Repligen Corporation (RGEN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning and welcome to Repligen Corporation's 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. At this time, I would like to turn the meeting over to your host, Ms. Karen Dawes, Chairperson of the Board. The floor is yours, Ms. Dawes.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2020 Meeting of Shareholders of Repligen Corporation. I'm Karen Dawes, the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the company, and I will act as chair of the annual meeting. In light of public health concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, we are conducting the Annual Meeting virtually this year instead of in person to protect the health and safety of our shareholders and employees. At this time, I would like to give special thanks to our Repligen employees who have been working to keep company activities moving along during this unique time. Their dedication and efforts are recognized and much appreciated by the Board of Directors and the shareholders. Thank you for everything you do. Regarding meeting logistics. You can view the agenda for today's meeting in the virtual meeting portal in the top right-hand corner of your screen. In the bottom right of the screen, you can also see links for our meeting materials, including our annual report, proxy statement and rules of conduct for today's meeting. In order to conduct an informative, orderly and constructive meeting, we ask that participants abide by these rules. I'd like to begin with a few introductions. Joining me today representing our Board of Directors are Nicolas M. Barthelemy; our CEO, Tony J. Hunt; Glenn P. Muir; and Thomas F. Ryan, Jr. At this time, I would like to introduce Rohin Mhatre, our newest Board member. Rohin joined us in February, and we welcome him and look forward to his contributions to Repligen. We also have 2 Board directors, Dr. Glenn Cooper and Mr. John Cox, who will be stepping off of our Board today. On behalf of the Board, myself and everyone at Repligen, we would like to thank Glenn and John for their many years of dedicated service to the company and its shareholders. They have really been a key to our company growth and success. Also in attendance today from Repligen are Jon Snodgres, our Chief Financial Officer; and Sondra Newman, our Global Head of Investor Relations. In addition, we are joined by Courtney Hetrick from Goodwin Procter, Repligen's outside legal counsel; and Sean Lynch from Ernst & Young, Repligen's independent auditor. Sean will be available later in the meeting if there are any questions for him from shareholders. We are also joined by [ Terrence Hassett ], our independent inspector of elections for this meeting, Terrence has signed an oath of office, which will be filed with the minutes of the meeting. In order to expedite the flow of business, we will follow this sequence of events. First, the polls will be opened. Then each of the matters to be voted on by the shareholders at this meeting will be presented in the order set forth in the proxy statement. We will follow the presentation of each proposal with the opportunity for shareholders to ask questions relating to that proposal. Once all proposals have been presented, the polls will be closed and the formal meeting will be adjourned. You may vote at the meeting at any time through the virtual portal by clicking on the Vote Here button towards the middle of your screen. If you have already voted before today's meeting and you do not wish to change your vote, you do not need to vote again at the meeting. Your vote will be cast as you have previously instructed. However, if you have already voted and now wish to change your vote or if you have not already voted and you wish to do so now, please vote during this meeting by clicking on the Vote Here button. Meeting participants can enter a question online at any point during the meeting by typing it into the Ask a Question box at the bottom left of the screen. If you have a question or comment that relates to a proposal being presented today, please submit it as soon as possible and prior to the discussion of that proposal. If you have questions that are not related to the proposal, please submit them at any time. These questions will be addressed time permitting during the question-and-answer session following the company update presentation given by our CEO, Tony Hunt. If your question is either not addressed during this meeting or if you prefer to submit it outside of this meeting, please e-mail your questions to [email protected], and we will respond to you. Having reviewed the meeting logistics, we will now proceed to the formal business of the meeting. The secretary has informed me that Notice of the Meeting was sent to all shareholders of record as of the close of business on April 1, 2020, the record date for this meeting. Only shareholders of record on that date are entitled to vote at this meeting. As of the record date, there were 52,278,083 shares of common stock outstanding and entitled to vote. Accordingly, 26,139,042 shares present at this annual meeting in person or represented by proxy constitute a quorum. It will be presumed, pending the final report of the inspector of elections, that a quorum is present in order that the business of the annual meeting may be conducted. We will now proceed with voting on the agenda items. The polls are now open and will stay open during the discussion of the proposals and the question-and-answer period. There are 3 matters of business to be voted on by shareholders today as set forth in the company's proxy statement, which was delivered to shareholders in connection with this meeting. The first matter of business is the election of 6 directors, each for 1-year term, which continue until the 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders and until their successors are duly elected and qualified or until their earlier resignation or removal. As set forth in the proxy statement delivered to shareholders in connection with this meeting, the Board of Directors has nominated as directors of the company Nicolas M. Barthelemy, Karen A. Dawes, Tony J. Hunt, Rohin Mhatre, Glenn P. Muir and Thomas F. Ryan, Jr. The Board of Directors recommends a vote in favor of each director nominee. Do we have any questions on this item?

