Qiagen N.V. (QGEN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome, everyone, to our event today. Really appreciate that you've come to New York, a lot of you. Some of you have come in from Europe. Some of you have come in from across the United States, and we really appreciate that you have this interest in QIAGEN. So let me go through the program. We want to be respectful of your time. So we're going to keep the prepared remarks and presentations to about 2 hours and then leave ample time for the Q&A. So today, we're announcing our 2028 strategy, that commitment to solid profitable growth that you read in our press release, and you'll see that in all the presentations. Today, first, you're going to hear from Thierry Bernard, our CEO, about the 2028 strategy. And to wrap up the presentations, Roland Sackers, our CFO, will discuss our financial goals. Also joining us today from the executive committee are 3 leaders: Nitin Sood will explain our ambitions with QIAcuity digital PCR and what we want to achieve with Sample Technologies where we have a solid #1 position, and this involves the first step in any molecular workflow. Fernando Beils will be the next speaker after that, and he'll give you an update on 2 important pillars. QIAstat-Dx for syndromic testing, and you saw our news today that we are moving into companion diagnostics in this area and then on to QuantiFERON and how we want to extend our #1 position in tuberculosis testing. And after a short break, Jonathan Sheldon will provide some perspectives on our QIAGEN Digital Insights business, which is our bioinformatics business growing at a nice pace and highly profitable. You know that any investor event requires a safe harbor statement. This slide is in all of your presentations. You don't have to worry, I'm not going to read it to you. I'd like to remind everyone that we will be discussing forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in any statements that we make. The factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially are discussed in our most recent Form 20-F on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a copy is also available on our website. Our goal today is to help you better understand and appreciate what QIAGEN has to offer to our customers, and that is all anchored by the power of biology. And it is this power that makes QIAGEN stronger than ever before as we come today to you with our commitments for 2028. So let's see a short video to share with you more about what QIAGEN does before I hand over to Thierry. [Presentation]

Good afternoon. QIAGEN has never been stronger. It's very good to see you, and we thank you. We are around 50 attendees here, the same number of people attending on the web. Thank you so much for your attention on our company. Thank you for the time you spend with us. Thanks also to the team of QIAGEN, the executive team, but not only, and some of our board members who are in the room. It's been 4 years that we did not have such an event together. Last one, if you remember some of you, I hope so, was July of 2019 in New York. And then after we had a web-based one, if you remember, at the end of 2020. It's fair to say that in 4 years, a lot of things that happened have changed: geographic situation, the economic situation, financial hyperinflation. There is one thing, one thing that has never changed during those 4 years, it's QIAGEN focus. And today, it's going to be a key word between us: focus and commitment, focus and commitment. For the last 4 years, we have been focusing on building differentiated pillars of growth, selected pillars of growth where we could take significant leadership in market shares. For the last 4 years, we have been focusing on bringing innovative, differentiated solutions to more than 500,000 customers all over the world. And for the last 4 years, we have been focusing on systematically quarter after quarter delivering on our guidance, both on the top line and also from an EPS or bottom line standpoint. And today, basically with Roland here with Nitin, with Jonathan, with Fernando, we are coming to you to focus, to sharpen this focus even more and to increase our profitability even more. This is not just a commitment of Thierry -- of Thierry or the Executive Committee. It's a commitment supported by 6,000 Qiageners behind us today. And so let's go directly to the numbers because this is what counts. First of all, QIAGEN is a growth investment case. We are committed to you to deliver 7% CAGR in sales above market, above most of our competition. Second, QIAGEN is a profitable investment case. We are going to deliver 31% of operating margin. So an improvement of more than 250 basis points towards or compared to our objective of 2024. Third, QIAGEN fosters operational efficiency. Today, and it starts this year, we are going to propose you and to present and share with you a set of actions aiming at making this company more agile, leaner, better, returning better profitability to our shareholders. And fourth, this commitment to create value to shareholders and stakeholders. You will see that together with investment in R&D and M&A, we will also to seriously -- we would be able to seriously step up our commitment to return to shareholders. And so why do we believe that we can achieve that? First of all, because we have the privilege to operate in a market which is powered by biology. And it's fair to say that in the world of today, biology impacts everyone. Top19 has opened the eyes of the world on the value of biology. Biology is providing our customers, whether they are researchers or clinicians with earlier, faster answers, insights to take clinical decision, either to go further in their research or to basically start the treatment for the patient. Biology is helping pharmaceutical company to speed up drug development, therefore, directly impacting health care. It is fair to say, and especially since COVID-19 that biology has become a critical contributor to the health care value chain. So what is the role of QIAGEN here. Well, first of all, if you agree that biology has become a critical component of the health care value chain, then it's fair to say as well, especially again since COVID, that molecular biology, molecular biology is a critical component of the diagnostic value chain, both for research and for also clinical. And our founders, the founders of QIAGEN have seen that for the last 40 years, the promises of that powerful molecular techniques. It's fair to say that in molecular biology, there is before QIAGEN and after QIAGEN. Metin Colpan, our founder, 40 years ago really unlocked the pathway to understand DNA and RNA and this accelerated that revolution. Let me tell you an anecdote. A year ago, I was invited in Cambridge in the U.K. to deliver a statement on the future of biology, the future of diagnostic, both for research and for clinical. The audience was a public of more than 250 PhDs from all over the world. And at the point, I asked the question, simple question, who in this room has used a product of QIAGEN? They all raised their hand. I don't think that any other company on the market would receive that statement of confidence. And that statement and confidence is built on the quality of the product that we have been building for the last 40 years. This is allowing us to address a market which is significant in size. As of today, 11 billion market addressable. And we do that also by being quoted, mentioned every year, 60,000 time in scientific publication. You heard that, 60,000 times. It's not total, it's every year. Credible scientific credibility. And yet, indeed, the last 4 years have been dedicated to focus on execution. Executing on delivering 85% of our sales from recuring consumable sales. Executing on delivering 7% CAGR in the last 4 years outside of COVID, outperforming again the market. And what is equally important that in the last 4 years, we increased our installed base by 17,000 systems. Those systems will create the consumption of -- consumables of tomorrow. Focus, as I said, but also balanced, balancing application. QIAGEN is equally at home between life science and molecular diagnostics. Never forget that we sell more than 80% of our product across those 2 dimensions: life science, molecular. Then coherence in the product portfolio. It starts obviously with sample prep and Nitin will show that. It's the heart of QIAGEN. But from there, it allows us downstream the value chain to provide solution in PCR, in digital PCR, in next-generation sequencing, all these boosted by cutting-edge software to unlock the power of data in biology and also, obviously, geographic balance. Most of our sale order, big part of our sales, 50% from the Americas, especially in the U.S., which is by far the main market for us in research and diagnostic. We are still growing in Europe, Middle East and Africa, with significant market shares taken recently also in Middle East, for example. Asia Pacific, Japan, around 15% to 20%. And since we are talking geography, allow me 2 minutes on a topic which is recurring for the last 2 years, which is China. China is 6% of QIAGEN sales. Our exposure is limited. Does it mean that we deleted the market, China? No. It's too big a market to be ignored. But China is a specific market that deserves localized solution. This is what we are doing, with local manufacturing, local brand as well to take what? Once again, profitable position, and I insist profitable. And so this slide for me is speaking by itself. We are serving, as I said, more than 500,000 customers. Here, 2 messages for me: one, those are the most prestigious names that you can dream of in pharmaceutical, in CROs, in clinical, in biotechs or in public health agencies. But the second message is perhaps more important. Those customers are extremely demanding. For them, quality -- quality is no brainer. And this is why for the last 40 years, we have built a very coherent continuum of solutions from academia to clinical based on quality. And so as I said before, it all starts with a sample. This is where we have absolute leaders, everything which is sample collection, stabilization, extraction of a nucleic acid, we are #1, manual, automated. But from that pivotal and avoidable position in the laboratory workflow, then we can take leadership position in PCR, digital PCR, next-generation sequencing delivering results either to researchers or to clinical laboratory. You will see that slide again and again in that presentation, with Fernando, with Nitin, with Jonathan. This is the typical workflow in a molecular lab, and this is showing clearly the coherence of our portfolio. So yes, I said, clearly, over the last 4 years, we believe that we have built a stronger company, a more focused company, a more resilient company. But now with our market, with our customer base, with our product portfolio, we believe that we can look ahead to the coming 4 years with extreme confidence, and this is what we propose you and this is what we are going to deliver. As I said before, first, delivering 7% CAGR sales for the coming 4 years, above market growth. This will come for 2 main actions, accelerating when we believe we have the potential to take quicker market shares; second, consolidating leadership position. But this will come also with increased profitability. As you most of know -- as most of you know, we already have a very strong P&L, but we are committed to deliver an ever improved P&L with 31% EBIT margin by 2028. This focus, this unwavering focus in portfolio priorities will be across digital PCR, QIAcuity, syndromic testing, QIAstat, bioinformatics. Those are the markets that we need to accelerate, but also consolidated leadership position around Sample Tech and QuantiFERON. Those priorities alone by 2028, we represent $2 billion of sales for QIAGEN. And as we will see later also a significant step-up in commitment to return to our investors. So let me take you a bit with more details on how we are going to do that. First, to sharpen focus on sales. It's very simple. It is all about freeing up management attention, people attention and resources when we can matter. And this explains also why we had to take that decision on NeuMoDx. It's not about the product. The product NeuMoDx has always been good and has served its purpose, has served so many customers, especially during the pandemic. But with NeuMoDx, we have never been able to create enough profitability and to have enough visibility on the profitable evolution. So we need to take decisions. And this is also a signal of what the new QIAGEN is by the way, a company that takes quicker decision when it's necessary and we don't stop NeuMoDx just for the sake of stopping it. We do it to be able to free up resources, management times, people times, people in the field, people in marketing where we can take leadership. Once again, where we can accelerate investment for growth digital PCR, syndromic testing, bioinformatics and where we can consolidate leadership. So how can we consolidate that leadership in those areas? Let me try to propose a very simple distinction. We have 2 main focuses here. One, we have market with tremendous growth and the rule here, we need to accelerate investment to accelerate on taking market shares and those are: digital PCR, syndromic and bioinformatics. And we have also proven leaderships, Sample Tech and QuantiFERON on markets that are still offering smart growth opportunities to our company. So let's go a bit in detail, starting with digital PCR. You know that we have launched our solution around 3 years ago. It's, by far, at the moment, the quickest progression of installed base, clearly. And here, we have a significant objective of tripling our current level of sales, $250 million by 2028. We'll do that by taking market share from qPCR from NGS, but also adding solution and menu for our researchers and moving the platform also to clinical application. Nitin will come back to that. Syndromic QIAstat, already an impressive installed base of more than 4,000 systems and a commitment to double what we are currently doing to $200 million revenues in 2028. We told you for some time already that we will be a solid #2 on the market we deliver. You have seen the recent approval of GI in the U.S. This is allowing us, obviously, to accelerate on that fundamental market, but Fernando will show you that we have more menu coming, more submission and therefore approval, and he will also give you news on what we call Mini panel, but we will go to that. Bioinformatics. We said at the end of 2023 that QIAGEN was investing into bioinformatics. We confirm that investment. We are already the #1 in the world in bioinformatics, not only #1, but profitable #1. It's all about putting more foot on the ground, basically creating new software, updating our current software and probably also accelerating on M&A. But the objective here also is enhance this leadership by doubling the revenue, $200 million, 2028. And then we move to the right side of the slide, the consolidation of leadership. Sample Tech and Nitin will go there. I know that many of you are considering that Sample Tech is a very mature market or even old market. Mature, I don't know. Slow growing, yes. It's probably low to single digit. But we are on the offense here, we are on the attack because we know that we can continue to consolidate our leadership. Nitin will show you what we are going to launch 2 new platforms. And perhaps more importantly, there are many opportunities -- unmet research opportunity for Sample Tech when we can continue to grow. Think about microbiome; think about, for example, liquid biopsy; think about minimal residual diseases; and last but not least, obviously QuantiFERON. I know that it has been a topic of discussion for the last months and it's still a topic of discussion. It's perfectly legitimate. In July of '19, when we were standing in front of you, we said at that time, we were $200 million on QuantiFERON. We said we will achieve $400 million by 2023, and some of you were saying, might be a bit optimistic this one. QuantiFERON has been facing competition for many years. It's not new. Competition has never been new for QuantiFERON, but there is one competition, that we can convert to continue to take market share, and this is skin test, and Fernando will show that again. 60% of the skin test market is still not converted. In the U.S., that means 16 million, 1-6 million of tests. And Fernando will also show you how he wants to take more market shares by accessing other population with QuantiFERON. Growing faster than the market is always very good. Profitably growing is even better. And here, we are sharing together with you today the set of actions that we are starting in 2024. It's not going to be a one shot. It's going to be a long-term action plan where no stone is going to left unturned. Every department at QIAGEN will be impacted: sales, R&D, marketing, operation, finance, administration, you name it. It's a complete mindset at QIAGEN from 6,000 people, we call it QIA efficiency. Efficiency means obviously being smart enough to focus when it matters in sales. We covered that. Efficiency means to systematically track any place where we could do better, where we can become leaner, where we can provide you with more returns. Just a couple of examples, and Roland will come to the details there. Organizational setup is no taboo, can perfectly change the organization if we can make it leaner. Once again, if we can increase the span of control of every manager and reduce the number of layers between an entry employee and myself, for example. Second is obviously portfolio streamlining. You have seen that with NeuMoDx. It's a big number, but it's not over. There are other smaller products in our portfolio where we are going to really say, okay, would they be better off in another organization? Or should we accelerate their life cycle management? Once again, focus of the people attention, where it matters. Third, process optimization. You all know that for some years, we have invested into a new ERP, SAP HANA. It's not for the sake of changing the ERP, it's to create basically scale up in processes, and Roland will give you some details. It starts with demand forecasting. It goes to purchasing, and we will have quantified objectives here. And last, Antonio is in the room here, it's constantly challenging our network of sites. We have many sites of R&D and manufacturing all over the world, but our objective is not to multiply those sites, forever. A good example. 2 years ago, we told you that we were strengthening our forensic activities with the acquisition of Verogen, NGS-based forensic activities. They are in San Diego. Guess what? We have a center of excellence in Maryland, Frederick, to develop NGS kits snowball. We closed San Diego, we move it to Maryland. That's just another example. And why are we doing that? It's also to, as I said before, to free up elsewhere. And this company really believes in AI and in digital. It's been many years that we have invested in digital activities. Obviously, we look at AI as a way to enhance and improve processes. But never forget that AI and digital can be also a good accelerator for sales. This company is already having 65% of our sales coming from touchless orders. This is the first in the market. We take a commitment today. We will become the digital life science and molecular company, not just for sales and marketing. It goes to operation. It goes to regulatory. It goes to administration. Roland will show that as well. Once we have done all those activities, focus, operational efficiency, how can we leverage our healthy balance sheet and recurring cash flow generation to become even more efficient. Not a lot of change here at QIAGEN. It's all about disciplined capital allocation, obviously. It's all about thinking shareholders, stakeholders' return. First, we believe in investing in organic R&D. This is a fundamental of our company. We have done that for you. We will maintain a ratio of 9% to 10% of sales dedicated to R&D., but profitable R&D, think NeuMoDx. Two, M&A. Obviously, M&A is a key element of our strategy. We have been doing M&A for many years, but we have very clear criteria for M&A. One, it has to make strategic sense. You know the word, we are not doing M&A to swing the company or spread the combination again. Two, we need to basically be able to clearly improve or accelerate the target we want to acquire. In other word, 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 2. It needs to do 3. Third, it has to be sound financially. A company like QIAGEN can accept to have some dilution for a certain period of time, but we need to have a clear visibility on accretion. Last but not least, and this is where we are stepping up. While doing R&D investment, while doing some M&A, we want also to step up a dynamic policy of return to shareholders. And we commit to $1 billion return to shareholders starting in '24 to 2028. You have seen at the beginning of this year, was that we started to return $300 million per year share buyback program. You have seen if you follow QIAGEN closely that in the agenda of our general assembly this week, we have also another authorization for $300 million, $1 billion. It's a significant step-up. Obviously, as I said before, we work in an environment where biology is so important, but it's not the only environment where we are. We live in countries. We live in societies, communities. We live in the world. We believe that with $2 billion revenues and 6,000 people, QIAGEN has a corporate social responsibility as well, not because there are regulation or it became fashionable, because we believe that it makes business sense for QIAGEN, but also for our customers. And just a couple of examples. We continue to confirm our commitment to net 0 carbon emission by 2050, one. Second, we strongly believe in a diversified sales force. Diversity doesn't just mean that gender. The gender is important. And this company was at 26% of female in leadership in 2019, first time we came to you. It's 36% now, and we will go to 40%. And everything we can improve, we will do it here. And last but not least, we are here in health care. What does it mean? We mean -- it means that we care. Fernando, Nitin, Jonathan, we are all convinced that we need also to provide added value quality solution, not just for Europe or for the U.S., but also for emerging countries. This is why we have more than 50 programs with public evidences all over the world. All this will never be achieved without the people. We call them our qiageners. I'm strongly convinced and you see that in that place, first of all, that QIAGEN is a nice place to live in and to work. But there is something also very important for us, is that we constantly want to have this fundamental mix of attracting new talent, bringing new people, and I note here that 50% of our management has changed in the last 4 years, 50%. But at the same time, we continue to leverage the experience of long timers, 15% of qiageners have been working in this company for more than 15 years. It's a fantastic loyalty. We need to leverage this. And it's at every level. At the Board, for example, look at the strengthening of the Board in management capabilities, in scientific knowledge for the last 4 years. We have here Ross Levine with us from our Board, a renowned oncologist. He joined the Board in 2016, but some other people like Eva van Pelt, for example, or Bert did join this year, and we will continue also this. We do that also at the executive committee level. You will have the opportunity. Some of you have discussed with them already to meet Fernando, to meet Nitin today. They joined in 2023 with a specific experience from other companies, international experience. In the room, you can also meet Antonio Santos. He joined us in 2022 and he is leading operation, renewing, reinvigorating always the people. So to conclude, and before going to a movie which will show you how our customers are leveraging our Sample Tech and digital PCR products and handing it over to Nitin, very simple. I will never remember -- I will never forget, I'm sorry, that 4 years ago, this company has -- had its back against the wall. And the last 4 years, by execution, by focus, we really made it stronger, once again, more resilient. What we are giving you today is a commitment to an even more focused, even more profitable company. 7% CAGR, 31% and the company that believes in our shareholders $1 billion return. Thank you. [Presentation]

