Mettler-Toledo International Inc. (MTD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Great. Hi, everyone. My name is Casey Woodring from the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team here at JPMorgan. I'm pleased to be joined by the management team of Mettler-Toledo. We have CEO, Patrick Kaltenbach and CFO, Shawn Vadala. Following the company presentation, we'll have a Q&A session. But for now, I'll hand it over to Patrick.

Thank you, Casey, and good morning. It's great to be with you today. I'd like to start off today with an overview of the business, share some thoughts with you on our growth strategies and why we are well positioned to continue to deliver excellent shareholder returns. So before we get started, of course, please note our disclosure regarding forward-looking statements on -- in the slides. So for those of you that are familiar, I'm sure you would agree, we have a great track record of delivering strong financial results. This track record is built on several important factors. First, we have a strong organization with excellent competitive advantages, which provides an impressive foundation for our growth. Second, we have a growth strategy that is well-developed, well-proven and well-ingrained throughout the entire organization. And third, who we are is why we win. We have a strong culture based on innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement and agility. This has led to a high degree of entrepreneurship and operational excellence. And finally, the organization is laser-focused on execution. In part, this is driven by our tremendous diversity, given the number of customers, products and geographies we operate in, we must execute well to meet customer needs. This is also driven by our group of talented employees worldwide and a flat organization structure, which allows us to efficiently execute on our initiatives. A focused growth strategy, which is underpinned by well-developed initiatives and the strong culture of execution is what drives this track record. Now I'd like to share with you a bit about our product offering. So let me start with our laboratory offering, which represents approximately 55% of our total sales. This slide highlights our laboratory offering, which helps customers accelerate their R&D efforts. R&D customers typically need a high degree of precision and flexibility, which we support of our high-end balances, analytical instruments, pipe heads and automated chemistry solutions. As you can see on this slide, we sell top-of-the-line benchtop or personal instruments, and we are well known for our innovation, quality and deep application know-how. R&D customers increasingly also seek productivity and automated workflows. An important offering is LabX, our instrument control and data management software. We have seen software become an increasingly deciding factor for customers in choosing a supplier for benchtop instruments and the way for customers to achieve full data integrity related to our instruments. Our laboratory instruments are also very important in QA and QC labs. These instruments include balances and a wide range of analytical instruments. Our strong presence in the lab is evident in that we can provide approximately 40% of the bench instruments that are typically used in an analytical quality control app. The final piece of our lab business is process analytics, which is focused on continuous monitoring and process control, including pH, oxygen, CO2 and pressure sensors that are connected with our transmitters. Biopharma is an important end market for this business and also the chemical industry in the fast-growing segments like the semiconductor manufacturing space. The next slide is an overview of our Industrial business, which represents about 40% of our total sales. This slide specifically is what we refer to as core industrial business representing approximately 25% of our total sales. Here, we provide solutions that support our customers in their manufacturing or production, helping them to drive automation and productivity. Our offering includes terminals, scales, load sales and logistics solutions. While we refer to this business as core industrial, I want to remind you that we estimate that more than 60% of our core industrial sales are to pharmaceutical, biopharma, food manufacturing and chemical customers. Now the other portion of our industrial business is product inspection, which represents about 15% of our total sales. In this business, we sell a variety of instruments primarily to food manufacturers to help them detect physical contaminants in packaged food, which is a critical end-of-line process to protect brand reputation. Pharma customers use our PI solutions to detect contaminants in APIs or finished product, ensure proper fill levels and detect damage packaging. Complementing our products, we also provide a broad range of services, which are very important to our customers. We believe we have the largest and most global service network of our direct competitors. And we have seen over the last few years, our ability to continue to serve customers during the pandemic has led to steady increases in customer satisfaction. Services keep us close to our customers, build trust and customers are much more likely to purchase additional products if they utilize our service offering. Now that covers an overview of the business, and I now want to discuss our key competitive advantages, which provide a strong foundation for our growth. We are a market leader in the majority of our business in which we compete. However, many of these markets are fragmented and therefore, provide ample of opportunities for organic share gain. This leadership position stems from our excellent brand and very sizable installed base as well as our innovative product portfolio. We have a direct sales network with product specialists, with deep application know-how, a first class and quite unique sales and marketing program that allows us to identify and direct our sales specialists to the best growth opportunities. And finally, customer contact and support are reinforced with our superior and extensive global service force. The bottom row of advantages on this slide reinforces the strength of our global operations. We have an excellent market position in China and can leverage growth opportunities, manufacturing