beyond 2025. So I was hoping you could just update us on your latest thoughts on kind of Mavenclad IP protection and the severity of erosion thereafter. And also just generally, your confidence that you can maintain that top line growth through this period as that chart seems to suggest?

Yes. Thanks for the question. So on the Mavenclad IP situation, I'll zoom in first on that, and I'll take it a little bit broader afterwards. First of all, the U.S. expiry is, by the end of 2026, so October 2026. As you know, we have filed for a PTA -- PTE. We were unsuccessful in the first instance. We're going to appeal. And we do believe we have strong reasons to prevail. In Europe, situation is a little bit different. So we have data protection until the end of '20 -- sorry, until August 2027. And there, we have already obtained for some countries and some important countries, like, for example, Italy, France or Spain, an SPC, which covers us until 2030, right? And of course, obviously, for the other EU countries where we haven't obtained it yet. Those SBCs are ending. Now we have been cautious in our forecasting, and we have indeed modeled in a typical LOE sales erosion for those countries where we haven't yet obtained either an SBC either for the U.S. patent term extension. So I think what you see on this chart is relatively cautious and could lead to some upside if indeed we prevail in those SBC extensions or PTE appeal procedure. Now what is very important is, of course, the sustainability of the franchise. It's clear that we have high hopes on evobrutinib. And that evobrutinib will, of course, take the relay of Mavenclad at certain point in time. I mentioned to the -- or I hinted to the fact that there is still unmet medical need in MS. And perhaps, Danny, it would be opportune now that we're talking about MS that you give a little bit of an update on the recruitment of our Phase III trials for evobrutinib.

Thanks, Peter. I think that the recruitment on evobrutinib, which I will allude to, is also a part, at least in our opinion, per the exciting profile of -- that this drug has. As I said at the beginning, we did design it with the intention to be best-in-class. And it also has quite a high likelihood also to be first-in-class, and I will allude to that. Oral drug, fully covalent brain-penetrant and with a very strong proof-of-concept that showed on the extension annualized relapse rate in the ballpark range of anti-CD20s. This is very exciting. This is very exciting because it gets to the brain and also acts on cells which are responsible for progression. All of these attributes, including the data that we shared about brain penetrants about neurofilament, about the fact that the drug does not deplete B cells. It switches them off. So you can get your immune system back by far faster as compared to anti-CD20s, made this drug very, very attractive in terms of the randomized controlled trials that we are running all over the world. And I think that we are likely to be in a position in a couple of weeks from now to terminate recruitment, of something like 2,000 patients worldwide. So this puts us in a very strong position. I'm sure in terms of the raise for bringing an oral BTK inhibitor to patients.

Our next question comes from Michael Leuchten from UBS.

If I could just follow up on the last question. I understand the point you're making about the potential differentiation of evobrutinib. I, obviously, it is a field where there's quite a few of them in development and a fair proportion of your medium-term trajectory on the top line does depend on evobrutinib. So do you think there is sort of a need for an insurance policy should this field go in a slightly different way? Or are you actually confident enough in the profile such that you can let MS go the way it's going, and you can refocus your effort be that in-licensing, be it organic onto the leadership in oncology?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Michael. I'll start and perhaps, Andreas and Danny, you may chime in. I think you're totally right to say that, if you look at the NNI portfolio, we have 2 assets in clinical development, right? We have evobrutinib, and we have an [indiscernible]. In oncology, we'll have seen not only but also due to the addition of [indiscernible] bringing into the clinic late-stage clinic versus bringing into the clinic our ADC, bringing into the clinic and also expanding TEPMETKO, we have discussed it. It is a fact that we have a -- we have more optionality as it stands today in oncology as compared to, call it, NNI on neurology. And so we are definitely very actively looking at opportunities, not necessarily in MS, but in adjacent fields, where we could really put our experience, our deep knowledge of those markets to work with potential additional external opportunity screening. And Andreas, I'm sure you will want to expand a little bit on that.

Yes. Thanks, Peter. I think we are indeed active, not only in oncology but also looking at that field that Peter just described, we see a good fit regarding capabilities and also from a [indiscernible] base in some areas. And so yes, we are open. And what is important for us is that we really find the right asset with the right characteristics, and that goes back to what we said earlier, right? We want to have derisked assets that have shown already certain clinical data that allows us to place a confident back here. So that's the focus. And if you come across the right opportunities. And I think we are willing to execute.

The next question comes from Florent Cespedes from Societe Generale.

Florent Cespedes from Societe Generale. A quick one on fertility. As now it is, let's say, at the beginning of your slide deck or your thoughts on this area. Do you have a new strategy? Or do we intend to put more resources behind this business? And is it an area where you could pursue some acquisition?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Florent. And indeed, the fact that I started with fertility is not a coincidence because we do believe it is a gem we have in our portfolio. There are structural tailwinds to that market, which I explained in my speech, so I will not repeat myself. And I can also tell you that the fertility franchise, which is, of course, specialty care, obviously, is also in the remit of Andrew as Chief Marketing Officer, next to the oncology franchise and the N&I franchise. So it shows that, of course, we take it seriously. We are looking at a couple of potential opportunities also in R&D, but, let's say, the jury is still out on that. And I think that perhaps, Danny and Andrew, you could comment a little bit on how you feel about the -- both the fit and the size of the opportunity, what we're talking about here. Andrew, perhaps you can start.

Yes. No, that would be great. Yes. So I think we're obviously very, very happy with the progress we see of the Fertility business over the course of the last year and also over the last -- the course of the last quarter. We see some really strong growth, both in the market, but we also see development in terms of our share. Over the course of the pandemic, I think we've tried to really focus on ensuring continuous supply to customers, which has not always been easy and certainly has been difficult for some of our competitors. As well as that, I think we have a great portfolio of products that really stretches across the continuum of treatment for patients and allows physicians to really tailor their treatment experience. I think the other thing that's really important within the strategy is we have a family of pens that allow for injection within the home setting, which, of course, during the pandemic has been really, really important. If we think it a little bit more to the future, Peter mentioned the Philips collaboration in his introduction. And I think that's really important for us as well. We see the -- a trend towards home monitoring of treatments even before the pandemic. And since the pandemic, that has only been sped up. And I think this collaboration will help us really look into possibilities of home monitoring of treatment outcomes. And hopefully, we can bring further innovation to the market through that collaboration and hopefully have a significant impact on clinical outcomes as well. Danny, anything to add?

I think that you said it all. I would just use different words.

The next question comes from Matt Weston from Credit Suisse.

It's a question about 2022. And I know we've already seen this morning that no one wants to be drawn on margins, but you have a great deal of moving parts in your P&L in Healthcare for '22 with the loss of the GSK upfront, the loss of the Bavencio bladder milestone income and then also the Lilly supply deal on Erbitux. Can you just at least give us in broad pictures what levers you think you have in your P&L for the next few years to try and drive the accelerating productivity that was such a feature of the message this morning. Given that I think Belen, when she was CEO of Pharma, had pulled a lot of productivity levers already.

Well, thanks for the question, Matthew. And I would ask Andreas to give it a try.

Yes, sure. Matthew, thanks for the question. So if we start with the top line, maybe. So I think we -- indeed, we have this special effect with Erbitux this year. And at this point, we don't expect that for next year. But we have our innovative portfolio, of course, growing. And don't forget, China. I mean, China is expected to grow again next year. This year, we have this phase where we are rebasing based on the VBP impacts we saw last year. But as of next year, we expect that business to grow again. So I'm quite confident that we will show nice sales growth next year. On the other elements in the P&L, I mean, you heard this morning more efficient growth. So we'll really take that seriously. I mean, we learned during the pandemic that the business can be driven in a different way very successfully. And so we will definitely apply those learnings. And that, I think, is basically what we know and catch on to efficient growth. So you will see leverage when you compare OpEx growth with our sales growth. And regarding other levers, I mean, you will remember that transformation program that we started last year, and that's still ongoing and making nice progress, and it really contributes nicely and will contribute also going forward and at least next year to improving our P&L. And you mentioned then some of the nonrecurring income items, GSK upfront, Bavencio milestone. And indeed, those are items that won't repeat next year. And that will definitely be something that will impact our EBITDA margin. So I think those are the main components and how I would look at them. Does that answer your question?

It does. If I'm allowed a follow-up. It does raise one question. I totally understand the concept of efficient growth. And I completely understand that you have learned a lot during COVID that means that you can deliver a lot of your messages cheaper. The challenge that I have is that assumes that your competitors will also not revert back to history of face-to-face SG&A and a lot of spending. You're in a lot of very competitive markets, whether it's in I-O with Bavencio, whether it's in MS or fertility, how can you be sure that you won't have to significantly increase your spending if your competitors do the same?