Good afternoon, everyone. So as you saw from that video, the possibilities of analyzing DNA and RNA are endless. And that's essentially what QIAGEN does and enables for scientists all over the world and the applications are endless. You can make better diagnostics, you can improve therapeutics, you can monitor global pandemics more vigilantly. And that's why I joined QIAGEN over 10 months ago. I'm a molecular biologist by training, and I worked in the life science industry for over 20 years. And I've had a deep admiration for QIAGEN, first as a molecular biologist in the lab and most recently developing liquid biopsy tests. And now I'm really honored and privileged and delighted to be part of the QIAGEN team. I was a customer first and now I'm part of the team. So very exciting for me. And my team and I and all of us at QIAGEN, we're committing to groundbreaking advancements in molecular biology and above-market growth, and let me show you how. So first, let's zoom in on the market. You saw this slide from Thierry a little while ago. Let's focus on the life science market. Sample preparation is the area where we are leaders. As you all know, QIAGEN has been in this space for many, many years. So we're leaders in this space, and this is the first step in every molecular workflow. This is the first step in enabling the endless applications of RNA and DNA. And from this first step, we also provide workflows in detection through NGS, PCR and our digital PCR platform. We have a global sales team. We provide our products to customers in academia, in biotech, in pharma across 60 countries, addressing essentially a $6 billion market opportunity. Now whether you're a scientist in cancer research trying to fundamentally understand disease biology or you're a scientist like I was trying to develop liquid biopsy-based diagnostics, and let me tell you about liquid biopsy. As you all know, cancer typically requires an invasive process to remove a tissue sample from your lung or liver or stomach. It's typically done invasively. Now there is companies and technologies that can detect the same thing from a blood sample and QIAGEN enables many of those applications; or you're a researcher in a biotech or a pharma company inventing these novel drugs called cellular therapies, where you're training the body's own immune system to fight cancer, again, we enable that; or you're a law enforcement official trying to catch a criminal using DNA-based evidence, and we recently helped catch this criminal called the Golden State criminal that had gone on -- had gone -- not caught for 30-plus years, and our technology was helpful in catching that. So we -- for all these customers, across all these segments, we provide the full workflow. We start with the best DNA and RNA extraction technology. We're known for that. And then we go into NGS, digital PCR and PCR. And then we combine it with our sophisticated bioinformatics so that we can really provide groundbreaking advancements. And you'll hear about bioinformatics from my colleague later today, Jonathan Sheldon. So the applications of DNA and RNA are increasing. You heard that from Thierry. They're everywhere. So it's a very exciting time to be in this market. And on the midterm basis, we expect continued growth. So great market. How are we going to win in this market? You heard 2 things from Thierry, focus and commitment. You'll hear that as a theme from all of us. First, I want to start out by reminding all of you we are in an incredibly well-known brand in all molecular biology labs out there in the world. You've heard Thierry's example. He was at Cambridge. He was talking to a bunch of researchers. Everybody knows QIAGEN. I can tell you that from my own personal experience. I'm a molecular biologist. My wife is a molecular biologist. We have so many friends who are molecular biologists. QIAGEN is an incredibly well-known brand. And we're known for performance and we are known for quality. So from this position of strength, we're focusing on 2 areas. First, we are leaders in sample preparation where we're going to continue to innovate and invest in Sample Tech and maintain our leadership position. We're launching 2 new platforms. I'll talk a little about that later, and we're launching a steady stream of consumables in high-growth applications like liquid biopsy, cell and gene therapy, infectious disease detection and all of those areas. Second, we are increasing our investment in our highly successful digital PCR platform called QIAcuity. Some of you may have seen that. It's outside. Happy to talk more about that later after this conversation. You all know PCR, right? You've all been tested for COVID. COVID was a PCR test. Digital PCR is the next generation of PCR with much higher accuracy and precision and we've been very successful with it. So we're increasing our investment and really capturing what we think is a dynamically growing market opportunity, seizing this opportunity. So those are the 2 areas of investment, and now I want to dive into each one of them. First, let's start with Sample Tech. So Sample Tech is a $1.2 billion market opportunity. Everything starts with Sample Tech. And if this sort of first step doesn't work out, downstream applications will fail. So it's really, really critical that Sample Tech plays a very important role in all molecular biology workflows. And whatever the application is, whether it's liquid biopsy or microbiome or monitoring cancer using this new application called MRD, all of those endless applications of RNA and DNA start with Sample Tech. And customers know that QIAGEN provides the gold standard kits for Sample Tech. Now any sample type: tissue, cells or a sample from a crime scene, the performance of Sample Tech must be great. And we provide 350 kits that cover all kinds of applications. And when customers know how to use one QIAGEN kit, they know how to use all QIAGEN kits. And as a result, they're able to come to QIAGEN and utilize QIAGEN, our entire workflow, our entire portfolio to meet all their application needs. And you can see that from our performance. We sell 120 million reactions a year. Now I want to show you these boxes, these red and blue boxes. They're everywhere. And you can go to any molecular biology lab in the world and you'll see these boxes. And inside these boxes are spin columns, these are tiny little spin columns, and we were the first ones to develop spin columns. We took 3-day workflow and compacted into a 3-hour workflow. And since 40 years, we've been launching innovative products in sample preparation for decades now. But, we're not sitting on our laurels. We're not complacent. We're investing, we're continuing to innovate, and we want to really continue to serve our customers. 50,000 publications is what our customers publish a year using our Sample Technologies. And we have 28,000 automation platforms installed out there and we want to double down on this. So we're launching 2 new automation platforms. First, in 2025 for our clinical customers, we're launching QIAsymphony Connect, and then in 2026, for our research customers, we're entering a brand-new segment with a product called QIAsprint Connect. And let's now dive into each of these. Starting with QIAsprint Connect. This is a brand new segment we're entering for our high throughput customers in the research segment. This is sort of a -- we have a comprehensive portfolio of products in Sample Tech. This was an open flag. We're now fulfilling this segment. What's great about QIAsprint Connect? First, it's the smallest footprint instrument out there. As you know, researchers value lab space and especially bench space is really at a premium. So this is a benchtop system, it's low footprint. Second, it's the highest throughput system on the market. It can process 192 samples in 60 minutes. Third, this system comes with a very sophisticated piece of software that allows customers to rapidly create new protocols, which is an important need in research markets. As you know, researchers change their workflows. So this will allow configuration. This system is based on our highly successful [indiscernible] based consumables. So at launch in 2026, customers will have a wide array of applications available to them right at launch. And now with the launch of this system, we cover the entire throughput needs for our customers that have low throughput needs. They have the QIAcube Connect, which processes. You can see that on this side, that can process 12 samples per run. And we have 14,000 instruments out there doing QIAcube Connect and we recently upgraded the system. And then for our high throughput customers, they'll now have QIAsprint Connect. So customers will not only have the entire array of consumables from us, they also can rely on us for their entire throughput needs. Next, we're launching a product in the clinical market. You all are very familiar with our QIAsymphony Connect product. This is our flagship product for clinical diagnostics. We have 3,300 instruments installed worldwide. We're upgrading this system, and we're launching it in 2025. We're upgrading it for liquid biopsy applications, which is a high-growth area for us. And what are we doing here? We are upgrading it in terms of higher volume. We're upgrading it in terms of low elevate volume, low debt volume. These are technical terms. How do they benefit the customer? They benefit by capturing every single molecule in cell-free DNA applications and liquid biopsy applications, every molecule matters. And then these QIAsymphony Connect also will come with preconfigured workflows and prefilled cartridges, which are very important for our diagnostic customers. A great example of QIAsymphony Connect is a customer called Intera. You all are familiar with it. It's a cancer diagnostic NIPD company. QIAsymphony is -- dozens of them are employed in their production lab processing massive volumes of clinical samples. Both QIAsymphony Connect and QIAsprint Connect have received great feedback from our customers. I'm really confident -- the test customers have given great feedback. I'm very confident that these products will do really well in the market. So in summary, we are launching 2 new systems. We're launching a set of consumables and we're committing to $750 million in revenue by 2028 in Sample Technologies. That's about $100 million increase from where we are today. Next, let's go into digital PCR. This is our highly successful platform. A few minutes ago, I just said digital PCR is the digital version. You saw that in the video as well from one of our customers. It's got higher accuracy and precision than conventional PCR. So what does this mean? This means it enables new kinds of applications that weren't enabled before. A great example of this, you all probably have heard of this in news is wastewater testing, where you test wastewater to measure how a pandemic may be doing, how the levels of infection in a community may be. And we developed wastewater testing on the QIAcuity with CDC. And now QIAcuity is deployed in 84 state and federal labs all across the United States, measuring wastewater, measuring the emergence of pandemics. Whether you're in Boston, or you're in Chicago or you're in L.A. or right here in New York City, there's a lab out there measuring wastewater using a QIAcuity. And we recently spoke to the CDC again, and they're converting all their qPCR assays into QIAcuity for variety of pathogens, and they're expanding this to airports and to hospitals and to military bases. So we really see this as a great opportunity for this product. And I also talk to customers and customers are converting some of their NGS applications because it's much simpler to convert -- much simpler to implement as a workflow than NGS. So we see that change happening. So really a great opportunity for this platform. And now let me tell you how -- why we're going to continue to do well. First, we have the most scalable system. We can go from one system, 1-plate system to 8-plate systems. So if you're a brand-new to digital PCR, you can start with a 1-plate system. Now if you've moved digital PCR into your production environment, you can go to a 4-plate system or to our 8-plate system, which is the highest throughput in the entire industry. Second, our system is based on plates. These are plates. These are highly well-known in a molecular biology lab. If you've been in molecular biology lab, everybody knows how to work with these plates. So our systems are plate based. These are very complex plates. There's a lot of engineering behind in these plates. Happy to talk about them later. And a plate-based system has great workflow advantages. Other systems for digital PCR required 3 separate steps. Our system requires 1 step. And that step takes 2 hours versus 5 hours in other systems. So great advantage in terms of speed. And we've been very successful with this platform. We launched the system in 2020. We've now 2,000 systems installed worldwide. We have 2,300 applications available to our customers. And we have something called GeneGlobe. This is a portal where customers can go and get access to millions of assays that can be customized and run on our digital PCR. So incredible flexibility in this platform. And we've tripled the number of publications that reference QIAcuity. So again, this is a very successful platform, doing really well for us. The market is growing. And as a result, we want to dramatically increase our investment in QIAcuity. First, we're launching a clinical system coming soon later in this year. On this clinical system, we're launching an oncology assay called BCR-ABL. Next, we're launching 100 new assays on the QIAcuity platform. You recently heard us a few weeks ago -- a few days ago, last week actually, we launched 35 new assays, all focused on infectious disease detection. Next, we're going to launch assays on cancer, on cell and gene therapy. And we are matching this investment we have in R&D with a commercial investment. We are tripling the size of our commercial team. That's how much confidence we have in this product. And we're going to commit to delivering $250 million in revenue, which is 3x more revenue than what we have today. And the market is growing at 25%, we're growing at -- sorry, the market is growing at 15%, and we're going to grow at 25%. So that's how much confidence we have in this platform. Now let me tell you about a specific use case, a customer story. A major hospital in the U.S. is using QIAcuity in its fight against pediatric cancer. They're developing what are called cellular therapies or CAR-T therapies. This is where the patient's own immune system is reprogrammed to fight the cancer. So typically, what you do here is you draw blood from the patient, you engineer their T cells or immune cells. You engineer them so that they can recognize cancer cells. You reinsert them into the patient's body and there, they go and fight cancer. Very complicated step. The hospital wanted to release their product in 5 days and they're releasing their product with QIAcuity. The release testing of this product, this highly important product is done with QIAcuity in 5 days. And I just spoke to the customer, Dr. Kat Willis and she told me she's going to move all her legacy assays from Droplet Digital PCR from qPCR, all of them into QIAcuity. So this hopefully gives you a visibility into our understanding into how we're going from research into translational medicine, eventually moving QIAcuity into diagnostics. So in summary, we're very excited about what we can do with sample technologies and QIAcuity, digital PCR. We're very bullish on the underlying markets. We're very bullish on what we can do with these technologies. And I want to again remind you all, as you saw from the video, the possibilities of DNA and RNA are endless. It's a great time to be in this market. It's a great time for QIAGEN to be in this market. We have a strong position. So very, very excited, again, to be part of the company. We're very excited to be in this industry. And it's not just a great time for life sciences, but all these technology we develop in life sciences then get passed over and hand over to my colleague, Fernando, who then turns them into diagnostic solutions. And so we work very closely together. But before I invite Fernando, we're going to play a video of how QuantiFERON and our QIAstat platform are used by clinicians and by customers all over the world to make really mission-critical decisions. Thank you. Thank you, everyone for listening to me. [Presentation]