and sourcing in this country. Our global supply chain and manufacturing presence are enabled by Blue Ocean, our Process and System Harmonization Program. And finally, as I mentioned in my introductory comments, we have a strong culture of execution, driving operational excellence and continuous improvements. We serve very attractive markets and estimate that approximately 70% of our sales are to life sciences, food manufacturers and chemical companies. This mix has significantly improved over time. With the benefit of our pinnacle sales and marketing program and our strong product portfolio. In particular, we estimate that approximately 40% of our sales are to life sciences which we estimate has increased from less than 1/3 of our business about 10 years ago. Our medium-term outlook for our end-markets is very attractive as these markets are focused on automation, productivity, digitalization and compliance. We also expect Life Sciences will benefit from investments into new drug modalities from research to manufacturing, which provides a great opportunity for us to support them with our solutions. Our lab customers are under increasing pressure for automation to drive efficiency and effectiveness in gaining more and better information more quickly while at the same time, facing labor challenges. Biopharma customers are increasing like -- increasing their R&D investments in demanding greater level of accuracy and reproducibility. Lab customers are also facing greater digitalization needs to support automation and compliance needs, while data integrity is driving consolidation of data management systems. The breadth of our bench instruments, combined with our overarching software, LabX, positions us very well to help customers with these needs. The trends of automation, productivity and digitalization and compliance are also very relevant for our customers in manufacturing or production. Labor shortages, higher throughput targets and more recently, near-shoring in higher-cost countries to mitigate supply chain risks continue to accelerate demand for industrial automation to enhance productivity on the shop floor. Our solutions are ideally positioned to meet customer demand for modern, comprehensive interfaces that integrate easily into customer control systems. Now that we have covered the background of our offering competitive advantages and market trends, let's turn to our growth strategies. We have a strong foundation for our go-to-market strategy. As already mentioned, we are a leader in the fragmented markets we operate in with ample of room for additional market share gains. We have approximately 25 different strategic business units, each representing a major product category. We typically have different competition in each category with no one competitor that competes with us across the majority of our businesses. Our Spinnaker sales and marketing strategy increases the productivity of our sales force to focus on the best opportunities and gain share. We have many sophisticated tools and analytics that include utilizing unique data analytics to leverage external data sources and our substantial internal data, including that of our installed base to identify and direct our sales force to the most attractive and profitable growth opportunities. We further support the sales force with an extensive digital library of tools and selling approaches. Our top K program identifies and qualified sales leads that are directed towards our outside sales team. This helps us identify and target attractive opportunities and under-penetrated segments and also pivot 2 so-called hot segments in the market. Given the tremendous diversification of our products and customers, cross-selling is an ideal opportunity to capture growth. Because we utilize a specialized sales force, cross-selling techniques are different than what you might hear from companies that use a more generalized sales force. We use our Spinnaker sales and marketing programs and data analytics to identify customer sites in which we have low cross-selling penetration so far. We then use contacts and references to develop leads for other product categories. It involves data and qualification analytics, and these leads have proven to be very effective in converting into sales. We also continuously expand and enhance our digital sales enablement to library that allows our sales reps to be more effective in value selling, including application information and webinars and EDMOs. Turning now to our service offering. We view service as an important competitive advantage that keeps us very close to our customers. We believe our service organization of approximately 3,000 colleagues is the largest and most global as compared to our direct competitors. Service and consumables represent about 1/3 of our total revenue, of which services is about 70% of that. Now looking closer at service revenue, approximately 50% is contract and the other half is value-added services. Over the medium term, we would expect service to grow even faster than our product sales. We see further potential in penetrating our installed base for service opportunities. Given the strength of customer satisfaction levels, we can continue to increase the percentage of our installed base under service contracts. As a reminder, services are more profitable than our instrument sales. A core part of our strategy is capitalizing on fast-growing market segments, both geographies and end-market verticals. Faster-growing emerging markets represent approximately 36% of our total sales with over half or approximately 20% of our total sales being in China and about 16% from other fast-growing emerging markets outside of China. We have an excellent track record of growth in China, built on our long history of local operations and a very strong local management team. We see lab continuing to be a growing portion of China sales, given the government's commitment to research and development and developing the life science industry. As GDP and GDP per capita grows, customers have greater needs to improve quality and drive higher productivity with automation. We are uniquely positioned to capitalize on these trends across both lab and industrial. Our growth initiatives in China are supported by our portfolio that includes products and applications tailored to the local markets in terms of