Andreas, can you give it a try again?

Yes. I would say, I think the answer is that, indeed, we have to be very selective. And so when we talk about a new launch, there indeed, share of voice is very critical. And there, we have to carefully what our competitors are doing and match it here in order to really have sufficient shareholders. But we have also other businesses that are quite established that we have a strong market position. I think we mentioned some. And here, I think, yes, we can be different and still be successful depending on the geography and depending on the type of business, whether it's fertility, whether it's Glucophage or Concor, which, as you know, is still growing nicely in many parts of the world.

I would say that we have also Chris as Head of North America, and he has the finger on the pulse every day, obviously. And perhaps, Chris, you can share a couple of insights with us how, let's say, the go-to-market model has evolved, has structurally changed and what you think will come back of the old world and what will definitely not come back of the old world.

Yes. I think we're definitely moving into more of a hybrid sort of setting around the world, where we got to keep the efficiency gains that we've had from things like congresses and the dissemination of data and remote meetings, remote advisory boards. All of these things are both efficiency improvements and effectiveness improvements, and we're not going to lose those. But I'd also repeat what Andreas said around the launches. I think we've demonstrated that we will compete and we'll stand up the resources necessary to have the impact that the products deserve and we'll ensure that whatever the environment is that we're operating in that we're bringing the right power to bear to maximize on those opportunities. But there are loads of areas where we're going to be much more efficient going forward than we have been pre-COVID, for sure.

The next question comes from Luisa Hector from Berenberg.

I'd love to hear a little more about what is attracting you to the antibody drug conjugates and what advantages you think you could offer from your next generation.

Yes. Thanks, Luisa, for the question. And I'll defer to Joern-Peter to answer that question.

Yes. Thanks. So first, you have seen the first entry into the clinical bispecific MUC1-EGFR antibody now in dose escalation. The advantage that we are expecting here is higher selectivity. You may know EGFR-ADCs brought by competitors in the clinic were not successful based on toxicity. We believe based on preclinical data that we have to target both antigens with this ADC to be -- to deliver the payloads to internalize the payload. And that's true for cancer cells. There are some cells -- normal cells that express both targets, but those are polarized cells and they express the target on different sites of the cell surface so that we cannot target them luckily, because we believe that gives a safety improvement. And we will see this pretty soon. The beauty here is that the proof of concept is probably during dose escalation in Phase I, so a validation very near term. And then we have a broad pipeline of bispecifics behind that. We have a second technology platform. It's a proprietary payload linker technology. Release the payload very, very specifically only after internalization. We believe there we have a safety advantage even to the ADCs now in clinical development, the secondary [indiscernible] ADCs. Most importantly, it's a DNA damaging payload and that combines very well with our DDR portfolio. You set the DNA damage very selectively in the cancer cells via our ADCs and then you prevent repair via our DDR portfolio. So we believe best-in-class in terms of combinability with DDR, but also if you think about IO, there's another upside potential there. So very content also here. We have the first in preclinical development of the second platform. And the same holds true here. We will see the clinical validation very early on during the Phase I dose escalation.

We'll now take our next question from James Quigley from Morgan Stanley.

So -- but one on Bavencio in bladder. So the chart on Chart 6 shows or the chart on Slide 6 shows sort of a gradual increase in platinum chemotherapy. Can you give us sort of an idea of the dynamics there? Is that purely just driven by the use of Bavencio as a maintenance therapy? Or are there other sort of effects? Or is there potentially the pandemic effect could be having some impact on use of platinum-based regimens that could be that sort of fall back as we move out of the pandemic? And then just more broadly, the 540 -- or the 500 million or so peak sales target that you set before for Bavencio in bladder, are you still confident about that? Or have things changed given what you've seen through the early launch?

Yes. Thanks, James. I'll defer the question to Andrew. Andrew, you can go ahead.

Yes. Perfect. And Chris, feel free to chip in on any specifics on the U.S. In terms of platinum use, I think we feel that the availability of Bavencio in first-line maintenance has been the key driver around that increase. And we've seen that in the U.S., increased from about 50%, up to more than 70% in every market where we've launched, whether that be Germany -- we're also seeing something very similar in France. We're seeing that dynamic play out. So that's sort of independent of launch time lines. I think we remain extremely confident from what we've seen in your early launches, both in the U.S. and in Europe, where not only are we being able to change the standard of care. So more platinum use upfront, more use of first-line switch maintenance getting to around 50% of all regimens, having now first-line switch maintenance and a very, very high proportion of those where Bavencio used. So I think we remain very, very confident from what we've seen both in the U.S. and in the early launch markets in Europe. Chris, anything to add more on the U.S. side?

No, I think you've said it. I mean, I think the fact that the chemotherapy use has gone up -- the platinum use has gone up is a direct consequence of our data. And I think it's important to recognize this is I mean a really high bar for anyone to try and match for any competitor to try and match. And so we're seeing the adoption of this maintenance treatment continue to progress and will continue going forward. And I suspect we're still very confident in whatever targets we've put out. There's nothing to say that we're not going to get to that 500 million.

Quick follow-up on the stay time on maintenance for patients. I think the PFS was about sort of 4, 5 months or 6 months from the data. What are you seeing in the real world setting in terms of how long patients are staying on maintenance therapy?

Yes. It's early days. Obviously, it's certainly in the launch in Europe to make too much of an assumption at this point. But yes, I think we stick by what we saw in the clinical studies regarding PFS.

Where the PFS by the way, I heard you saying 5 to 6 months, but I recall that the PFS was more in the range of 7 to 8 months, if I recall correctly. Is that correct, Danny?

Yes. The clinical trial suggested around 6. In the real world, we see slightly more, but it's in the same range.

We will now take our last question from Richard Vosser from JPMorgan.

Just a question on R&D spend. I think your budget at the moment is about 1.6, 1.7 for 2021. When we're thinking about the cost savings that you're bringing to bear or maybe SG&A or -- and other areas, are you going to reallocate those to R&D? And also, I mean clearly, there's -- for the overall group and health care, increased investment has been the theme. So where is that R&D budget is going to go? And what programs, I suppose? I know you've highlighted a few, but there's also a finalization of programs and reduction of those spend. So how should we think about that budget and the allocation of spend?

Yes, Richard, thanks a lot for the question. I'll ask Andreas to open that, and then Danny, you may chime in there.

Yes. Pleasure. Danny is slightly biased. So I will start. So if you look at our last couple of years, I mean our R&D spend hasn't grown much. And that's actually also what I would see in the foreseeable future. And you mentioned some of the effects, right? We have cost items that go down. If you think about [indiscernible] or bintrafusp and we have other items that go up like evobrutinib or xevinapant. So I think there's a good balance at the moment. It will grow probably at a very moderate level. But having said that, if it's turned by opportunities. So if we see a great internal opportunity, if we see a great external opportunity -- we definitely have the room to also to increase a bit more, but that will be really selective if we see the right opportunities. But for the time being, assume moderate to very, very moderate, low growth and continuous improvement as a percentage of sales. Danny?

Just to add maybe 3.5 sentences. Thank you, Andreas. The pipeline today, when we look at it from the xevinapant perspective, tepotinib perspective, DDR portfolio, which is which is a beast as itself, a good beast. It's full of opportunities and, as you can imagine, also of permutations. So to Andreas' point, we will, of course, do what really makes sense and what we are -- we feel very comfortable that we have a strong proof of concept that will drive us forward. Now it's very important for us also to be cognizant of how we do things. Now if you look back for a second, you can see us growing from almost no submissions and approvals to several ones in the last past 3 years -- 3, 4 years. So as you can imagine, this has required us to make some changes in how we work, looking at our processes, our speed and particularly our ability to use our own data and advanced analytics to make our programs run with higher probability of success, kill early when you need to kill early and move quickly. So the engine is definitely getting a booster these months.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your questions. The next session will start at 2:00 p.m. Please stay on the line or use the same dial-ins for all sessions. [Break]

Dear, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Life Science session as part of Merck's Virtual Capital Markets Day 2021. [Operator Instructions] I now hand you over to Constantin Fest, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome back to the second session of this afternoon. And this one is for Life Science. We are now having the presentation of Matthias Heinzel, CEO of Life Science, which will be directly followed by a Q&A with Matthias and selected members of his top management team. With this and without any further delay, I would like directly to hand over to Matthias to kick it off. Over to you, Matthias.