Yes. I wish. You know we saw in this video how important it is to diagnose when times of the essence when you need to treat a patient. And I wish a solution like QIAstat would have been available more than 10 years ago. My mother passed in the ICU because of a severe infection and diagnosis came way too late. QIAstat that would have been a solution in this case, true savior. Good afternoon. My name is Fernando Beils. I'm the Senior Vice President and Head of the Molecular Diagnostics business area here at QIAGEN. I joined QIAGEN last year. I've more than 2 decades in the clinical diagnostics industry. I served companies like Siemens Healthineers and Thermo Fisher Scientific Being active in fields like molecular diagnostics, microbiology, clinical toxicology, therapy drug monitoring. In my last role, I was in charge of the genetic testing solutions business. I joined QIAGEN. You saw the blue box. I was just before in the elevator and someone, I don't know if this gentleman is in the room asked me about all the blue boxes, I use them all the time in my lab. So QIAGEN is almost everywhere, sample to insight. And for me, it's a candy store of and the privilege to convert all of this into methodology to help patients is a big privilege. So today, I will be talking about molecular diagnostics, how we embrace it, how we address the market, how we expand our business. As you have heard from my colleague, Nitin, before, in Life Science, we are unlocking the secrets of DNA and RNA from sample to insight. And in molecular diagnostics, we are addressing the needs in infectious disease testing for respiratory illnesses, for gastrointestinal infections, for tuberculosis. We're also addressing cancer diagnostics. We're helping pharma companies to come up with precision diagnostics. All of this ultimately is here to help clinicians to be decisive where it matters. And ultimately, we're helping patients. True to our mission, we're making improvements in life possible. You heard from Thierry before, relentlessly focused, and this is a relentlessly focus on to be decisive where it matters and to answer unmet clinical needs. So today, I will be speaking about 2 of our growth pillars and one of them, I call it always, yes, a sneaky disease, which is tuberculosis, which we are addressing with our QuantiFERON platform, where I'm going to talk about how we expand our business in this market leadership role. Then I will be speaking about our second growth pillar, which is our up-and-rising star, QIAstat which is addressing multi-syndromic testing that needs multiple variants of bacterial or viral infection, where we come up with one test. But let's address first the sneaky disease, tuberculosis. In this age of biology, we always think about the tuberculosis is something from the past. It's gone or it's only impacting developing countries. But it's here and now. You heard in the news that right now Chicago was impacted, that we had impacts in California with outbreaks, also in Michigan. And it's here, it's present. And what you also need to know is that every year, 1.5 million people die because of tuberculosis. It's the deadliest among the infectious diseases. So it's latent, it's sneaky. So it's inactive in a human being for many years. You go throughout your life and eventually, it strikes when a person gets older or is immunocompromised or women in pregnancy and then it becomes dangerous. 2 billion people, 2 billion people, that is 25% of the worldwide population carry latent TB. The good news is it's detectable, you can diagnose it and you can treat it. And for many years, the standards of care for tuberculosis has been the skin test. I'm sure that many of us in the room and also many of us on the webcast have been tested with a skin test. I have been tested with a skin test when I came to the United States. And I needed to see the doctor a couple of times because I missed my second appointment. The blood test has so many advantages because you have one visit. In the lab, it's fully automated. You can visualize the results on your [ lymph ] test. So you have all the automated aspects of a very automated tests. The blood-based tests, which we call QuantiFERON has a tremendous success over the past years. As you can see here, we grew the business very successfully. It's a standard of care. We are currently at our fourth generation of QuantiFERON test with more than 2,700 publications, protected by more than 120 patents, FDA approved, CE IVD certified, WHO approved and endorsed. It's a true gold standard when it comes to tuberculosis testing and it's our foundation for growth. Now we are expanding our number, our market leadership position that we have by a couple of things. Number 1 is we continue to explore and we're going to roll out our automation capabilities, pre-analytical, post-analytical together with our partners. I want to mention DiaSorin in this case as they have a very large global installed base where we are putting our solution on top. We are also collaborating together with DiaSorin on releasing a new test for Lyme disease, which is currently under review with the FDA. We are also continuously converting our skin tests, the skin tests which are out there with our dedicated and specialized sales force in our customer education programs, which is research sharply focused on this. And we are in development of a solution for developing countries where we want to address the particular workflow needs and the price points of these developing countries. All of this makes us commit and we are driving the business to be at $600 million revenue by the year 2028. This is our target, which we are committed to, and this is how we want to expand our leadership role. Now let me speak about our second growth pillar, QIAstat-Dx, where simultaneously, you can test up many pathogens, viruses, bacteria, parasites, but let me give you an example how our solution comes to play. Let's take a 3-year-old child suffering with diarrhea, high fever, nausea. And the treating physician, it would take him or her several rounds of testing until to decide which therapy is the most adequate to help the patients. Precious time goes by. You start the therapy very late. And in this particular case, our QIAstat gastrointestinal kits would test the same patient in 60 minutes and would give the physician treatment outcome to help the patient. Ultimately, QIAstat, it's about sample-to-answer, easy and speedy solution to be decisive where matters and provide our clinical results. Over the past time, we installed more than 4,000 instruments, and we're very happy with the sales trajectory of our QIAstat solution. Last week, we hosted 80 molecular diagnostic experts from all over the world in our headquarters in Hilton, and I brought with me a cartridge. So I ask them what is really what excites you about QIAstat. And the simple answer was it's easy to use. It's less than 1 minute hands-on time. And one of the big advantages that we have, I mean, with the simplicity is just to show you, you open the pouch, you take off the cartridge, then with a swab that you might still remember from the COVID times, you put in the sample, you put it into the system, press the play button, and that's it. And my colleagues will happily show you later in the break how our QIAstat system works and you can also put hands on the cartridge. The cartridge is essentially combining the complexity of real-time PCR, qPCR in a very simplified setup and this is one of the advantages. The customer told me that qPCR is the name of the game. It's a technology which allows you to quantitate. You can see CT curves, standard curves. you were able to digitize it. You put it on your digital insight system and you can visualize everything. Another advantage, and this was one professor of German university told me what he particularly likes about our system is, yes, we are looking at more than 20-plus pathogens, so viruses, bacteria, but it has the ability to go over 40 and if you imagine that life goes on, there might be new mutants out there, hopefully not another pandemic or epidemic but you are able to expand the testing capabilities of our QIAstat system and our QIAstat cartridge. But it's not the cartridge alone. It's the modular scalability of our system. We can help low throughput customer and similar to LEGO set, you can expand your setting up to the QIAstat Rise where you can run up to 160 tests in a day. Furthermore, we are dedicated on focusing on menu expansion. And with the menu expansion, you just heard from, Thierry, we just got the FDA approval for our gastrointestinal testing kit. We are also submitting this year our meningitis panel. We're also addressing reimbursement needs with our mini panels, which are coming up. And we're also expanding beyond that with blood culture identification, complicated urinary tract analysis and also pneumonia. And all of this makes us commit to double our revenue of QIAstat until 2028 overcoming $200 million in sales. And this makes me very exciting. And not only that, and we don't stop here, we are rolling QIAstat-Dx right now also into pharma partnerships. So, you have to imagine that we have right now 2 pharma partners we just signed on, addressing hereditary disease space for liver, for also other parts of the body like kidneys, where QIAstat ultimately is a gatekeeper of therapy. What does it mean? Currently, the drug is going under clinical trials. We're supporting it with the QIAstat solution with our cartridge. But once the drug is approved, it will go with a companion QIAstat kit which qualifies the patient for therapy or rules them out for therapy. Why is this an advantage? So ruling out is -- I mean, once you ruled in, yes, you can help the patient, you can cure the patient. But once you ruled out, there are 2 advantages. Number 1 is you're not keeping up false hope for cure. And number two, you also avoid, especially payers, insurers, would avoid costs. And why is all that? Why did the pharma companies choose our QIAstat solution? Because the complexity of qPCR testing is combined here, the sample to answer approach, the simplicity that you have in this cartridge and to be able to give a clinical decision where it matters. Also talking about our companion diagnostics efforts and what we're doing in this space. We are also currently evaluating more than 10 projects for our QIAcuity digital PCR business, where we already signed up 3 partnerships for drugs which are in development. and we are supporting the clinical trials. Overall, at QIAGEN, we have more than 15 years of experience in companion diagnostics and precision medicine, where we have more than 30 partnerships signed up, and we brought already 14 FDA-approved IVD assays to light. And this is a statement of how we are supporting the pharma industry in bringing up novel treatment options with companion diagnostics. Ultimately, we are focused where it's relevant, where we want to answer unmet clinical needs, and we want to be decisive where it matters. So in summary, in molecular diagnostics, in tuberculosis and QuantiFERON, we want to expand our leadership position through our dedicated and specialized sales force converting our skin test conversion, with our automation capabilities with our partnerships and providing a solution for developing countries. On QIAstat, we committed to double our business to more than $200 million through menu expansion, continuous evolution of installed base and providing additional digital insights where they matter. With this, I want to hand it over to John. Thank you very much.