costs, application areas and entry-level segments. In addition to China and emerging markets, we also pursue other fast-growth vertical market segments. While other small, these market segments represent outsized growth potential for us. Segments include battery, semiconductor, advanced materials and plant-based food to just name a few. The components of these faster growth segments will change as the various markets develop. But given the breadth and scope of our product offering, there will be other subsegments that we will -- that will then emerge and that we will focus on. I now want to turn to the important topic of innovation and our technology leadership. Innovation is fundamental to Mettler-Toledo. We are constantly coming to market with new products that provide concrete value to customers, improve their processes or reduce their pain points. It is deep customer, product and process knowledge that forms the basis for our innovation. On this slide, you see just 2 examples of recent innovations for our lab customers. our new UV instrument and our new unbreakable pH sensor. The UV/VIS instrument can do the work of 3 instruments, but has only about the footprint of a notebook, providing critical bench-based savings for our lab customers. And our new X1 pH sensors are unbreakable and a great solution for dairy customers where glass sensors cannot be used. On this slide, you will see 2 other examples of recent launches for our lab and core industrial customers. our titrator, with automated sample changer and our Industry 360 automation rate indicators, both of which are highly valued by our customers for the productivity benefits they bring it to the lab and in a production setting. Altogether, new product introductions are an important driver of organic sales growth as they help us to trigger replacement, accelerate replacement cycles and add to our installed base for subsequent service business. Switching now to our margin initiatives. We have an excellent track record of margin improvements, as you can see on the slide, when we have very good runway to continue to expand our margins. Margin enhancement starts with our organic growth focus. Sales growth is the most -- is the single most important contributor to margin improvement. Our pricing program and StermDrive productivity programs are important drivers as well. Our business mix also contributes to our margin expansion as our fastest-growing business often tend to be our higher-margin businesses. Also, increasing service sales contributes to margin improvement. As we think to our various growth and margin initiatives, it is important to recognize that Blue Ocean, our global process and system harmonization program is a key enabler of our ability to further evolve these initiatives and successfully implement them. Our pricing program is an important strategic initiative that allows us to continuously reinvest in our business and helps us to mitigate inflationary headwinds. We have a very solid foundation for our pricing program. It is built on our technology leadership, strong value proposition as well as selling lower-priced instruments often directly to the end user. On top of this foundation, we have developed a very strong program based on in-depth analytics, tools and training. Execution is key, and the team has demonstrated great agility in their ability to react quickly to changing market dynamics. StermDrive is our operational excellence and continuous improvement program, which has been a significant competitive advantage over the last couple of years. Several hundred StermDrive projects are underway any one time to improve productivity and continue to drive operational excellence across the organization. We will be launching Wave 3 of StermDrive this year with a focus on smart manufacturing and digitalization, including material cost reduction, strategic in and outsourcing and back office process improvements. While our core growth strategy is centered on organic growth, we also think we can expand our offering through select acquisitions. We are a strong platform for small and medium-sized companies who are facing an inflection point in terms of manufacturing scale-up or the need for international expansion. Since our strategy is predicated on organic growth, we can be very selective in pursuing acquisitions. The key areas of focus would be acquisitions that expand our product portfolio and strategic adjacencies. I think you will most likely see this in our lab offering and our recent PendoTECH acquisition is a good example of this. We will also look for technologies to complement our offering. These will likely be rather small, such as the software acquisition we completed for our automated chemistry business, which provides us additional scale-up capabilities. We have long been committed to sustainable development across broad environmental, social and governance aspects of our Green MT sustainability program. We have great accomplishments in ESG, including achieving carbon neutrality with respect to Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and reducing and sourcing 100% renewable electricity, and our emission reduction targets, including Scope 3, were recently approved by the science-based target initiative. We are very proud to have been recognized from leading rating agencies like EcoVadis for our industry-leading sustainability effort. ESG is a great example of how Mettler-Toledo focuses on the long term to enhance the value of our franchise. So let me summarize our key points from this presentation. We have an excellent track record of delivering outstanding performance. We have clear differentiation in our markets with leading positions in innovative product portfolio, extensive field force and a strong culture of continuous improvement and focus on execution. We have first class go-to-market strategies and are confident that we can capitalize on growth opportunities and faster-growing markets. We will continue to bring innovative products to market and believe our margin and productivity programs will continue to yield strong results. We generate a strong level of cash flow and have balance sheet capacity for selected acquisitions, and we will continue to return capital to shareholders via our share repurchase program. Now that concludes my comments, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.