Thank you, Constantin. Good afternoon, and warm welcome from my side as well. Thanks for spending the next 45 minutes with us. I've now been at the helm of Merck's Life Science business for 6 months, and I've had the chance to interact with many stakeholders, both internally and externally. And I'm impressed and intrigued by our ability to advance scientific progress, an important role we play together with our customers to support millions of patients worldwide with our products, services and innovations. Obviously, this includes our intensive engagement in the response to COVID-19, but it goes way beyond that too. It's a pleasure and a privilege for me to lead this dynamic business. And together with an excellent management team, I'm really excited to take it to the next level of performance to create sustainable value for shareholders, customers and employees. So let's start with the perspective on our markets. You heard from Belen and Marcus this morning, COVID is a major driver for our industry, and we are participating strongly in the upside. This comes on top of very sound underlying dynamics and momentum. So the growth rates you see on this chart are those for the underlying base business -- that means excluding COVID, and they represent an attractive and very robust market favored by very strong and sustainable trends. We see growth supported by all important dimensions, portfolio, customers and geographies. Process Solutions, the pharma segment and China clearly stand out in that respect. And those are the areas where we already have a strong exposure. They will play a major role also in our growth strategy going forward. So take biologics for example. We continue to be at the forefront of innovation in manufacture of monoclonal antibodies, pioneering a template upgrade to an intensified, connected and continuous process. While mAbs will undoubtedly remain a backbone of industry growth, we will clearly benefit from our early support of novel modalities. Bioengineered therapies, ADCs and nucleic acid therapies will gain significant importance, and we are well positioned to capitalize on these emerging opportunities. Other important developments such as digital, demand for local supply and increased outsourcing are also very favorable drivers for us. So with that market context, I would now like to walk you through our strategic framework that will guide our actions and resource allocation going forward. I'll start with a summary first and then provide some additional color afterwards. Our priorities are clear. We will continue to strengthen our excellent core business, and we will expand in high-growth segments. So starting with the core, our near-term focus will be on increasing productivity to better meet the massive surge in demand for many of our offerings related to COVID on top of strong momentum supporting other life-saving therapies. We have launched several additional initiatives over the last months to further maximize the output of our existing assets. We've also taken decisive action to add physical capacity and expand our network regionally to enable the growth of key portfolios, leverage customer intimacy and hedge business risks. In parallel, we will continuously optimize our go-to-market approach. A major milestone in this respect was the successful launch of a powerful upgrade of our industry-leading e-commerce platform just a few months ago. So moving to the right side of the chart, the expansion in high growth segments. So starting with new business models, we will scale our service offering significantly in the coming years. We will also expand in the software component in our holistic offering. These are all activities we already have built expertise in, but we will now scale it up to a much different level. The ongoing rollout of our Bio4C platform, the first of its kind digital ecosystem for continuous bioprocessing, serves as a prime example. And we have plans in other areas as well. Finally, we will put much more emphasis on emerging regions, especially China and other parts of Asia. Our strategy aims at expanding our presence and addressing local market needs in this rapidly evolving life science hotspot. Our key strategic priorities will be complemented by an increased focus on innovation, digital and with a strong lens on strategic capital allocation. All of this will be supported by continuous strengthening of an investment into our foundational capabilities. So let's now take a quick look at how we apply this strategic approach to our 3 business units. So starting with our key growth engine, Process Solutions. So this comprehensive slide captures some of the key elements of our growth in Process Solutions. So the circles on the left represent the link to the strategic framework I just introduced. Then the next vertical column connects to our evolving model, which we have introduced before. So we're going from products for traditional modalities, to services for all modalities, to products for novel modalities. And then in the middle, we highlight some of the key initiatives with some further explanation on the right. So let's start with the upper third, products for traditional modalities. We are expanding our network and capacity significantly. For example, you have heard us talking about doubling our output by year-end for single-use assemblies in Danvers, Massachusetts, and for important filtration products in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. However, this is just the beginning. We will add much more at both sides in the coming years. And in addition, we will ramp up existing plants in Wuxi, China and Cork, Ireland, and we will also be adding new operations in Darmstadt and Molsheim, France. The strategic intent is to have a regionally well-balanced capacity setup for single-use and filtration offerings, which positions us very strongly to capture the growth as well as a potential upside down the road. So turning to the middle section, services for all modalities. We will significantly scale up our CDMO activities for mAbs, viral vectors, ADCs and high-potency APIs. To be clear, we are not investing in large [ stainless steel ] operations. Instead, we will focus on single-use and other state-of-the-art processes to improve speed to market with our differentiated capabilities in development, manufacturing and testing. We will also venture and expand further into mRNA, combining our long-standing expertise in lipids with the mRNA manufacturing technologies of AmpTec, which we acquired earlier this year. And for the third element, products for novel modalities, let me highlight the innovation angle. We are the partner of choice for our customers when it comes to industrializing processes for novel modalities to enable commercial drug success. The recent launch of Synthechol 2, a new high-purity synthetic cholesterol product and key component for encapsulation of mRNA therapeutics, is a great example and the market uptake is showing great promise. Based on this well-rounded strategy and distinct initiatives, we are confident that we will deliver on our upgraded Process Solutions guidance for low to mid-teens organic growth in the medium term. Turning to Research and Applied. The middle column informs the connection to our strategic priorities with key initiatives for research on the left and for applied on the right. So let's start with Research Solutions. We will build on our podium positions in research chemistry consumables and capitalize on the evolving CRO market. For example, this includes deepening customer loyalty through scientific engagement and global agreements. And in terms of growth, our focus will be on tapping into attractive segments in research biology, especially molecular and expanding further in APAC, especially China. For example, we will support nucleic acid workflows with novel products and we will upgrade production materials and assays supported by learnings from COVID. In China, we see opportunities across both chemistry and biology mainly with pharma and academic customers, and we will drive further penetration in Tier 2 and 3 cities. China was also the first country to launch our upgraded e-commerce platform featuring best-in-class B2C and mobile experience. Turning to Applied Solutions and starting with the core again. We will strengthen our industry-leading lab water business through innovation, and we will expand our pharma QC testing for biologics and novel modalities. A strategic focus area in terms of growth will be our diagnostics offering. We aim to build on our leadership in materials by complementing our offering through assay development and contract manufacturing, supporting custom innovation and time to market. And here as well, we will drive further penetration in emerging markets like China through increased sales presence. And lastly, we will apply digital sales and marketing tools and incorporate digital aspects into our product offering, be it through smart consumables and mobile analysis or data management solutions for efficient lab management. Above all, Research and Applied remain important parts of our portfolio, and we are confident to deliver growth in line with historical trends going forward. Before we go into the Q&A, I would like to briefly touch on key supporting pillars of our strategy. Accelerating our science and tech leadership will be critical to mobilize for growth. So based on our large footprint, both regionally as well as portfolio-wise, we are uniquely positioned to identify new trends as well as to leverage our capabilities at the intersection of disciplines. Our interactions with more than 1.6 million customers, whether in person or through virtual and e-channels, provide us with excellent and first-hand insights that can be translated into new and highly differentiated offerings. Like in many other industries, data are also becoming increasingly important. We have started a digital journey to both address customer expectations and evolve our internal capabilities to drive business value. For example, we use data science and AI tools to facilitate and automate decisions like supply replenishment. We are developing digitally enabled products like Bio4C. We're accelerating digital engagement with customers, and we will continue to invest in our upgraded e-commerce platform to enable new growth models. To support our growth, we need to invest. Given the excellent growth opportunities in front of us, our focus will be on organic growth with CapEx expected to increase to about EUR 900 million per year, and this is about 2.5x historic levels. And tying back in with what I just mentioned, we will also increase R&D as a percent of sales in the coming years to 5%. We will complement this with a very targeted bolt-on acquisitions, focused on attractive technologies and capabilities in high-value areas of our portfolio. So to sum it up, our markets are highly attractive. They are very robust with tremendous opportunities. And our strategic priorities are clear, focusing on strengthening our core and expanding in high-growth segments. Innovation and digital will be key enablers of growth and in line with our upgraded midterm organic sales growth target of 7% to 10%, and we will strategically allocate our resources to maximize sustainable value generation. At the end of the day, execution is critical. And this is what I will be focusing on together with my management team. And with this, let me hand it back to Constantin and see you for the Q&A.