Well, right now, we're going to take a 15-minute break. We're running ahead of schedule. 15-minute break. We're going to start then at 25 minutes past the hour, and thank you for those on the webcast for your patience while we take a 15-minute break here. [Break]

So thank you very much. Now we're going to start again with the program with Jonathan Sheldon to talk about our QIAGEN Digital Insights bioinformatics business and this time watch the entire movie. Sorry that we had a technical glitch there. And this gives you an opportunity to learn a lot more about our business. Then we're going to have a presentation from Roland about the financials, and then we'll have ample time for Q&A. So let's watch the video now. [Presentation]

So that's a great way to start the session here from our customers. I hope you got a good sense from Nitin and Fernando about the value that we're delivering to our life science and molecular diagnostics customers. I'm now going to take you into the world of software. So, everybody in this room, in fact, everybody on the planet has approximately 3 billion bits of genomic DNA that make up their genome. But what does that all mean? What actual decisions can I take as a result of all this vast amount of genomic data? That's the field of bioinformatics. And in QIAGEN, bioinformatics is called QDI, QIAGEN Digital Insights. QDI is solely focused on providing analytics to understand genomics. And as Thierry said in the opening, it's a fundamental part of our overall QIAGEN strategy. So QDI addresses both the Life Science and the molecular diagnostic customers. So 2 large growing markets. Relative to what you heard from Nitin and Fernando earlier, where does QDI fit in the overall Sample to Insight workflow? We provide genomic insights. So we enable our customers through our software to make decisions based on this vast amount of genomic data. Whether you're a researcher or you're a clinician, at the moment, you probably basically feel like you're drowning on the data and you need a way to actually get answers fast. The other point that I really want to make that's important in terms of the strategy that we have is we're agnostic. So we're not tied to any particular platform. We're not tied to any particular assay. The software that we provide works with any offering. Okay. So let me tell you a little bit more about the QIAGEN Digital Insights business and why I believe we're exactly where we want to be to unlock the full potential of genomics. So, whilst we've got very good at generating genomic data, I think the stats on this slide speak for themselves. I mean we've really made some incredible progress taking down -- the first genome took 13 years. We're down to a few hours. The cost is absolutely plummeted from greater than $1 billion per genome down to $200 dollars per sequencing. Generating genomic data is not the problem now, though. The problem is actually making sense of all that genomic data. And we're really just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of extracting value from genomic data. In other words, we've really shifted the bottleneck from data generation to data interpretation. That's why QDI exists. It exists to solve that problem, to provide analytics to understand genomics, and we've done that now for just shy of 100,000 users globally across both our research and our clinical businesses. Okay. So where are we today in the market? So we're #1 with the market leader. It's a highly profitable, high-margin business with greater than 80% of our annual recurring revenue coming from our subscription-based Software-as-a-Service model. We're the only bioinformatics player that has a sizable research informatics and a sizable clinical informatics business. So we're the first sort of scale to bench to bedside bioinformatics provider. And then last but not least, over the last 20 years or so, we've created and fine-tuned the curation process, which is basically a hybrid of artificial intelligence and human creation to create the QIAGEN knowledge base, and that's unmatched in terms of depth, breadth, quality of data. So that's the reason that we win and based on that, where we're going to take the business, in a nutshell, we're going to accelerate our profitable growth, and we're going to do that in 3 ways. So firstly, we're going to extend our leadership in curated knowledge, that's very much our competitive edge. We're far ahead of others already here. We're going to scale our global commercial organization, and we're going to continue to invest in AI and other technologies. I do want to make a point about AI. I'm probably going to say this multiple times, but we've been doing AI for many, many years. We've invested in it heavily in the past. It's integral to our curation process. We're increasing our investment going forward. So we're not just talking about it, we're actually doing it, and I'll give you some very specific examples of the kind of impact we see in our processes as a result of using that. Okay. So what are the dynamics of the market that we're going to grow into? So bioinformatics is a high-growth market, the double-digit growth is driven by the explosion of genomic data and the adoption of genetic testing and NGS systems. And this has really caused a transformation in the bioinformatics software industry. It's moved away from sort of home-grown cottage industry-type efforts created by post docs to enterprise grade, production quality software and systems that can scout a petabyte volumes of data. And that's exactly what we provide and the reason that we have a market share of just under 20%. I think probably more importantly, based on the strategic priorities that I described on the previous slide, it's why we believe we can capture further market share. Okay. So why are we #1? So there's really 2 aspects to this, I think. So firstly, as I mentioned earlier, we've taken a platform-agnostic approach. So the software that we have is highly tuned on QIAGEN kits, but it works with any offering. So irrespective of what components you have that make up your NGS workflow, the QDI software will drive that next action. And then the second piece, I think, relates to the QIAGEN knowledge base. So when we populate the QIAGEN knowledge base, the scientific information that we create, whether that's the scientific literature, its drug labels, its guidelines, I mean we pretty much curate everything that's relevant. We package that one way for the research market and then we package that up another way for the clinical market. But what's important here is it's the same underlying knowledge base. It's the same curation process. We just package it differently for the different markets. And this enables all kinds of economies of scale, which just aren't open to the competition. Okay. So let me illustrate that now with a couple of case studies for you. So I'm going to do one in research and one in clinical. So for research, this is why drug discovery researchers use this. So pharma need to identify disease pathways and need to identify tractable targets. I think everybody knows, despite billions of dollars of investment, 9 out of 10 drug candidates fail due to failure to win approval during the clinical trial process. So ingenuity pathway analysis, IPA, enables researchers in a few minutes to identify what diseases could be treated if you block a particular target in a particular pathway with the drug. So you can see a screenshot of the user interface. So many of you talking to Dominic outside getting demonstrations of this. I mean what you're actually looking there is a differential expression pattern between the disease and the normal. And you can see genes which are up-regulated or down-regulated and pathways which are activated or inhibited. And that whole representation on the right-hand side is just a very visual way to understand that information, and that's a very powerful tool to identify new targets, to identify new biomarkers. It's pretty much the gold standard for this kind of analysis and is the reason it's used by 24 of the top 25 pharma. The second case study I want to talk about is in the clinical area and it's why oncologists use this in the hospital. So a patient was diagnosed with leukemia that was linked to a rare gene mutation, where the standard chemotherapy was unlikely to be successful. So QCI, QIAGEN Clinical Insights, our clinical decision support software, that suggested an alternative therapy, which did indeed lead to better patient outcomes and a much improved quality of life. And we generate about 65,000 of these reports at the moment for our customers every month. Again, we have some reports outside. I saw many of you talking to Dominic and he was walking you through the report. I mean, to make it very simple. So the report you can see basically what you can see in red, it's saying, this is something you need to think about now in terms of the therapy you're going to recommend, maybe it's not going to -- the therapy is going to be resistant or maybe you're going to get an adverse event or maybe there's a clinical trial you should involve on for an investigational drug if the standard of care is not going to be successful. So a lot of very valuable information to help drive decision-making for the oncologist. And by the way, the patient I'm talking about here is actually Dominic's dad. So Dominic is our VP of Marketing. So if you want to get more detail on that specific example, then please do talk to Dominic or if you want to see further demonstrations of the software, then Dominic is your man. Okay. So what does that all mean? So it means we have a uniquely balanced portfolio between research, which is the first case study I described targeting pharma and biotech. And then the clinical area, which is the second case study I described, targeting the clinical testing labs and the hospitals. That revenue stream -- and that sums to $100 million. So that revenue stream is recurring. Our customers come back every year to renew the data and the software, thanks to the subscription-based model. And because it's the same underlying data as I described earlier, the business is highly profitable. So most of our competition in this space are burning $30 million, $40 million, $50 million, $60 million a year. This business is highly profitable. In terms of the products on the right-hand side, just generally speaking, their clinical portfolio is growing the fastest. And in particular, QIAGEN Clinical Insights is growing at 30-plus percent. So we believe we have a highly sustainable leadership position. The hybrid curation approach that we've perfected over these years leverages AI to ensure that we can scale to whole genome, whole exome levels of data, but then the human component, greater than 150 PhD scientists ensure that we don't sacrifice quality. And as I'm sure you can appreciate, quality is so important, particularly for the second set of use cases, the clinical use cases, the leukemia example, in particular. We've also integrated greater than 40 scientific and clinical databases, some of which we have exclusive commercial rights to like COSMIC and HGMD, which are very much gold standards in their own right. So I touched on it earlier the areas that we're going to invest in. I want to provide a bit more detail around this. So firstly, we want to extend our leadership in curated knowledge. So that's very much our competitive edge. We're far ahead of others here. We want to put further distance here and extend that. We currently have greater than 7 million oncology and hereditary disease variance curated from the literature. We're going to expand that to greater than 12 million by 2028. We're going to scale our global commercial organization. So we're looking at a 40% increase in SaaS sales and associated support functions. So that's to enable us to deepen our relationship with our existing customers but also, obviously, scale to net new customers, too. And then we're going to continue to invest in AI, not just in terms of the generation of data to populate the QIAGEN knowledge base, but in the analytics and the applications that sit on top of that knowledge base that enable the customers to interpret and mine that data. To kind of come back to the AI piece, again, just to reiterate, this is integral to our curation process. It's part of everything that we do in terms of the way that we create the knowledge that goes into the knowledge base and it's an integral part of many of the applications that are analyzing that data. So as it stands today, we currently have integrated AI into 5 applications. What we're committing to is by 2028, we'll integrate an additional 14. And then how are we using AI? So we're using AI to enhance our applications to deliver AI-driven features such as phenotype-driven ranking in QIAGEN Clinical Insights. This basically drastically reduces the review time to prioritize mutations. So what would have taken a clinical scientist 60 minutes to be able to do that on a per patient level, they can actually do now in a few seconds. We're using AI to deliver new insights. So we are using AI-generated virtual disease connections at a scale that's just not possible with the human mind. We're doing that for the researchers so they can identify novel targets, novel pathways, new biomarkers and as an illustration of that, and again, Dominic can actually show you this live, we applied this to the COVID area. And what would have been a couple of years of research, we were able to publish in literally a few weeks after the pandemic. And then last but not least, we're using AI-only certified content to supplement our human content. So you really get the best of both worlds. You get a sort of whole genome level scale but super high quality. You don't sacrifice that quality, which, frankly, many of our competition do. And if you do that, all you're doing is putting the work on the customer. And the whole point of this is so they can make quick decisions that can have actionable insights. And if you don't do that work upfront, you are in effect just pushing it to the customer and they have to do it. So we're taking the burden of that in ensuring that everything that we do to populate that QIAGEN knowledge basis is super high quality. So in summary, we're using AI to boost our efficiency. We're using it to extend our capabilities and we're using it to enhance our QIAGEN knowledge base. So to sum up. So when I opened, I said we were in the foothills in terms of unlocking the full potential of genomics. We're #1 in the market. We're #1 by revenue. We're #1 by profitability. We're #1 by unmatched depth, breadth and quality of data in the QIAGEN knowledge base, and we want to take that upper level now. We want to extend our leadership in curated knowledge, we want to scale our global commercial organization and we want to continue and accelerate our investment in AI. And as Thierry said at the start, I mean, QDI is a fundamental part of the overall QIAGEN strategy, and we're committing to double our sales and double our leadership in bioinformatics by 2028. Thank you.