Great. Thank you, Patrick, for that overview. We'll start the Q&A session now. If anybody has any questions in the audience, please feel free to raise your hand. We have a mic runner in the back. And if anybody is on the webcast and has a question, please feel free to submit one via the portal. But I guess, first, can you walk us through what you're seeing in China in recent weeks, given the resurgence of COVID there? And then just how you're thinking about the medium-term growth levers in China?

Sure, happy to do so. So we have certainly -- what happened in China recently was very concerning also to us. But you have also seen us managing the situation in China through the entire pandemic with the lockdowns very well. I mean we've actually had no disruption, and I'm very happy to report that we're also seeing right now, we don't see any disruption of our operations in China. The latest numbers I have received is that about 83% or north of 80% of our population of our employees in China actually have been already impacted by COVID, and most of them have recovered. So our operations are fully up and running. And we actually, from that perspective, see no impact on the results so far. On the supply chain side, of course, we also monitored that very careful, but also there, I think we can report we don't see any major disruptions so far. It's a situation that we continue to monitor. But again, we have a very strong team in China. The local management team has demonstrated throughout pandemic that they have a strong handle on how we can manage these situations. We have very good protocols in place to make sure that we can protect our employees as much as possible. And we are also very confident that given where we are today, that's the impact on Q1 and further out will not be more impacted.

You've spoken a lot about automation trends across the business and how Mettler is benefiting from that shift by customers. Can you elaborate as to why you're the beneficiary here? Do you have more automated products than competitors? Is it just the overarching trend in the industry that is a rising tide lifts all boats situation? Can you just elaborate on that?

Yes. Thank you. Yes, automation -- the need for automation is actually a real competitive advantage for us. I mean we have long time already prepared our portfolio duty address these needs of customers, and I spoke to that throughout the presentation of the need for automation to drive cost down, to drive productivity, to address labor shortages, et cetera. And I would say, our close contact to our customers really drove solutions that are really well received by them today. And if you look at the lab business, for example, we are probably the only company to have automated scales. We have great automation solutions for our products. As I said in the presentation about Food became serve about 40% of the products that are typically on an analytic quality control bench, and those can be connected to our overarching LabX software, which is also quite unique in the market. This software allows you to automate and reflect the workflows that are used in these labs. So really strong competitive advantages there. On the industry side, it's similar. I mean, you see the home shoring of many of the industries that have been in Asia Pacific now into mature economies, that is, of course, accompanied by the need to drive efficiencies and keep costs under control and also address the need for labor shortages. So our customers are looking for automation solutions. And with our automation solutions that we have in our industry portfolio that seamlessly plug into our customers' environment. We have, I think, a pretty nice competitive edge and it has been very well received by our customers. And we, again, through continuously working with our customers, we continue to also update it further features to reflect the workflows in the manufacturing environment as well.

On European macro, there's been a lot of focus there. You've called out some softness, particularly in PI, but also the overarching energy crisis that's impacting customers. You also noted that the first half of this year will be more challenged in Europe, but should improve in the back half of this year to get to that low single-digit guide for the region. What sort of visibility do you have in the European business? And maybe remind us how much of that European business is more cyclical and industrial exposed versus the company average?