Thank you very much, Matthias. With this, we are now ready to transition to the question-and-answer session of the second deep dive of this afternoon. [Operator Instructions] I would now also like to introduce the panel of this Q&A session. We have Matthias Heinzel, CEO of Life Science; joined by Andrew Bulpin, Head of Process Solutions; as well as Klaus Bischoff, Head of Research Solutions; Jean-Charles Wirth, Head of Applied Solutions; and Marc Horn, Head of Life Science Controlling. With this, I'd like to directly hand over to Sergey, our operator, in order to kick off the Q&A. Over to you, Sergey, please.

[Operator Instructions] Gary Steventon, Exane BNP Paribas.

Just had a quick one on bioprocessing utilization rates, please. So could you just give us a sense of kind of the utilization rates you were operating at pre-pandemic in bioprocessing and whether there's any willingness to really operate with lower utilization rates going forward so that you kind of have some additional headroom that you'd be able to take advantage of should there be any kind of future spikes in the demand?

Yes. Thanks for your question. It's Matthias here. I mean as you may guess, I mean currently, we are running [ fallout ] utilized fully in our high bottleneck areas in single use, in filtration. And as I mentioned, we have a tremendous focus on increasing existing output from those assets. On top of that, we are building and rolling out capacity across the globe. So the way I would look at your question is we were running, I think, already pretty high pre-pandemic. We are now filled out. And what I laid out before with a target of about $900 million CapEx per annum, a lot of that going to process, that should allow us to capture our growth, which we outlined also in terms of the midterm guidance for process but also give us a bit of a headroom for future potential upsides down the road.

We will now take our next question from Wimal Kapadia from Bernstein.

So can I just ask a little bit about the composition of Process Solutions to date across the 3 strategic focus buckets, so products with traditional modalities, products for novel modalities and then the services for both. But any context on how much of the division do each of these contribute today? And what could that look like in 2025?

Andrew, why don't you take it directly?

Sure. And thank you very much for the question. It's actually quite difficult to separate because many of the products that we have that are used in the production of traditional modalities are also applied in the manufacture today of some of the novel modalities. But basically, as a split, about 85% of our revenues today come from the sale of products and about 15% come from services. Moving forward, the split between traditional modalities and novel modalities, obviously, as we develop and refine the portfolio, there will be more weight progressively to the novel modalities. And likewise from the service is a key initiative area for us, 15% today, but we expect that to become more significant in proportion to the rest of the portfolio moving forward. Thank you for the question.

Yes. Thanks, Andrew. Maybe just to build on that. We -- when we look at service, obviously, a lot around the CDMO, and we do have already a kind of a small CDMO business in different modalities but we also have a very significant testing business unit, brand name BioReliance. So when we talk services, we expect and we are confident that we grow significantly in both aspects when we talk about services here. Thanks for your question.

The next question comes from Michael Leuchten from UBS.

A clarification question, please, to Slide 3. So you're saying the Process Solution market, you see growth of 9% to 10%, if I understand it correctly. If I work your guidance backwards, if I look at your life sciences guidance overall, until 2025, and I take out what you previously said about Applied and Research solutions and then I also take out the COVID contribution in 2021, at the midpoint of our scenarios in 2025, your implied growth for Process Solutions seems to be about double the process solutions market. That seems high. So I just wondered how the 2 tally out, how does that process solutions market growth of 9% to 10% tallies with 17-or-so percent that seems to be implied in your guidance?

Yes. Thank you. Let me maybe take it from the high level and Andrew can add to that. I mean, from your general message, you're right. Indeed, I mean, we are expecting and we are targeting to grow above market versus the market growth we've outlined here, which takes a holistic look at the process solution market. And you also indeed backed out the COVID impact which we built in our guidance, which is a bit of a fading over time. So why are we confident? A couple of things. Number one, we are investing heavily into our key bottleneck areas. We are currently capacity constrained, which is limiting our growth and has been limiting a bit our growth short term. We are investing heavily in the high-growth areas within that market. The market has certain areas which are growing higher. Others are less growing. And with our very strong focus on novel modalities on the testing element and on our upside potential in the emerging regions, that gives us the confidence to grow significantly above market. And Andrew, maybe you want to add?

Sure. And so when we talk about the difference in the actual sort of addressable market, I'd split it into 2 elements. One is really sort of structural elements of the market itself, and then sort of new business models and market share. So if you think even just on the structural side, biosimilars becoming more and more significant. And with that access to biologics from patients who historically haven't been able, we've still got, I would say, originated drugs coming through to meet unmet marks, which will structurally change. Recent announcement of the approval of an Alzheimer's drug, first time that's been addressed. And then things like the cell and gene therapy, where previously, these sort of genetic conditions were virtually a death sentence. Now there is opportunity of sort of hope for these patients. And again, they were untreatable. So all the cell and gene therapy stuff is basically a structural shift in the market. And then as we mentioned earlier, obviously, with our testing and our CDMO and our services, we believe, given our expertise in process development, in manufacturing, in the testing and the combined package that we can offer, I think, will resonate in the market, and we expect to be able to take market share there. So just a slightly different optic compared with what Matthias said, but hopefully, that gives you a broader picture. Thank you.

The next question comes from Matt Weston from Credit Suisse.

My question is about R&D. So one of the key messages from this morning was the need to invest significantly to drive future growth and innovation. Within life science, there's always been a significant investment in R&D, but it's not been a very material contributor to the Merck Group total spending. Now that Life Science and particularly the bioprocess business is becoming a much more dominant part of the business, can you outline what we should expect for divisional R&D going forward over the coming years? I'm just very mindful that at the moment, we're seeing revenue accelerate very significantly because of COVID but you are telling us that basically, that revenue will be sustainable from other new income streams going forward. And so do you have to spend significantly more aggressively to secure that revenue?

Yes. Matt, it's Matthias here. Thanks for your question. I mean I provided in my speech kind of an indicative number, a target number of 5% of sales. So we are ramping up. We are currently on the lower end of the 4 percent-ish range. So we will gradually move up to a more 5% of sales number in terms of, if you will, R&D spend for the entire business. And here again, we will focus this R&D dollar on the bigger growth opportunities. And we will see opportunities certainly in Process Solutions, but there is also quite some opportunities in Applied and Research. We will never get to the level like my colleague Peter Guenter has in pharma. But I think we will, over time, increase our spend, increase our efficiency. In other words, what do we get out of this spend with a little bit more focused effort on some of the more needle-moving areas. And we gave you a few examples, right? Novel modalities, it's a tremendous growth opportunities. There are areas, as I said, and maybe Jean-Charles, you can step in here and give a few examples, where we see also products and digital kind of coming together and giving us new opportunities. May JC, you just want to share a few examples in your area.

Yes. Thanks, Matthias. Yes, if I may add, first of all, innovation, it's critical for our core business. It's part of our strategy. And to do so, I would like to mention that we have critical KPIs to track our innovation efficiency. I'm going to give some example, i.e. time to develop products. So usually between process, research and apply, it takes 2 to 5 years. We have also one KPIs where we are able now to measure our vitality index of our pipeline. And this vitality index has, in certain area, doubled over the last 3 years. And talking about new product sales, we try to accelerate the potential of sales coming from product launch over the last 3 to 5 years. And I would say most of our KPIs are growing. Just to give you some example, we launched 2 years ago Milli-Q Connect for the Lab Water business, and it helped us to now debug system, to fix system remotely. It has been a big success during COVID crisis, but it also helped us sell more consumables. So I will say our innovation is an enabler to drive growth, and the Milli-Q Connect is one example, and we have many across research but also process and applied.

Yes. Thank you, Jean-Charles. Maybe just to close that question. So there are 2 angles. We're increasing the spend going from the low end of the 4% to 5% while we're increasing the business, obviously, 7% to 10%. So the absolute dollar will be significantly higher over the next couple of years. And then we are also turning the other knob, which is the effectiveness of our R&D spend. So both together gives us the confidence that we have then the right output and outcome to fuel the growth going forward. So thanks, Matt, for the question.

The next question comes from Luisa Hector from Berenberg.

I'm interested in your comments around China and the increased focus there. I just wonder if you can talk a little bit about the growth potential, where it's coming from? Is this selling products to CDMOs within China or just a local biotech and pharma companies? And maybe a little bit of color around the competitive situation within China.