So that's the end of the portfolio presentations. Now I'm going to hand over to Roland, who's going to explain how that translates into solid financials.

Thank you, Jonathan. And also, of course, welcome from my end. And as Jonathan just said, you learned a lot about our products and about the different growth drivers of QIAGEN. Let me try to help you on translating that into financial statements and what does it mean for QIAGEN. But before I get there, I do think it's important to understand and refer to what Thierry said before, QIAGEN changed a lot since 2019. And the change was driven by focus. And the focus is clearly also something what we want to extend going forward. And what you learned from my colleagues: from Thierry, from Nitin, from Fernando and from Jonathan, that our growth pillars are all the way into the way of 2028 are going to deliver around $2 billion of accumulated revenues, that is exactly more or less a revenue amount, which is a full company of QIAGEN is delivering in 2024. So we will deliver above-market growth by focus and even more important, it's about very profitable growth rate. Our commitment as of today is also for a very strong operating margin, adjusted operating margin in 2028 of at least 31%. And of course, this goes hand-in-hand also with our focus on shareholder value. We also want to increase our return to shareholders of at least $1 billion covering from the beginning of 2024 to the end of 2028, absent of any M&A. I do think there is a significant opportunity for us to drive shareholder value for QIAGEN. But let me go into some details here and clearly starting off also with reminding where we're coming from. QIAGEN has a very solid track record in delivering financial performance since 2019. Our revenue growth rate, our adjusted EPS growth rate, but also our operating cash flow was typically not only higher than what we guided for, but it was clearly also very strong if you compare it to the overall market growth. Also, we had a good start into the year. We have seen our Q1 numbers came up slightly off our guidance. And you have seen also our increase updated guidance for the second quarter and the outlook for the full year. So there is a good basis where we can rely on. If you look at this slide, on the left-hand side, you see the 4 different product categories at QIAGEN. We report on them since several years. CER represent 100% of the company. We see also quite significant growth opportunities as we see them into 2028. And they are clearly driven by our focus on the growth pillars on the right-hand side. So color column helps you a bit to see which product group, which growth pillar fits. But I do think what is important is that we have 2 growth drivers with a CAGR of north of 20%, QIAcuity and QIAstat, we have Digital Insight with a growth rate of north of 15%, and even quite sizable business like our QuantiFERON franchise and the SAP technology franchise have above-market profits. And I do think that is something, again, going back to our focus, which makes us strong and feeling strong about our commitments on this focus, delivering growth and even more important, delivering profitable growth to our shareholders. Let me dig into the efficiency goals at QIAGEN. On the left-hand side, you see a reflection of our communication and our decision around NeuMoDx. We communicated and I think 1 week ago that we're going to discontinue our NeuMoDx franchise as the market has changed, is that clearly led to a situation that we have up -- that we were able to upgrade our EPS guidance for the full year and also the margin guidance is around 50 basis points from 28% before now to 28.5%. But it's clearly also on a 6-month basis, so next year, we will not only have 12 months. But as we roll through and go through the discontinuation of that product, there's clearly more margin improvements coming from that. But on top of that, and you heard that from Thierry before, QIAGEN initiated earlier this year a program what we call QIAefficiency. We like to start everything with QIA as you know. And I do think it is important to understand that it touch the full company. So we will give you good number of tangible examples in the next slides. We expect gross margin to improve round about 100 basis points. We do believe that R&D, while we are investing significantly into R&D with 9% to 10% of revenues into R&D, there's an opportunity with the focus around QIAstat, around QIAcuity and of course, around QDI being on the 1 hand side, driving -- on the 1 hand side, driving innovation and therefore, revenue growth seeing some also efficiency gains here as well. And of course, last but not least, SG&A we have a lot of areas where we can improve our internal processes, particularly also the implementation of our next-generation ERP system, SAP is going to help that. But let me give you some spotlights, because I do think it is important that you also see it's very tangible, what is sponsored. And let me start on the right-hand side. And you heard that before, we acquired now some time ago, our HID business, Verogen, quite overall successful move. But we have now decided also to integrate it in our Maryland hub, just this decision, again, allows us to save around about $3 million per year. We have a couple of 6, 7 smaller sites. And even if you only integrate over time, 1 or 2 of them because it still helps us to get actually an increase in efficiency on the 1 hand side, but probably also a faster output by better communication, by faster processes that makes a material impact for us. Then process optimization. On the 1 hand side, as I said before, we will roll out our new SAP system, but it's not only an ERP system. For example, it also has a quite dedicated procurement tool. Right now, QIAGEN has round about 30,000 manual orders per year, which we are processing to our suppliers. If you're able to automate them with 50%, 70%, which is quite realistic, if you're looking on the benchmarks, we clearly reduced the hand on time. But what is probably even more important is this product also allows us to put certain things quite easy out for auctioning. What I mean we said is we just had recently an example where we put out for online bidding a freight line to several carriers. So they were really bidding around supply connection between QIAGEN central hub to 1 of our regions. This online bidding process very automated led to a saving of $5 million once fully implemented on a yearly basis. There is a significant opportunity for us now to go that more or less through all different opportunities within QIAGEN. Portfolio streamlining. We clearly talked quite in detail about NeuMoDx, that is for sure, is the most significant one, but there's also other smaller portfolio management opportunities. So it will add up. Again, there's nothing significantly even close to the size of NeuMoDx, but there's always smaller opportunities where it is a nice product, probably also has a certain productivity. Nevertheless, might not grow as fast. So we will actively review that and there might be opportunities to rather reallocate into areas where we can grow not only faster, but also more profitable. I would say that's one of the more significant changes QIAGEN developed over the last few years that we are very fast and very active on this kind of decisions. And last but not least, it is clearly also our focus on around organizational design. QIAGEN historically was a very centralized organization. We on purpose empower people now much more decentralized. We clearly want to on the 1 hand side we have more and more decision power in front of the customers. At the same time, we are glad to have very strong centralized organization shared service centers in 2 locations, which allows us to get the synergies out of the centralized, sometimes even corporate offices, but enabling people informed quite quickly of the customers to do the right thing. You just heard from Jonathan what we're doing around AI in bioinformatics. But digitization and AI is clearly also something what is affecting QIAGEN in its day-to-day operations. Let me give you also here 3 spotlights. Within manufacturing, they're using AI-powered optics to reduce scrapping. Because as you know, we clearly produce millions of cartridges, millions of kits every year and it is important that we monitor that quite timely. And as earlier, we see something is going wrong as more significantly is a positive impact to us. Having that AI-steered probably reduce also the scrapping level by 10% to 15%. At the same time, we're also using -- that's quite new, also predictive analytics to manage our inventory levels. I would say the 1 thing our industry did terribly wrong is educating customers whatever you order, we ship in 24, 48 hours. So the inventory management is on us. If we find the right balance between inventory levels, that is clearly something what has a significant impact on our working capital, but also at the end of the day also in terms of our P&L. And also here, we see already the impact out of the predictive analytics tools we're using. Same is true for regulatory. Post-market monitoring is a must for each company in our industry. QIAGEN is monitoring every year round about 10,000 report and 100,000 genomic sequences. If we're doing that with AI tools, as we're starting to do it, it will reduce on the 1 hand side, the hand on time quite significantly by 60% to 70%, but probably even more important is a higher accuracy because we're eliminating the human error factor. A very good example how AI will make an impact to our operations on a daily basis. And last but not least, of course, typical for many companies, but also typical and important for QIAGEN is customer actions. QIAGEN gets round about 75,000 tickets a year from customers with requests from -- for help, for answers, for support with our database and our proprietary service, GPT solutions, we are able to, of course, take here manual time away using good answers we had in the past and again, reutilize an opportunity for us to get more efficient as well. Let me shift gears for a second because every company also has a balance sheet. And of course, QIAGEN has a very healthy balance sheet, strong cash flows. But of course, we also have sub debt outstanding. And here you see our debt maturity table. Let me remind you that we have $600 million repayment this year, and most likely another $500 million repayment of a convert next year. Why in '25? So convert as a timing till '27, but it has a coupon of 0% and it has a put option in '25. So most likely, given the changes in interest rate environment, we assume that investors are going to put it to us as the conversion price is somewhere at 85%. So it was clearly a very attractive financing for us over the last couple of years, but we have to assume repayments here as well. Giving that, but also what we said before, we will, of course, opportunistically looking on refinancing opportunities. There is no immediate lease. As you know, we have a significant balance sheet. We have strong cash flows. But if there are interesting opportunities, given the change in the interstate environment, QIAGEN is more than willing to act on that as well. You have seen this slide before, but I do think it's important to repeat that. We do have a strong balance sheet. We do have strong cash flows. And we are going to use them quite strongly in all 3 areas. We are investing into the business. You heard that we want to do focused R&D investments into QIAstat, QIAcuity and QDI and, of course, also in the 2 other focus areas for QIAGEN because we do believe there is more revenue growth for us in the mid- and long term. At the same time, you also know that QIAGEN has a good track record of doing deals, which we believe create quite a value for QIAGEN. There's opportunities out there, so we're constantly reviewing them as well, and there should be opportunities as well. But what is clearly increased today with the Capital Market Day is our commitment to shareholders on capital returns within the next 4 years. From 2024 to 2028, we at least want to return $1 billion in cash to our shareholders and we do believe that the combination of all 3 creates long-term value for our shareholders, but also for all stakeholders related to QIAGEN. A couple of planning assumptions. I know it's important for a lot -- with of a lot of people in the room. Everything what you heard today in terms of revenues is about the current business excluding NeuMoDx, no future acquisition included into that. An important topic is clearly about tax rates. And on the 1 hand side, it is quite difficult to wrap the tax rate 4 years out because there's a lot of change in the world. We do believe it will be moderately increased because the OCD guidelines on Pillar 2 is clearly out there. The Netherlands has implemented that. Our current expectations for 2024, as you know, 19% to 20%, we do believe there's a moderate step up. We're clearly trying to mitigate that. Nevertheless, that's the most likely scenario. At the same time, and the same purpose is clearly around the interest rate environment. As I said before, we had very attractive refinancing or financing in place in the last couple of years. $500 million with a 0% coupon, $500 million with a 1% coupon, hard to repeat in this kind of environment. So depending on the interest rate environment going forward, I would expect that we have a reduced interest income going forward. Shares outstanding, of course, will be significantly less going forward than we have them today. It's a factor, of course, of share price. When we do our share repurchase programs, most likely, but nevertheless, depending on the actual share price. And we expect it to be somewhere between 210 million and 250 million shares outstanding. Let me bring it all together. You learned today from us about a significant commitment on revenue growth, a compounded revenue growth rate from '24 to '28 of 7%. We do expect a quite significant profitability jump from 28% to 28.5%, now to 31% in 2028. On top of that, we want to increase also return to shareholders by returning up to $1 billion to shareholders in the same period. I do think this is a nice opportunity for us to QIAGEN to create value for all our stakeholders. And with that, I would like to hand it back to Thierry. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Ronald. Thank you so much. I told you at the beginning that we were privileged at QIAGEN to be working on such a market and powered by the tremendous wave of biology. I think I should add that I'm privileged myself, as you could see that today to be working with such a strong team: Nitin, Fernando, Jonathan, Roland. And they are not the only 1 in this room today, we have also Stephany here, our Head of HR. We have Antonio also, our Head of Operations. And someone also who has been critical to so many good acquisition occasion we have Jean-Pascal, they are at the back of the room, our Head of Business Development. Before concluding, I'd like also -- you can understand that putting together Capital Market Day is a lot of effort. And I would like to personally thank John. You know most of you also Phoebe. She has been working in Investor Relations for many years. Domenica is in the back room there with the video and songs, but she has been so critical. Alexandra as well, all the team at QIAGEN, who have been working at [ Haan ] at the back of the room, so many people have been trying to make this a success. And quite proud of John because we committed to you, we are very well respectful of your time. You know that you have many companies to cover, and I think that we did better than expected to respect this time. And that's very good. So, let me conclude. I mean, I'm not going to talk about numbers anymore. There is something for me, which is really setting QIAGEN apart. I know that it's very easy and it's tempting to always put things in boxes, you see. And so for example, it's life science or it's clinical diagnostic. What set us apart at QIAGEN for me, it's not just about life science, it's not just about molecular diagnostic. As you have seen today, is creating sustainable, profitable, long-term ecosystem. Ecosystem that are addressing and answering the needs of an incredible arrays of potential customers, researchers, academia, pharma, clinical labs, CROs, biotechs, government health agencies. A winning ecosystem is a solution, which is able to cover either the needs of life science or the needs of molecular diagnostic or cover or give answers to oncology challenges or to infectious diseases. Sample tech with instrumentation, chemistry, bioinformatics is an ecosystem. Digital PCR, especially now when moving from life science also to clinical with proprietary instruments, software and chemistry is a winning ecosystem. Extended QIAstat from clinical to pharma partnership is creating a winning ecosystem. Moving QuantiFERON to partnership for back-end automation with DiaSorin or front-end automation with Tecan and Hamilton are bringing QuantiFERON to another unmet clinical need, which is Lyme, is also creating a solid winning ecosystem. And this is what is and will set QIAGEN apart. And as we grow, you can be sure that something will never change. It's putting the customers behind me, always at the very center of everything we do. This is the power of 6,000 QIAGENers. And this is why we relentlessly believe in the power of biology. Thank you so much. And now we can open, John, I think the question-and-answer that I will ask my colleague of DC to come back on stage. And John, you can open the session.