Okay. So in terms of our business in Europe, we have great visibility in our business in Europe. Actually, it's the one region where we go most directly with our sales force. So we have very close feedback also from our sales force as the intact with our customers. The product mix in Europe actually is not much different from other parts in the world. Probably we have a little bit less exposure in industry compared to other areas, but also in the industry there, it's more -- the business is more driven by automation needs where our product portfolio is really front and center what customer needs. About 60% of our industry business today is going into pharmaceutical, biopharma, chemical companies and food processing companies. So that is something we also would consider less cyclical. We are actually -- I think we feel good about our operations in Europe about the strength of our sales organization and go-to-market approaches. When we mentioned in the Q3 call that we see some softness in PI, this was reflecting on, I would say, more cautiousness from our PI customers in terms of making larger investments. These are usually typical large CapEx investments. But the rest of the industry is holding up for us so far. We are very closely monitoring this. Regarding the energy crisis, as you probably know, there has been not a significant impact yet, but it's something that we really have to have on our radar screen. And everything we have in our control, we really feel good about. But of course, there might be -- moving forward, there might be a stronger impact. We haven't seen it right now.

Just had one comment via e-mail. Are you seeing any pharma customers postponing orders or purchases due to budget concerns in the sector? And then just remind us of your exposure to small biopharma versus large biopharma customers.

Yes. So I'll start off with that, that let Shawn also chime in on the split between to large and small molecules market segments. But first and foremost, we have not seen cancellations from our pharma customers. So nothing that I would be aware of, nothing significant. There might be smaller ones, but we see still a very healthy investment in both small molecule and large molecule markets. Remember that in the large molecule segment we serve and also in the small molecule world, we serve the entire value chain from R&D, QA/QC into manufacturing, and it's a very balanced portfolio and a very attractive portfolio, as I outlined that our customers need. But we don't see a significant slowdown anywhere, and we haven't seen cancellations there.

Yes. In terms of the breakout, so the way we would look at it is about 40% of our total business sold into Life Sciences, and we would define that as both small and large molecule as well as like CROs and CDMOs and testing labs. Within that breakout, we don't have a specific breakout between small and large. Of course, large is also important, but a large part of what we do is also on the small side. On the large molecule side, we talk a lot about diversity in terms of our products and in terms of our applications. You also see that in large molecule as well. We have pipe pets that are sold -- that are in the research labs and also the quality labs, but we also have a lot of solutions in bio-production, like our process analytics business, where we have a wide range of sensors, both in upstream and downstream processing. And then we have different instruments throughout the value chain from research all the way through bio production like automated chemistry, we even have some niche applications with like protein aggregation and things like that.

Got it. That's helpful. I think we have a question right here.

Yes. Great presentation. A question on the capital deployment. You obviously have a very well-structured and communicated capital deployment model. Within that context, thinking about the acquisitions and M&A and given how fragmented your markets are, how do you look at deals? How do you evaluate deals? What kind of criteria do you use both in terms of returns or size, et cetera, if you can speak to that?

Okay. Thanks for the question. So I think the first thing is Patrick presented on the slide, but first and foremost, we do view ourselves as an organic growth story, right? Like we have -- we're a market leader but we're also serving highly fragmented markets. So we just need a little bit of market share to gain to continue to grow the franchise. And we feel very passionate about that and we outlined that during the presentation. But at the same time, we do think we are a good platform for acquisitions. But I would say that our view of acquisitions is we tend to be very focused and very disciplined on strategic fit. And so we're not looking to do anything transformational. We really want to see something that can leverage the synergies of our organization. So something that is a good adjacency, something that can leverage our Spinnaker methodologies. Oftentimes, we're looking at bolt-ons, companies that want to go global, we can leverage our infrastructure globally. But oftentimes, it will be something in the lab space, you saw us do PendoTECH a couple of years ago. That was a great example of what we like to do. Bioprocessing, very complementary, where we have a strength upstream. They had a strength downstream, single-use technology, which expanded our portfolio there. But at the same time, we could help them go global. So lots of synergies there, a very good example of the type of acquisition we'd like to do.