Yes. Thanks, Luisa, for the question. I'll take it high level, and then I will ask Klaus since he also has a very strong presence already in China, to comment. So in general, I mean if we look at the growth potential, I mean in our market, China is one of the biggest regional growth drivers, high double digit, and we certainly want to not only participate in that growth but really use it as a fuel for our growth. I think opportunities are twofold. One is around our presence, right? If I look at our network globally, we have about 55 plants globally. A rather small setup is in Asia and in China. We have presence in [ Andong ] and Wuxi. And as I mentioned in my speech, as we are looking for expanding our single use -- especially single use offering, we will utilize our footprint we have in China to build on that. Why do we do that? We want to be closer to our customers. We want to be quicker. We want to kind of look -- utilize the local capabilities there. So expanding network and our footprint there. And then it's, of course, about the sales presence, the penetration into other Tier 2, Tier 3 cities. That's a big angle and then certainly also utilize our e-commerce platform because we all know that China has already adopted a much different use of mobile. So I suggest, Klaus, you add a bit of color to that because, again, given your model there, you already have a very good base.

Perfect. Thank you, Luisa. For Research Solutions, actually, China is one of our fastest growing market of the base business. Today, we do about -- around about 10% of our reserve solutions product business in China, and the ambition is to grow this substantially. I think currently, what's happening in China meets very well with our value proposition, right? Chinese customers, not only pharmaceutical but more and more also academia, want to make sure they have reproducible result, good quality testing and all that kind of things without having to worry that they have to redo tests or research work. And our value proposition regarding premium, high-quality reagents and chemistry and biological reagents meets very well this demand, and we really see this. Secondly, Matthias mentioned it already. We have launched a new e-commerce platform recently, and we did the launch before we went globally, 2 months ahead in China to provide our customers actually really in the life science industry, I would say, the best-in-class experience, including [ mobile. ] And after the China experience, we went global. And the third one is also we are also looking to improve our footprint to have more products available in China also out of own capacity. So this is basically in Research Solutions, what we are doing on a high level in China.

Thank you, Klaus. And thanks, Luisa, for your question.

The next question comes from Sachin Jain from Bank of America.

Just got a real big picture one. So just to reconcile the guidance increase with the amount of investment going in and how you're thinking about returns criteria, any additional color you can give. So guidance obviously gone up roughly 2%, which equates to sort of 200 million [ sales ] a year roughly. And that reconciles the CapEx of 2.5x. And R&D, if you're going up 100 basis points, sort of 300 million, 400 million a year investment. So I would have assumed that, that level of investment would have seen greater upside. So I wonder if you could just provide some more color on the time frame over which you see that upside being delivered through the level of investment you're putting in? And then maybe I could just take a follow-on. Belen invited me to ask my question this morning again this afternoon on boosters and mRNA modalities and how you're thinking about upside should they potentially come through.

Yes. Thanks, Sachin. Let me take the second part, and maybe, Marc, you can cover Sachin's first part. So maybe just to recap. We are guiding and we're expecting for COVID next year, 700 million as a floor in process solutions. This year, we will see a bit more than 1 billion. Next year, we can already say with confidence, we believe, about 700 million. And over the years, in our 7% to 10% guidance, we have kind of built in a slightly fading of the COVID contribution. And we have given you also in the footnote 2 scenarios, if COVID stays as it is and if it totally goes away. So in our assumptions for the midterm guidance, we assume that there's a continued rollout of vaccination. As we are here today, less than 1/3 of the world population is fully vaccinated, right, typically with 2 vaccine doses, and about 40% have at least 1 shot. There's still room to go over the next 12 to 18 months, and hopefully, it goes quickly to fully vaccinate the world. This kind of, if you will, is built into our model. It's also built-in that we will see some booster shots as we are seeing some countries are already moving ahead, especially for the vulnerable groups. We have not built in a full booster shot for everybody in a high frequency right? Because as we speak today, it's still yet to be seen at what frequency booster shot might be required and what population will be receiving those booster shots and also what's kind of the dosage. So there's a few variables. So if you take that all together, there's a set of booster shots, especially for the viable groups included if there would be, let's say, a high-frequency booster shot rollout across the world. That certainly would provide upside to our midterm case. And with that, Marc, maybe you can cover the first question.

Yes. Thanks for the question. As you know, I mean we're normally not giving any guidance explicitly on the margin evolution overall. But as you know from the presentation, we are really striving for industry-leading margins. At the moment, the margin level is exceptionally high, really driven by operational leverage, favorable pricing and product mix. When you look now at the investments going forward, there will be a step change now in CapEx of 2.5x, what you alluded to, but also that goes hand-in-hand with OpEx, especially spending in areas like what we just said R&D. But overall, the back office functionality is looking at organizational readiness in digitization, in sustainability, in the new product offerings but also in the new service areas. So you have to assume that we are very carefully managing the ramp-up of the costs and the expenses and the investments we do on the one hand with, at the same time, achieving substantial leverage on the other hand. And that will be a balancing act we have to go through in the next couple of years.

Thank you, Marc.

Sorry, the question was a little bit more. How does that level of investment increase, not drive a greater sales upgrade? Apologies if it wasn't clear.

Yes. Maybe the way to look at it, I mean, we mentioned it, I mean, the CDMO business, especially for novel modalities, is a big growth area for us. We already do have a small setup, as you know, and we will continue to now roll it out across multiple modalities across the regions. So we, obviously, have built in a ramp-up in the utilization rate of those new assets. And I think we need to take that into account. Not everything will be fully loaded day 1 and -- but it will come over the next -- over the strategic horizon but also beyond, right? I mean we are phasing those rollouts of the novel modalities over the years to make sure we're able to execute it. So that's, I think, one explanation why you don't probably see everything kind of already kind of kicking in at full level.

Yes. And add to that, Matthias, also think about CapEx in 2 directions, right? One is really investing in the growth of existing products and new capabilities and [ we saw these ] offerings, but there's a substantial part of the CapEx also going into the existing footprint, right, to upgrade in terms of digitization, sustainability but also to make -- ensure robustness of supply network. So this goes hand-in-hand. So the step change is, of course, very strongly focused on the growth areas, but we are also supporting the existing footprint.

The next question comes from Peter Verdult from Citi.

Peter Verdult, Citi. Just a follow-up from the previous question. I mean you clearly addressed the demand side of the equation. What about the supply side, Matthias or Andrew? As we go into 2022, will there be any sort of residual bottlenecks of note? And if we do start to see country -- the developed countries going down the booster vaccination route, do you have the ability to meet -- to supply that increase in demand?

Peter, it's Matthias. Great question. I mean to be clear, that's one of my top priorities and has been over the last months together with my team here, right? I mean as I mentioned before, we are full out, and we have a laser-sharp focus on 2 things. Get more out of the existing assets. I call it the debottlenecking, right, and we're making good progress. And that will help us over the next months and has had us already to satisfy many of our customers to ensure they can get the consumables for COVID but also many life science therapies. On top of that, we have kicked off about a $400 million program for multiple sites. I'll give you one example, single use, for example, in Molsheim, which will go live in phases at the end of the year, early next year. So to sum it up, we will see still over the next, let's call it, 6-plus months into '22 a very tight situation. And also keep in mind, our lead time has increased over the last 12 months, right? Some of our products, we do have already a 9-month lead time, some even 12. So we also need to work down that backlog. So I think it's fair to say that we are gearing fully into the right direction to also work with our customers to support the booster shots they are preparing for, but there will be still a tight situation as we go into '22. I would say, after mid of the year next year, it should be a much better situation. But until then, it's tight. Again, we are fully geared up. We are working very closely with our customers, the entire team globally, and so far, it's really working well, but it's a tight situation.

The last question comes from Simon Baker from Redburn.

A slightly related question on order patterns. One of the things we've heard about, I think, you've mentioned it and certainly your competitors have in bioprocessing is that we have seen a lengthening of the time when -- over which time orders are placed before delivery from 6 to 12 months to 18 months through the pandemic. That's obviously given you increased visibility on the order book. Do you expect that to continue? Or do you expect that now the urgency and the disruption of the pandemic is starting to diminish a bit or at least it will, that, that will come back down to a more normal period? And then at the other end of the order time frame, clearly, the urgency of a lot of pandemic-related orders has probably added costs because of the need to supply very quickly. To what extent has that blunted the significant margin increase that we've seen through the pandemic? And do you expect that cost pressure, if it is meaningful, to diminish over time?

Thanks for your question. Maybe the first one, Simon, we're out of time and who can address that? Andrew?