So thank you very much, Thierry. We have set up time now for Q&A. And because 2 people came in from Europe, I'd like to start with them as appreciation. So I start with Aisyah, and then we'll have Odysseas next. Please state your name and who you work for, so that the webcast can follow along. Thank you.

This is Aisyah Noor from Morgan Stanley. I have 2, please. The first 1 is on QuantiFERON. To what extent does your guidance of $600 million in sales by 2028, embed risk that 1 large competitor enters the market. And in light of your major IGRA competitor recently introducing an automated solution for their test and that your existing distribution partnership with DiaSorin is nonexclusive, would you consider taking on an additional larger distribution partner to secure volumes offset this competition risk? The second question is on the 2028 guidance. I noticed today that you have held back from providing an EPS growth target, which in contrast to the at least 10% in 2019 and at least 12% in 2016. If you meet your midterm target of 7% sales growth and 250 bps of margin expansion by 2028, and $1 billion of capital return to the shareholders absent M&A., what's stopping you from delivering 9%, 10%, 11% EPS growth for the next 4 years? And what's your confidence level in delivering this level of EPS growth every year until 2028?

Thank you, Aisyah. First of all, those are 2 very relevant questions. I will take the 1 on QuantiFERON and competition, and I will ask Roland to take the 1 on EPS. Aisyah you know and we have insisted on that, there has been competition for QuantiFERON for many years. There has been a serious competitors called Oxford Immunotec at the point acquired by PerkinElmer. There has been multiple competitors, for example, in Southeast Asia, and there is skin test. All this competition never prevented us from growing at double-digit or over double-digit. And yes, like you we heard that some other companies might be interested in that market. It's always good. We welcome competition. We believe that since 2015, systematically, we have raised barriers to entry to that market, more generation in technology, 4G as said by Fernando, more automation. So if you look at the math, $450 million guidance this year, $600 million by 2028, that means around 7% CAGR. That means that we factor potential evolutions, but that will not prevent us from leading this market still. Roland, on EPS?

Yes. Thanks for the question. There's no doubt that we expect EPS growth year after year. Nevertheless, what we also did when we were preparing the Capital Market Days, we actually were reviewing what other companies are guiding and I think we all know that actually most companies are focusing on what they can influence which is clearly the operating performance, which I think is also true for QIAGEN. So that's the reason why we focus on an operating margin improvement for QIAGEN. Nevertheless, if you assume what I said before, in terms of tax rate environment, if you assume also what I said in terms of interest environment and also share buybacks and others, I think there is no question that the actual consensus, which is out there and I've seen analyst rates here somewhere between $2.80 and $3. There's no reason that somebody at QIAGEN should be uncomfortable on that.

Okay. Odysseas?

I have 3 very brief ones. So first of all, on the cadence of your growth guidance, given how busy your pipeline is this year next year, would it be fair to assume slightly higher than that 7% CAGR in the next 2 years? Secondly, a follow-up on Aisyah. Are you making any pricing assumptions for QuantiFERON to 2028? And is price pressure factored into your margin guidance? And thirdly, just to get the mini panel opportunity better, how much of your U.S. sales are in inpatient labs versus outpatients for QIAstat?

Thank you, Odysseas. So first of all, on the evolution of that growth lever, CAGR around 7%, and it's difficult to give you a global answer because as Nitin showed, we are investing starting this year forcefully into more foot on the ground for -- so this is going to ramp up. We are already ramping up because we have started, for example, the investment program on bioinformatics. So it's going to be a mix. You see it's obvious referring to the previous question that if there are more competition coming on QuantiFERON at a given time towards the end of the period that you might see an inflection on that growth rate, so it's a balance. What we want to deliver is 7%. On the pricing, I think you would be -- you wouldn't be surprised by here, most of what we describe here is basically based on volume growth and taking market shares, but we also have disclosed to the market that on a normal environment outside of a hyperinflation environment, this company passes on average between 2.5% to 3% price increase on every product. And it does also impact QuantiFERON. And we also told you with a pretty much level of details that since we did that partnership with DiaSorin, we are able to sell premium on QuantiFERON. Customers anytime they transfer from a normal QuantiFERON to an automated QuantiFERON, they understand the premium; in the U.S. and in Europe, it's always sold at a higher price. So obviously we look at the different market evolution and we take a decision here. On QIAstat, and please, Fernando, feel free to chime in. Most of the sales at the moment of QIAGEN in the U.S. for QIAstat are related to inpatient. This is the main market that we are focused. This is where we are the most immune to reimbursement challenges, obviously. But as you saw, Fernando disclosed the launch of mini panels, and this can extend also to more outpatient, but Fernando you want to add something to that?

Yes. It's just we are adding additional capabilities in an attractive portfolio to the marketplace with GI and respiratory and addressing this particular needs.

Why don't we just try Patrick, and we'll play off both sides of the room.

Patrick Donnelly from Citi. I guess on QIAcuity, on the digital PCR side, you guys are talking about outgrowing the market pretty significantly in the next few years. Can you just talk about what goes into that? I mean, is it share gains versus the incumbent? You guys were second to the market and somewhat large player there. Maybe just talk about what drives the confidence in terms of share gains, if that's the case? And then maybe on Sample tech as well, Thierry, you mentioned it's a pretty mature market. Can you just talk about any growth drivers there? It seems like the product launches are more '25, '26. So how you're thinking about just the core market there as well would be helpful.

Thanks, Patrick. I think Nitin could address those 2 questions, digital PCR and Sample Tech.

In digital PCR, where we -- as I sort of gave the presentation, I talked about 2 things. First, we are taking share from QPCR and from NGS in certain application segments that require precision and accuracy in the case of digital QPCR and a simpler workflow in the case of NGS. But as I go out there and travel with my sales team and I see a lot of customers, I am also saying that we're taking share away from other providers and primarily because our workflow, which is plate-based is much easier to implement. If you look at QPCR, that workflow is also plate-based. And now if you move to digital PCR because you need higher precision and accuracy, this workflow with QIAcuity is also plate place. So that's sort of driving, that's sort of baked into our assumption that it's taking share from QPCR and NGS and from other providers. But the underlying market is growing 15%, we think we'll grow 25%. We're seeing solid performance already. Now going to Sample tech, there are certain application segments of Sample tech that are growing faster. Of course, liquid biopsy being one of them. Others like cell and gene therapy are increasing at a faster rate. And some of these applications are growing at double digits. So that's where we're focused on those. But the broad market is growing sort of 2% to 3% and the combination of focusing on higher-value applications or higher growth applications, plus launching those 2 new platforms will sort of contribute to -- contribute to above market growth. But near term, it's focused on those applications, higher applications. Next, we'll take a take Casey and then move to Doug Schenkel afterwards.