Okay. Simon, thank you for the question. So as we have shared previously, our order intake is roundabout sort of 60% year-over-year. That is starting in percentage terms to sort of plateau a bit against stronger comps from the second half of last year. And as you know from our Q1 and Q2 earnings release, ourselves are not at that level. So the order book is continuing to expand as we speak here. That being said, it's very clear that customers understand the unique and unprecedented situation we're in and are placing orders significantly ahead of time. From the conversations I've had top to top with many of our top accounts is there is an appetite to have longer-term transparency and consistency moving forward. So I think they may come in a little bit, but I do think we will move forward into a new norm where customers have got longer-range visibility on their order books, and they will place orders further ahead of time. So that was it with respect to the orders. Maybe to Marc in terms of the impact on margins?

Yes. I think at the moment, what you see is really an exceptionally historically high level coming really from favorable pricing and the product mix effects we currently see. So we do expect going forward that there will be a slight decrease coming through normalization simply of these 2 effects mainly. And about the volume leverage, we already spoke. So we see this continuously evolving, and we're managing that by -- vis-à-vis the ramp-up in the different new capacities where we're initially, of course, facing certain start-up costs.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your questions. The next session will start at 3 p.m. Please stay on the line or use the same dial-ins for all sessions.

Thank you for joining our Life Science session. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you. Bye, everyone.

Okay. Thank you. [Break]

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Electronics session as part of Merck's Virtual Capital Markets Day 2021. [Operator Instructions] May I now hand you over to Constantin Fest, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome back to the third and last session of this Capital Markets Day. And this one is for electronics. We have now the presentation of Kai Beckmann, CEO of Electronics, who will then be followed by a Q&A with Kai and selected members of Kai's top management team. And with this, I would like to directly hand over to Kai to kick it off. Over to you, Kai.

Thank you very much, Constantin, and a very warm welcome also from my side, and thank you for joining our Electronics deep dive session. And to have enough time for Q&A later, please allow me to go straight into a brief 5-slide recap. So we have successfully transformed our business to become a leading player in the electronics industry, and we have one of strongest portfolios and everything in place to deliver accelerated growth. So back in 2018, we announced our Bright Future program. And today, 3 years later, we can say that we have delivered on our promises. We have successfully transformed the Electronics business of Merck, and we have done so earlier than planned. So following the successful integration of Versum, we are now a EUR 3.3 billion-plus business, and we generate over 90% of our sales in Electronics, and we achieve attractive, stable EBITDA pre margins. Already today, we are an integrated innovation leader with one of the broadest and strongest portfolios in electronic materials-related services and equipment. And on the left-hand side of this slide, you can see a snapshot of what electronics will look like in the midterm future. A business with roughly 10 equally sized, differentiated technology platforms in attractive segments that enable our customers across more applications than ever before. All our businesses have a clear set of priorities, and they are in line with the enterprise portfolio unit roles introduced by Belen and Marcus this morning. We are confident to deliver on our upgraded midterm guidance of 3% to 6% sales CAGR. We have everything in place to gain speed and continue to be a vital growth engine for Merck. Looking at our end markets, we see vast growth potential and a substantial need for materials innovation to enable the next generation of chips across more applications than ever before. In previous decades, PCs, smartphones and tablets were the dominant categories driving semiconductor growth. Now we are entering the era of AIoT, the link between artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. More device categories than ever before will provide a broad basis for even faster industry growth. In this new era, a self-driving car, for example, will likely generate more data per day than all devices used by the average person today. A modern, high-end fridge today already has more compute power than your average smartphone 5 years ago. And in the not-too-distant future, your smart -- sports apparel might catch up with that as well. So there are currently around 50 billion AIoT devices, and your smartphone is just one of these. The number is expected to grow to over 350 billion devices by 2030. And as Belen mentioned this morning, we will live in a world defined by instant access to information, permanent connectedness and assisted intelligence. All these new data-centric applications will require more and newer types of displays such as augmented reality and virtual reality devices. And they will need more chips and better chips to generate, process, transfer and store data. And this is why the average chip value per device is expected to grow from around 18% today to over 30% in 2025. Our semiconductor customers are already working on expanding their capacities, and as I'm sure you have seen, they will even accelerate their efforts. The most recent investment announcements from Samsung or TSMC clearly indicate that we are already entering this new era. The MSI, the area of silicon wafers used for semiconductor production measured in million square inches, was growing with a CAGR of around 5.5% in the past 15 years. And we now expect this growth to step up to a midterm CAGR of 5% to 7%. We also anticipate that the industry will continue to be upward cyclical, however, to a lesser degree. This is driven by the aforementioned diverse end applications and a higher capital discipline in the industry. To meet this demand, our customers will not only require more materials and solutions, they will also need significant innovation of materials to enable the next generation of chips. So let me cover this in a bit more detail in just a few slides. To address these industry needs, we are now shifting gears from transformation to growth execution with our Level Up program. Level Up will focus on 4 core pillars, namely scale, technology, portfolio as well as people and capabilities. And this will put us in a position to meet the increasing demand and capture even more of the growth potential we see in this industry. Level Up will help us to provide our customers with an attractive set of innovative and high-quality materials-based solutions. With that, we will enable the next generation of electronic devices. When it comes to scale, we will diligently drive capacity investments that are in line with our customers' expansion plans. Our investments will allow us to tackle industry challenges and to ensure supply reliability. We will continue to localize our footprint in order to get even closer to customers, particularly in Korea, in Taiwan, in China and in the United States. We'll take a closer look at these CapEx plans on the next slide. Looking at technology and innovation, we will sharpen our focus even more on our customers' key technological inflection points, and we will sustain one of the highest R&D ratios in our peer group. We will continue to address sustainable innovation, as for example, with the recently announced new generation of greener solvent alternatives. On our last slide, before we -- for the Q&A, we will cover our innovation pipeline in more detail. Concerning the portfolio pillar, we will continue to pursue diligent bolt-on acquisitions with the aim to expand our portfolio. And they can be targeted at high-growth and high-value segments and, at the same time, we will remain committed to our broad portfolio, which is, as you know, highly appreciated by our customers. And finally, looking at people and capabilities. We want to continue to be one of the most attractive employers in the competition for next-gen talents. Safety, quality and sustainability will remain top priorities. And just as important, we will drive our capabilities in data analytics, and we will continue to leverage digital and data. This will help us to provide better solutions for our key customers and, for example, when it comes to collaborating with our customers on high-throughput experimentation or big data and artificial intelligence projects. You probably recall Belen talking about this earlier today in some more detail. And when it comes to scale, we will diligently expand our capacity and synchronize our plans with demand in the market and the expansion plans of our customers. And as you can see on the upper chart on the left, CapEx of the global semiconductor industry is expected to be at EUR 115 billion in 2022. This equals more than 2x the level it was in 2016. We will ramp up in lockstep with our customers. And this means we more than double our CapEx by 2024, ensuring that we are a reliable, long-term partner of choice for our customers, and we are prepared to accelerate CapEx further in the years beyond 2024. This will, of course, depend on future customer demand and market development. So looking at the main semiconductor geographies, we plan to invest in an additional large site in Taiwan, and this investment will ensure supply for key customers and also further increase our R&D footprint. We'll expand our strong footprint in Korea, building on the already existing solid proximity to our customers. In China, we will further boost our efforts as a highly localized multinational ready-for-growth abilities. Last but not least, we will also enlarge our capacity for global and local supply in the United States, allowing us to enable new sites of our key customers. Let's move to the last slide. So when it comes to technology and innovation, we are -- already a portfolio of silicon and optical solutions empower our customers to build smaller, faster, more energy-efficient and more sustainable devices in various applications across the entire data sphere. But we are not only empowering today's devices, our solutions also enable the next applications. And to give you just a few examples. So in the area of data processing, chip manufacturers will adopt a new transistor technology called gate all around. This will happen within the next 2 to 4 years. This technology will allow for increased scaling and lower power consumption. The challenge in making gate-all-around transistors is the uniform formation of the so-called nanosheets. They provide agents that selectively release the silicon nanosheets from the sacrificial film to enable uniform formation. Another challenge is the formation of the so-called metal stack. To minimize power consumption, we provide special dopants that enable the tuning of the threshold voltage and optimize chip power consumption. And there will be new 3D NAND chips with more than 300 layers. This means cost-effective data storage. The challenge in making 3D NAND chips with increasing number of layers is that signal delays occur, and we provide novel ALD precursors that enable high-quality films with higher conductivity. This increases signal speed and minimizes cross-talk between the memory cells. Looking at data interfaces, there will be new augmented reality headsets, which offer users unparalleled immersive experience in attractive form factors. The challenge is to manage light for the display, and we are currently leveraging know-how across our display and semiconductor business to provide higher refractive index and other materials that control light efficiently. And just these examples have probably given you an idea about the innovations we are working on in electronics. Please join us for the Q&A sessions. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Kai. And with this, we are ready to transition to the question-and-answer part of the last deep-dive session of this day. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to introduce the panel that we are having now. Kai Beckmann, CEO of Electronics, is being joined by Anand Nambiar, Head of Semiconductor Materials; Kate Dei Cas, Head of Delivery Systems and Services; Michael Heckmeier, Head of Display Solutions; John Langan, Chief Technology Officer, Electronics; Ed Shober, Head of Strategy and Business Transformation; and as well, Stefan Kratzer, Head of Electronics Controlling. With this, I'd like to now directly hand over to our operator. Serge, over to you to kick it off with the Q&A, please.

Thank you. We will now begin our question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Gary Steventon, Exane BNP Paribas.

Could you just talk to the kind of the current levels of visibility you have on the materials order book and then also kind of the levels of inventory that you think semi manufacturers are holding relative to historic levels? Just thinking here about the phasing of growth for semis over the midterm relative to the guidance kind of how much of a boost or normalization of the order book and inventory levels could have.

So we can hear each other. We are still waiting. You can hear me. That's -- we're in a waiting pattern right now.

Did you catch the question? Would you like me to repeat?

The user is still muted, the event user. We can't hear anything. [Technical Difficulty]

Okay. So I hope you can hear me. Serge, this is Constantin. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you, Constantin. Yes. Please go ahead. You may answer the question.

Excellent. So we are currently connecting the leadership team of Kai with all the colleagues who are here in the queue. And I would kindly ask all of you to stand by for a minute or 2 until we solve this issue. Thank you very much for standing by. [Technical Difficulty]

Gary Steventon, would you please repeat your question again?

Sure. Can everyone hear me?

Yes.

Yes. Perfect. Okay. So the question was just if you could talk to the level of visibility that you have on the materials order book and then also just sort of the level of inventory that you're seeing semi manufacturers hold at the moment kind of relative to those historic levels. The reason for asking is just thinking about the phasing of growth for semis over the midterm related to the guidance and kind of how much of a boost or normalization of the order book or normalization of inventory levels could have over the near term.

Yes. Okay. Thanks for the question, and thanks for the patience. Sorry for the technical hiccup. So now we are all on and welcome to the Electronics Q&A session. Happy to have you all in that session. And Gary, to take your question, maybe let me pass it on to Anand. I think he has a perfect visibility of what's going on right now in the industry from our constant conversations. And so Anand, would you please take that question?

Yes. Thank you, Kai, and thank you, Gary, for the question. As you've heard in the industry, there is a crisis with regards to chip shortages. And if you peel the onion from there, there is an enormous amount of demand for chips these days and that ranges from all types of devices, memory, logic, sensors, et cetera. And all of this demand is at a very high level, and there's an enormous amount of shortage in supply, which is why we see a very high price increases lately and the market doing extremely well. We believe this sort of demand, as Kai mentioned in his speech, will continue for the next several years and, therefore, we believe this market will remain extremely healthy.

We will now move to our next question from Michael Leuchten from UBS.

A high-level question for Kai. I think I asked a question at the last CMD where you set a very narrow range for Europe for your medium-term guidance. And I think your answer at the time was sort of visibility and sort of confidence that the demand for the top line growth or the demand behind the top line growth would not fall out of a few -- sort of you now a year or so later see obviously more demand, we had the pandemic, but why -- at the lower end of the corridor, what's the risk here? Why have you not lifted it if the structural demand is so strong as you've just outlined?

Mike, thanks for your question. And this one, just to build a bridge to the last year discussion, of course, now the time horizon got a bit longer, so many of the investments that are currently being executed on our customers' side, they will, of course, then have an effect on the demand side within that period of time. Why did we keep the lower end? I think constantly, if we guide on CAGR, some people try to track us like year-on-year -- we really deliver year-on-year within that range. And that misunderstanding sometimes leads to a bit of confusion. So we kept a bit of a safety cushion for the earlier years where the capacity situation is maybe not significantly ramping up and kind of the longer term picture you can see if you into this corridor quite nicely. And of course, once we know the plans better and we would, of course, track that very carefully, we will give you update on how the long-term perspective is going to develop. But I think it should give you confidence on the long-term outlook and kind of the amount of cyclicality that we could assume. I think we were pretty accurate in the past years to anticipate a pretty dynamic industry and giving you visibility on that and would like to keep a track record of reliability in our forecast that we were a bit cautious on the frame. Does that make sense, Michael?

Yes.

The next question comes from Matt Weston from Credit Suisse.

My question is about the link between your key customer CapEx and the Merck Electronics' P&L. So there's lots of very big CapEx being -- numbers being used by the likes of TSMC. A lot of it seems to be political as investment is going into the U.S., in your guidance, do you assume that all those CapEx numbers are real? Or are you essentially probability adjusting them so there is potentially upside if the spend and level of the capacity grows? And then I'd be really very interested to understand how your customers' spending money [ feeds ] into your P&L. We're not familiar with this, particularly in terms of how the systems business benefits as the facilities are built and then how the variable P&L changes as chips actually get manufactured. How should we think about the cadence of growth over the next 5 years?

Yes, Matt, exciting question. Thank you for that. And so the -- maybe the first question already contained a part of the answer on -- so of course, the current noise level on our customers' investments need to kind of clear a bit going forward. There are announcements which may not happen. There are things happening, which may not be announced as big. So we, of course, put to the whole list of so far intangible plans. We put, yes, you could say, probability adjustment to that, but very tangible plans where already [ account ] is broken and where already our DS&S business is enjoying a lot of kind of interesting new projects. So -- and I see Kate smiling on this. And by the way, Kate is here for the first time. She has just taken over DS&S. But while she is new in the leadership role, she's in DS&S already for most of her life and she knows the industry inside out. Maybe on this, Kate, I would pass that part of the question to you on the visibility, the tangibility of our customers' plans and [ the bridge ]. And then you could maybe speak to how does it then link to our project business and how does it link to our equipment business. And Anand, I'm afraid it's again you to kind of explain how do we get kind of an annuity out of that kind of a constant flow of business out of these projects. If the 2 of you would jump in, please.

Absolutely. I'll start. So in delivery systems, we are linked to the same customers that we have on the materials side. However, we have a different perspective. We interact with different people at the customer. And most of the time, we're interacting with facilities team members, which means that we're involved and we have visibility to the construction side of the projects of new factories. And so we get visibility to these projects, the investments you mentioned, TSMC, other folks like Intel and Samsung in this industry. We get visibility to what's happening much earlier in the process. And so it's a very complementary business where we are able to provide a perspective on what's happening at our customers earlier and then we can collaborate with our materials team to really understand what that means. And if capacity is delayed or if capacity is speeding up, we can provide that visibility so that we then, in turn, can be ready on the materials side.

Thanks, Kate. And Kate, when you get the visibility for TSMC and Intel's fabs, we get the visibility from Kate's business that -- what the material capacity utilization and ramp-up would look like. Historically, and in the future, we work very closely with our customers their capacity expansion plans way in advance of announcements, and they take into account what is the equipment capacity that's available in the marketplace to fill these factories and what's the material capacities available to fill these factories. And that we work very closely with them to ramp up alongside them as we win new technology nodes. So really exciting time and absolutely -- the CapEx number EUR 115 billion in 2022 is 2x that of 2016. So we've seen an enormous amount of potential for growth coming up and we are building to those potential with ramping up our own capacities.

I guess, Matt, to give you an idea how kind of integrated this organization works on these opportunities and visibility is king in a highly dynamic industry, especially in times when there is like a gold rush going on in that industry, I think visibility to build our capacities in our site to understand the technology needs, and we may come later to some technology aspects to understands what are the specific technology requirements and how can we best fulfill these needs. I hope this answered your question.

Kai, just to try to build on your comments, when we talk about customers and governments who are both committed to this unprecedented and accelerated CapEx expansion over the next 5 years plus, I've personally been involved in this history for over 35 years, and I've never seen this tremendous of an opportunity. I mean, Intel themselves yesterday at the car show in Munich, Germany, announced that they are going to invest EUR 94.5 billion in fabs in Europe, 2 new fabs plus additional fabs to be announced. So tremendous opportunity. Semi equipment, as we know, goes from 60 billion and 90 to 120 billion in the next couple of years. [indiscernible]. News flow is for real. It takes time to build these facilities and our teams will work very hard in obtaining plans of record, not just for the equipment but for the materials. So when you talk about your original question about the linkage to the P&L, we definitely link it to the P&L for our future, and it's like CFO refers to, Marcus Kuhnert, it's all about profitable growth. That's what we focus.