Casey Woodring from JPMorgan. On bioinformatics, can you walk us through the competitive landscape there? Curious on the barriers to entry and what your moat looks like from a technology standpoint? And then also how you're thinking about those margins, that's a very profitable business, but also talked about some targeted investments there. So wondering what level of investment is needed to really scale that business? And then maybe just for my second one, you talked about the total end market growth rate of around 4% to 6%. Curious what the Life Science market growth rate is embedded in that total number? And then how you see that kind of trending right that customer group off to a slower start here to begin the year. Is your assumption in these medium-term targets that growth sort of normalizes in the back half of this year and then 2025 and beyond as a more normalized environment in Life Sciences?

Thank you, Casey. So I'll start with the market environment, and then I'll pass to Jonathan on the barriers to entry and the level of investment required on bioinformatics. We have given you a range for the market growth that we see to be between 4% to 6%. This is coming from different outside analysis, and it's also our own data. It's clear that if you look at different reports this year or competitive report, we see that there is more softness today, for example, year-to-date on the life science market and the clinical, and I believe that most of it is explained by the fact that there are uncertainties out there, either coming from elections or the fact that laboratories did not have clear visibility on what would be the budget for NIH, for the CDC. It's the same in other countries, not just the U.S. So there is a bit of softness in capital sales. At QIAGEN, we believe a trend, we believe in trends. The fundamentals of this market, both for Life Science, Clinical are very solid. Many diseases are becoming chronic. HIV, obviously, but also cancers. Population is aging. As Nitin showed, there are a lot of continuous innovation who was talking about liquid biopsy 8 years ago? Who was talking about Microbiome 5 years ago? All this is pushing. So there is a bit of softness. We see the market overall, it's fair to say, to be around 5%. And this is why we say we are outperforming market growth. Now to you, Jonathan, on the bioinformatics.

So I mean a more general comment, I think, would be whether it be the research market or with the clinical market, it's the underlying quality of the data that we have in the knowledge base. So that's our competitive edge. That's the moat, as you said. And we've been doing this hybrid AI manual curation approach now for near on 20 years. So this is something we've very much perfected. And as AI has really gained prominence, we kind of have levers by which we can kind of adjust and maybe we need a bit more throughput with the AI, then there's sort of the human creation, the quality piece. And as AI gets better, I suspect that we'll be able to go faster, basically. But the advantage that we have is we have the definitive training data set. So this is like the single biggest limitation for most people in the use of AI is having good quality training data. But of course, because we have such high-quality data, we have that definitive training data set, so we can make our AI so much more efficient than anybody else. I mean I think from a -- on the clinical side, I mean, we've now processed more than 4 million patient cases. So as far as we can see, that's well ahead of anybody else out there in terms of cases that have been processed. And then we have the largest research informatics footprint in the market as well. And I think just to finish, we have a uniquely balanced portfolio as well. So we have a sizable business in research. We have a sizable business in clinical and our competition tends to do just 1 where we have the benefit of the same underlying knowledge base that means we can address both markets. So that affords us all kinds of economies of scale that the competition just doesn't have open to them.

Next is Doug Schenkel.

Doug Schenkel from Wolfe Research. Actually, I have 3 math questions for Roland. And then just a quick follow-up for Thierry. So regarding your revenue growth targets, you're targeting 9% growth for the growth drivers part of your portfolio. These growth drivers account for, I think it's about 70% of 2024 revenue. Does that mean you're expecting basically nominal growth for the rest of the business? And if so, should we view that as essentially a buffer to long-term targets? Turning to margins. How much does the change in mix and mix of growth drivers get you in terms of margin improvement over the 2024 to 2028 period? It seems like things like not just 70% growing to 80%, but also more digital PCR, less sample prep, that probably gets you at least halfway there mathematically. I just want to see if that's right. And then just being real direct on earnings, I believe your targets translate into about $3 to $3.10 per share in 2028 and about 10% EPS CAGR over that period for some potential for more if you get more aggressive with the balance sheet, am I thinking about it correctly?

Thanks, Douglas. Probably should have stated CFO, you do a good job. But I do think going to your questions in terms of revenue growth, I do think -- focus of the company is -- we do the focus of the company for a certain reason and that is we want to have an above-market growth. And we wouldn't have got committed to a 7% growth rate if you wouldn't focus on our pillars of growth. That clearly also means that certain other parts of the business grow lower than that. So the 1 thing that you have to take in the equation, of course, is that also this year, we still have probably, let's say, $30 million, $35 million of NeuMoDx revenues, which technically are -- clearly are not recurring anymore. So the underlying growth rate is somewhat positive but it's clearly far away from the 7%. Is there opportunity for us to do better than that? For sure. But again, today is not the day to commit even to more. I do think it's 7%. I think it's a great opportunity for us to deliver value to our shareholders. In terms of margin and margin mix, what we will see and what we expect at QIAGEN over the next 4 years is a change in drivers in terms of overall operating margin improvement. I think what we said before is, there's in the beginning, probably a larger opportunity around operational margin on leveraging particularly our SG&A lines. But we will see over time, of course, 2 topics kicking in, 1 a scale. We, as many other companies, clearly invested heavily into production environment. And now with the revenue growth, we are growing into the production capacities. So scale will be helpful. And of course, and I do think that is an important message to all of you is what you have to have in mind is we're still quite early with all our new platforms. We place a lot of instruments, but the relationship with these new platforms, QIAcuity and QIAstat, for example, between consumables and instruments is not like a QIAsymphony, where you have clearly a majority of revenues and therefore, in terms of profits coming from the consumables. We clearly see also here an impact in terms of mix that consumable shares will pick up and therefore having a positive impact on the overall gross margin development over time. Last but not least, on earnings, again, there's a reason why we focus today on the operating income margin because that is what's clearly in our hands what we clearly can commit, if you tell me who's become an ex U.S. President of what the tax rules are in the U.S. in 2 years, I'm happy to translate that in EPS for you, and that's true for other countries as well. What I said before, I'm happy to repeat, I think what I've seen from your analyst model here right now doesn't make anybody at QIAGEN uncomfortable.

Dan Arias next, and then we'll go to Mike Ryskin and in the back of the room. And then Dan and Catherine. Okay. So Dan Arias, I'll get you to.

Dan Arias from Stifel. Roland, maybe just to pick up on your last point and 1 that you made a couple of times during the presentation. Philosophically, how do you view margins in the context of the top line, which is to say there certainly does seem to be a credible path to 7%. But if you were to veer from that, would we or should we think about the op margins as just sort of flowing downward naturally? Or does your new target here sort of occupy a more prioritized spot just going forward and thinking about what you could control and what you can control, how should we think about modeling that or that to be the case?

And of course, Thierry, if you like to add to that. I would say we feel, in general, quite comfortable on our margin projections because it's clearly to a significant part in our hands and we worked quite detailed within the whole team, which holds a company to more or less planning that for the next 4 years. So you should also expect that next year, really, you see a significant ramp-up, so there's nothing but is like very much back-end levered. So I would say we clearly should have here a quite significant impact quite early in that period. Nevertheless, I do think there's also opportunities for us which come for what we discussed before on some of these projects, right, which are not all factored in. So I would say around that, and I would say that's also quite typical on QIAGEN, I would say there is quite some opportunities on the 1 hand side to reinvest into our business. You know that sometimes, we also quite actively said what we are probably doing quite well in profitability. We're making what we promise and guiding it. And we still said that, okay, there might be access. Some of that we let fall through to the P&L, something might reinvest because there might be new opportunities. I do think we want to keep that flexibility as well.

Will go to Mike Ryskin in the back. Do you have a follow-up?

Just maybe just a quick 1 for Nitin, if I could. Just the details around the new platforms. Do you have the run times for the new Sprint and the Connect instruments? And the reason I ask is because it does seem like workflow is a differentiating factor here. You gave samples per run. I just wanted to understand how you would make that [indiscernible].

Yes. I mean on the QIAsprint, which is a brand-new instrument for certain applications, we can process 192 samples in 60 minutes.

Let's go to Mike Ryskin and then we'll go to Catherine and Dan and we will work back this way. I'll ask both upfront.

Mike Ryskin, Bank of America. This was touched on earlier some of the portfolio, excluding the growth pillars. I mean just doing the same math, yes, it's about $600 million today. It's going to be about $600 million in 4 years. So the question I want to get to is portfolio evolution. I mean historically, you have not been -- you've been pretty open to trim parts of the portfolio if they're underperforming or not, not going the way you want, NeuMoDx is a perfect example. So within that $600 million, is there some opportunity to see some trimming or adjusting there? Or is it core to the business and sort of some of the parts is -- the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And then the second question is on M&A. The way you talked about capital returns to shareholders, you said $1 billion absent M&A. So without forcing to commit to it, obviously, M&A is opportunistic. But is the $1 billion your wallet size that you're looking at that you could do over the next couple of years? How do we think about that?

So Roland and I can take a view at these questions. The first one, let me address first the portfolio, the M&A questions. I don't think necessary in terms of size. We have proven you that we have a solid balance sheet. We have, as you know, a very limited leverage as we speak. So we have firepower. But our obsession is not necessarily transformational or bolt-on. Our obsession is, first of all, compared to our current priority does it make sense. And when we say it makes sense, it makes sense for us, it makes sense for our customers. It also makes sense for you. Can you understand the logic as well. Something very important, you acquire something because you believe that you can improve that something, you can help them to have a better reach, grow faster, be more profitable. We cannot show that. It's what I call before 1 plus 1 should equal 3. And last but not least, I mean, it's the financial smart acquisition. We can -- we have the firepower to stand some dilution, I would say, 2 years, it's acceptable, but we need to see a very visible pathway to accretion, clearly. Now on the rest of the portfolio beyond, I think Roland addressed that already, but I mean it's -- obviously, there is nothing easier than cutting in management. But obviously, we need to systematically challenge our portfolio to say, does it make sense for our customers. If a decision to cut doesn't make sense to the customers or putting our customers at risk, it's obviously a first challenge. Second, doesn't make sense for the company. We said that Qiagen did a big decision with NeuMoDx, but there are smaller portfolios. So rest assured that [indiscernible] before the end of the year, you will hear about smaller things indeed that we do not think are fitting in our portfolio as we speak. And we need to do that every year systematically. There are no taboos. At the same time, we have coherent workflows as well. And sometimes we offer products with small revenues, but they are making sense to bring more revenues in digital PCR in Sample tech. So it's a careful analysis, but there is no taboo, clearly.

Okay. Let's move to Catherine now.

Catherine Schulte with Baird. In Life Sciences, you have a fairly large exposure to the academic end market, which has enjoyed sizable funding increases over the last 4 years. So I guess what's your assumption for growth in that end market and your 7% CAGR? And what kind of NIH or overall funding level increases would be needed support that outlook? And then second, on QIAcuity, what's the time line for tripling the commercial team there. And you talked about converting both qPCR and NGS workflows. As the cost of sequencing comes down, is that a potential threat to that platform?

Nitin, would you like to take those 2 ones?

Yes. I mean I think for the Life Science market, we're not just entirely dependent on the academic market. We obviously serve academic markets globally, and we serve biotech and pharma, and we serve sort of the applied testing markets like forensic. So we have to take those 3 markets into consideration. And as I think Thierry mentioned, we're expecting sort of 5% growth in this midterm period. Obviously, within each of those application segments, we expect digital PCR to grow much faster. We expect Sample Tech to grow a little bit less. We expect sort of genomics to grow -- continue to grow sort of double digits. So that's kind of the flavor of the market growth assumptions that we've built in and including, obviously, funding agencies to continue to grow in the coming years. I'm sorry, I missed your...