We will now take our next question from Peter Verdult from Citi.

Peter Verdult, Citi. The messaging on semi is very clear. So perhaps a question for Michael or Kai on display and the whole dynamic about returning to growth, I think, in or before. Just clarification on when you think display can return to growth. And I think everyone on the call knows that OLED is going to be a growth driver, but perhaps you could also spend a little bit of time talking about the dynamic you see for the LCD part of the business. Is that just ongoing decline, moderating decline or even stabilization given the efforts you're making. So just a discussion on -- a little bit deeper on to the display side of the Electronics business.

Peter, thanks for building the bridge to the display side. And you probably have noticed that we have now kind of clustered our businesses on the display side a bit differently on the slide that I presented in order to kind of -- to show how these things are interlinked with the new technology requirements, specifically as it comes to AR/VR and other form factors like glasses. And I believe Michael is charged to the max to respond in much more detail to this question and especially on how the OLED trajectory and how the liquid crystal trajectory will be in the next years. But I think you gave you an indication on -- Peter, on -- that we return to growth in not too far future in that business, which is an enormous achievement given the situation liquid crystals was in some 3 to 4 years ago. So in such a short period of time, this has been completely [ at a build ], and Michael, please, your stage.

Yes. Thank you, Peter and Kai for passing on. We don't talk about liquid crystals and OLED anymore. In a sense, we're [ clustering ] around technology platforms, as you saw. We do that for a while already in semiconductors. And now we're coming up with a consistent tech description of our Electronics business, right? And active emitting materials, so that's the headline where OLED is part of it, but also other materials like [indiscernible] materials. So for the OLED business, indeed, you're right, in the quarter, we see very strong growth, especially compared to last year, very nice buildup. We're investing in OLED to further feed that growth. We're investing in manufacturing capacity in Korea and China, which are the 2 dominant markets from an OLED perspective and that one is our strong growth driver definitely in this resolutions. Light modulating materials is covering liquid crystals, but also other materials like reactive mesogens for AR/VR applications of for optical films for brightness enhancement and even nondisplay applications. The liquid crystal business, I have to say, there's not a lot of news to report here. We set our strategy very clearly in 2018. We're managing the business very consistently with cash. The outlook is fairly constant with what we said already. Last year, the business was hit a bit more by COVID and this is going to recover. So it's kind of modulating around our assumption. But basically, it's boring in the sense there's not much news to tell you. And then the third element in this resolution is the future display where we then look into topics like how can we help our customers to flexibilize their OLED, so means bring OLED into real flexible applications, how can we help to drive new applications like AR/VR, I mentioned already, where, by the way, semi solutions in this resolutions kind of [ merging ] technology-wise. When we do the math of all this, we come to the conclusion that we communicated already, by mid of the century, we -- sorry, mid of the decade, we're going to see these resolutions coming back on the growth track as well. So thank you very much. Great question.

Michael, just a very quick follow-up. I couldn't be more excited about our realignment around these technology platforms because I think it shows that we do have the opportunity to apply those technologies across these fields when semiconductors and displays and the whole processing of data needs to come together. So just so excited for our new alignment around those platforms.

The next question comes from Simon Baker of Redburn.

Just really going back to Matthew's question and Kate's answer, and apologies if I missed this because the reception died a bit. But in terms of your visibility on customer new capacity, could you give us an idea of your latest thoughts on when that capacity is likely to come online over the next sort of 18 months or so? I know you talked about in the past that being the period over which it should start to come online. But any color there? And then thinking about growth drivers for you and the market slightly longer term, could you give your thoughts on the potential impact of the open risk initiative, which if it displaces some of Arm's market share would certainly lower chip design costs? And what implications that's got for price and volume from your perspective?

Thank you, Simon. Maybe on this capacity enhancement side. So currently, we look at a list of probably 30, 40 fab projects and -- which are already on that list, not just talk in the newspapers. And each of these is in different stages. So we see already perhaps close to opening -- very close to the opening date when they start mass production. And we see fabs where they're just kind of breaking ground or preparing the land for that. So that's the scale in which we are. And Kate's team is tracking precisely where these fabs are, when is the planned high-volume production date and what would be our opportunity in that business. At the end, it's a number of -- a very distinct number of customers. We're not talking about a site of, I don't know, hundreds of customers. At the end, it's a number which is below 100, definitely, and of that, below 10 of extremely big customers. We got a high visibility. And Kate and Ed, maybe you can follow up on this one. And on this -- the technology question that you had on risk and its impact on the manufacturing costs, maybe John, could you then elaborate on this question how it impacts the industry. I think, there is, of course, from my point of view, much less than it's in the news because it's one specific technology for one very, very distinct application, but John is the person to excite you on this topic. Kate, Ed, if you could start.

Kate?

Sure. So to Ed's point earlier, I have now -- I've been in this industry for 20-plus years and started in construction. And I agree, I have never seen the level of investment, the level of announcements from our customers of new factories. I have also never seen the level of engagement that we have across the globe in delivery systems with all of our customers. In every one of our regions, every one of our customers has announced a new factory investment, and we are processing orders, receiving orders and forecasting orders that are coming in very, very quickly. And so looking at really making sure that we have the right capacity in region to be able to support this. But we are very busy right now, and I am receiving many orders, and it's exciting, and I'm really looking forward to the fact that there's a lot coming, and it's coming very quickly.

Yes. To build on Kate's comment, thanks, Kate, our customer relationships are very strong, so we have very insight -- good insights via our delivery systems business into the capital projects. We know it takes about 2 years to build from the ground up in these greenfield sites. They then ramp and lock in their process over [indiscernible] of the delivery system's requirements. We have insights into the fab and what materials they'll be using. So our teams work closely in close proximity with the customers. We've got fabs being built by TSMC here locally in Phoenix right now. Per TSMC, from the fact that 25% of the world capacity comes out of Taiwan, we're ultra-close to that customer there. That's ramping 6 fabs now. So we're very close to the leading customers in this industry. DS&S provides us with good guidance as part of our business. And then Anand and his team can work closely with the customers to obtain these plan of record wins for the [ 6 key processes ] where we have one of the broadest and most relevant portfolios in the entire industry.

And just to close on that real quick, the open risk initiative versus Arm, et cetera, I think what we're seeing is the ability for many different customers to start to custom design their chips for their specific applications. So for us as a material supplier, that's both an opportunity and a challenge, a challenge to understand what those different design architectures are going to require to manufacture them and then an opportunity for us to introduce those enabling materials that will allow those devices to realize the benefit that those many customers are now designing those chips. So I think that's just a very exciting opportunity and will bring us lots of new, very capable devices and material requirements.

And we will now take our last question from Rosie Turner from Barclays.

Just one quite specific around the semi business. And I think, obviously, as we've kind of discussed in quite a lot detail undersupply more broadly of semi at the moment, but actually, in terms of DRAM, we have got to state where because the rest of chip manufacturing can't keep up, we are now in a significant kind of oversupply position in terms of DRAM. And I guess if you look at kind of SK Hynix is further down kind of 15% in August reflecting that, so I just wondered if you could let us know what your exposure is more broadly to DRAM and how that's going in terms of your shift to 3D NAND and whether kind of it's something we should be slightly concerned about?

I'm sure Anand would jump on that question right away.

Absolutely. I think the fundamental question we have to ask ourselves is why are these -- why is the market behaving like this? And we have to look back into where we came from in 2019 to 2020. The semiconductor market was already expecting a growth at the behest of 5G and AI implementation. However, with the pandemic, there was also the massive digital acceleration that created demand for PCs and smartphones and more data centers and gaming consoles and more autonomous driving and more consumer electronics. And all of this, as we all mentioned earlier, is unprecedented in the marketplace. And this is the reason why there is shortages in the market, there is a high demand and an extremely short supply. When you look at the memory market, both DRAM and NAND have extremely healthy inventory levels. The prices are rising, and they have been rising for the last several quarters. And DRAM prices are fairly healthy at this point. And that is the reason why customers have also announced various capacity expansions because of the high prices and the low supply. And we believe the memory market will remain still very solid for the foreseeable future.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your questions and your attendance. I now hand you over to Constantin Fest for closing remarks.

Dear, ladies and gentlemen, this now concludes the Merck 2021 Capital Markets Day. Thank you so much for joining this event, for following the Merck journey and for being with us today. Also note that the recording of this event will be available in about 24 hours from now. And with this, thank you again. Stay healthy. Stay safe. Thank you, and goodbye.