The reason of the investment in digital PCR, for example, tripling of the sales.

Yes. So tripling the sales team, I think we're doing that in phases, I think hiring and incorporating the people into the commercial team takes time. So we're doing those in phases. And I think in terms of conversion from NGS, yes, the cost of sequencing is going down, but there are many applications where you need the digital capability that NGS also provides, but for a handful of targets. And for those targets, QIAcuity and digital PCR is significantly simpler and easier to implement than NGS. So I don't expect the cost of sequencing to really impact any growth in digital PCR because it's kind of very different application segments. It's still much, much simpler to implement a digital PCR platform in the lab than, say, NGS.

Okay. Let's go to Dan Brennan, then we'll go to [indiscernible]

Dan Brennan with TD Cowen. Maybe another one on digital PCR, if you don't mind, since it's the fastest growth product set, I guess, that you guys have guided for? And then one for Roland on a follow-up for earnings. So just on digital PCR. So I guess that franchise has expanded by roughly $13 million to $15 million than up to $18 million a year, and now your guidance implies $40 million a year in kind of incremental dollar growth per year through 2028. So can you just kind of quantify how much of that is from the new clinical entry and kind of when will we get visibility on that? And assuming that's a driver, would we see a big step-up coming in 2025? And then beyond clinical, could you just quantify a bit more some of the other key drivers for the step-up in growth? And then, b, just Roland, just as a follow-up to Doug, so it sounds like [ 3 3 10 ] kind of makes sense by 2028. But could you just discuss within that what's the net interest expense and the net interest income since you are paying down a lot of debt. You discussed the attractive maybe interest income you've been getting. I'm just trying to kind of net those 2 out, just to make sure we have the right number. And also on the tax rate, do we assume flat tax rate? Or is the tax rate going up?

Thanks, Dan. Let's start with those financials, put on the assumptions and then we'll move to digital PCR.

Again, we haven't made any decision right now on refinancing and so on. As I said, we have to repay one this year, another one most likely this year, but make it quite concrete. Let us assume we would refinance both [ convert], which we have to pay back this year and the other one next year with actual market condition, the impact on interest expense is around about $15 million per year. Again that is using today's rates, who knows we all believe it comes down a bit going forward, but that is the ballpark figure. On tax rate, right now, we are somewhere between 19% and 20%. It's really tough to guide where it goes because it's a global topic, and Pillar 2 clearly gets implemented. Again, if you assume that Mr. Trump wins this election and the U.K. has a change in population, I'm quite sure tax rates are not going to change. If you assume things might be different, I do think there is a scenario out there where you can assume the tax rate go all the way up to 21%. I think that's a ballpark where we are in. But again, while in my former life, I was a tax adviser, I'm not good in guessing tax rates going forward.

Thank you, Ron. Now on the split of growth in the [indiscernible].

Yes, I think there are many components to digital PCR growth. First, so far, a lot of our growth has been led by instruments. So as the installed base increases and as we launch new and new applications, we're going to see a shift from instrument led growth to consumables led growth. So that's a very big change that's happening. We actually expect our consumables to grow sort of above 50% CAGR. So -- and that's why we're launching these new assays. The second is, as the platform moves from sort of research into translational medicine, we see adoption in the LDT lab environment. A lot of hospitals are -- so there's a lot of clinical applications that are going to be built in that LDT environment. And then lastly, with our DX platform, we'll see clinical growth. I would say a large percentage of the initial growth is really going to come from this LDT/research market and largely led by consumables.

Before we go next, John, just a reminder that my English is not as good. So I said 15 million, not 50 million, right?

John, we have question from the web [indiscernible].

We have a question from the web, Dominica. Let's take Dan Leonard real quick center there, and then we'll take 1 or 2 questions from the web.

Dan Leonard with UBS. A couple of questions. First off, can you further frame the importance of the Qia [indiscernible] and QiaSymphony Connect in the context of your 7% LRP? Are these material to that enterprise figure? And then secondly, could you share your outlook on China over the planning period?

So I'm going to ask Nitin to give you some more details on Qia [indiscernible] and QiaSymphony Connect and then I'll take China.

So yes, on Qia [indiscernible] Connect and QIAsymphony, yes, they are material contributors to our growth. It really help us grow above market and not only are the instrument placement is very important, they're also very important to pull in the consumables and service revenue, which is sort of recurring revenue for us. So both of them are I would say, combined with the consumables we are launching in high-growth applications, the 2 platforms really help us grow above market. They're really critical to growing above market.

So in China, I think we remain coherent to what we keep coming for the last 2 years and the big discussions around China have started. We clearly said that pre-COVID we were expecting from that market on average 10% of growth every year given the size of the market. Let's not forget that China became the second market in research, life science and IVD in something like 10 years in the world. So it was a quite rapid development. But we said as well that post-COVID, the market is quite impacted, and we would expect basically starting second half of 2025, not more than a single -- than mid-single-digit growth, around 5%. Of course, the market is very specific. We are not belittling it. It's a large market. We are not depending on that market, 6% of exposure. We are quite relevant because we have local manufacturing and R&D. We have a second brand also in China. But clearly, it requires very specific solution, very localized, and we need to pick the ones that are profitable. This market is heavily impacted by price for the last probably 2 years, and we need to take care of that. So we will continue to invest in selected basically local presence where it makes sense, nothing more.

Okay. Thank you, Thierry. Dominica?

Okay. So yes, one question from the webcast. Qiagen has set ambitious sustainability target, how much of the 250 bps margin expansion goal could be traced back to sustainability integration across the organization, for example, waste reduction, lower energy costs and volatility, lower employee turnover.

Roland, do you want to take this one?

I do think it's a quite significant contribution factor for us because, as I said before, the gross margin is by far the largest factor of onset. It's around 100 basis points, also 250 basis points are based driven by improvements in gross margin. And here factors like less scrapping, better inventory management, better and faster shipping to customers, less air freight, more or less using other ways are all contribution factor to that. I don't have a hard number on hand. But I would assume that within that, somewhere around 1/4 is driven by also factors which have a direct link to ESG factors.

Yes. So we have a question from Stephan Wulf from ODDO. And he's asking, does the allocation to shareholders of the $1 billion by 2028 already include the $300 million -- $300 million share buyback performed in January this year.

Very simple. Yes, it does. It's from '24 to '28, and it does include the one we did in quarter one of $300 million share buyback. And we also highlighted that if you look at the agenda of our general assembly this week, there is another authorization of $300 million also share buyback.

Okay, Evie and then we'll take Tycho.

Evie Koslosky with Goldman Sachs. So my first question, going off of cases in bioinformatics, how are you able to achieve profitability in this business versus your peers? And then with the additional investment in R&D in this segment, is this still in line with your group margins or slightly above, which is what I think you said in the past? And then more broadly, you talked about margins. In the past, you've talked about new product launches and the pressure on gross margins. How do you expect with the new product launches you've laid out today, when will those start to meaningfully impact margins?

We can start with bioinformatic, Jonathan?

Sorry, could you -- yes, could you just repeat the bioinformatics part? I didn't quite understand. Why is it so profitable? Okay. So I mean, in a nutshell, that comes back to the underlying curation process because we're curating the same data once we're packaging it up one way for the research market, but then we're packaging it up a different way for the clinical market. But the important thing is it's the same underlying knowledge base. It's the same curation process. So we're kind of getting that economies of scale there. We're selling it into 2 separate markets, but it's the same underlying curation process that enables us to do that.

So we can take the margin question with Roland together. I would start saying that when you launch a product, when you launch, for example, QIAcuity, when you launch QIAstat, Nitin said that, for example, at the beginning, for example, the impact on instrument sales, capital sales on your overall revenues is higher because you accelerate on the creation of the installed base. The margin profile on capital sales is less than obviously on consumables. When you are launching a solution like QIAstat, for example, for some time, you are not reaching the optimal ratio between cost of goods and volumes. But as your volumes are growing, obviously, your cost of goods is going down. This is why, by the way, adding the capability or the partnership with pharma company is also important for the growth profile and the margin profile of QIAstat, so it's a mix. There are products in our R&D that are well established, like some product, It pays for the R&D of today and the productivity of tomorrow. That's how I would define that. But Roland, do you want to add something to that?

Not much to add. I think the only thing is, I do actually think what you're referring to is actually the opportunity of the future. That is exactly the reason why the margin expansion doesn't stop in '28.

Okay, Tycho?

So I understand the comments about the digital PCR market growing 15%. What do you think it grew last year in this, given your largest competitor has been kind of flat low single-digit growth. And then are you able to quantify the cannibalization from QPCR at all, put any numbers around that?

Yes. I mean I think we believe that the underlying market is sort of growing at the 10% to 15% rate. Our digital PCR business continues to grow in the 20% range, including sort of when others have had difficult times. And then we see some cannibalization from PCR, of course, as qPCR workflows are being converted into digital PCR. But a lot of this growth is also coming from new applications that couldn't be done on qPCR and are enabled by digital PCR. For example, when you're looking for many very minorfold changes with time, for example, that you need to do in wastewater testing, that couldn't be really well done by qPCR but is now really done well nicely by digital PCR. So it's both a little bit of cannibalization and a lot of new emerging applications that are just enabled by the higher precision and accuracy of digital PCR.

On M&A. I mean, I understand there's a history here and then deals need to make financial sense, but we've seen a lot of dislocation in the market. Can you maybe just talk about funnel, how much you're prioritizing M&A at this point. We've seen some of your competitors obviously get more aggressive about rolling up assets over the past year.

We also can take it as a team. But I do think that clearly, as we have seen it during the presentation as well, it's an integrated part of our strategy. We have been quite successful in M&A in the past. Tycho, we both have been around and we acquired our QuantiFERON franchise in 2012, and I know that you gave me a hard time, how can you pay $300 million for a franchise with $20 million in revenues. Today, we had accumulated revenues of $2 billion with a quite significant contribution margin, so I would say it pays off. We are clearly looking for more opportunities around that. And I do think there is opportunities, clearly not as significant ones, but there are opportunities out which we are reviewing.

Okay. Andrew Brackmann.

Andrew Brackmann from William Blair. Maybe just on QIAstat and the doubling of revenue there. Can you maybe just talk about the drivers to getting to that goal? And I guess, on menu ads, in particular, just the confidence that you have in the U.S. regulatory time lines that you laid out just in light of the process and timing that it took to get GI through.

Thank you. On the regulatory time line, and then I will ask Fernando to follow up. We have to highlight that post COVID, the FDA is constantly improving also on regulatory time line. It has been a difficult time because they were literally swamped obviously, by submission. But clearly, we noticed an improvement. We are not there due to the performance of the past, but both our 510(k) and including PMA. So that's the first part, to set the context on the specificity of QIAstat?

Yes. So essentially, we are just right now coming out of 2 FDA approvals, one for the respiratory panel, then 3 weeks ago of the gastrointestinal panel. We're submitting this year meningitis, which will be another FDA review. We're submitting the 2 mini panels. So we're quite confident about this. Blood culture identification follows next year. We're heavily -- our development teams in Barcelona and Hulme, Manchester are heavily involved with everything around the future panel with complicated urinary tract infection and pneumonia. And you heard also that we're stepping into partnerships with pharma where we're going beyond infectious disease. So there is a dependency of course, to be in the collaboration with the Pharma segment, but we are very confident about this.

Okay. Is there one last question before I ask Thierry to close the meeting. I think that's it. So Thierry, I ask you want to make some quick remarks to close the session.

I think I said what I had to say. I just said that we committed to a significant level of return to you. You have seen the number. We started by significantly returning time to your agenda. So we are already delivering. Thank you so much. Have a very good day.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

So I think the webcast is now completed. And for those of you who are staying for the bell ringing, I ask that you come back into this room at about 3:15 to 3:20 and then somebody from the New York Stock Exchange will make some comments and then we'll go down to the trading floor. Thank you.