There are no questions.

Thank you. There being no questions on the proposal, the discussion is closed. If anyone is voting through the meeting website, please vote now on Proposal 1. The second matter of business is the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2020. The Board of Directors recommends a vote in favor of this proposal. Do we have any questions on this item?

We have no questions at this time.

Thank you. There being no questions on the proposal, the discussion is closed. If anyone is voting through the meeting website, please vote now on Proposal 2. The third matter of business is the advisory vote on the compensation of the company's named executive officers. The Board of Directors recommends a vote in favor of this proposal. Do we have any questions on this item?

No questions at this time.

There being no questions on the proposal, the discussion is closed. If anyone is voting through the meeting website, please vote now on Proposal 3. That concludes the voting on the proposals set forth on the proxy statement. I will pause briefly to allow shareholders to submit any final vote. [Voting]

It is now approximately 8:06 a.m., and I now declare the polls closed. No further proxies or votes and no further changes or revocations will be accepted. There being no further business to come before the formal portion of this meeting, I hereby declare the formal portion of this meeting adjourned. Now I would like to give the floor to Repligen's President and CEO, Tony Hunt, to present a corporate update and to discuss our business progress and plans.

Great. Thank you, Karen. Good morning, everybody. Obviously, it has been a very interesting year for Repligen in 2020. So just like Karen, I want to thank all of our employees for all the work they've done throughout the last 3 or 4 months as we've all worked through the COVID situation. I think we've -- as you'll see a little later in the presentation, we've actually performed well as a company while continuing to protect the health and safety of our employees. So in terms of 2019 and before jumping into how 2019 went for Repligen, I mean, it was clearly terrific year. I want to just spend maybe a minute talking about who we are and what we do. And I think as everybody knows, Repligen's fast become one of the leading innovators in the world of bioprocessing. We have a very diversified portfolio of products today that's split into 4 different franchises from filtration to chromatography to proteins and then more recently, analytics, which was a deal that we did when we acquired C Tech in 2019, which gave us this fourth franchise. What makes us unique in the industry is that we're very focused on enabling our customers who are manufacturers of biological drugs to be able to increase their overall productivity to drive efficiency using single-use technologies that Repligen manufactures and makes today. Our product line, when you look to see who we compete with, is actually very differentiated. And that puts us in a pretty unique position and allows us to compete and perform as well as we have over the last 5, 6 years. We've seen really in 2018 and 2019 an acceleration in demand for gene therapy. If you had attended the meeting a few years ago, you probably would have heard us talk about monoclonal antibodies, recombinant proteins as being the major sort of end customer that we sell to. But that's changed a little bit. And in 2019, 15% of our revenue came from the gene therapy customer base, up from about 7% in the prior year. So with this growing portfolio of products and a very strong biologicals market, I think we're really well positioned for the future. And so if you look at 2019, as I said at the outset, terrific year for the company. We hit $270 million in revenue. Our organic growth for the year was 33%. We've started to march up on our gross margin hitting 57% in 2019, our EBITDA margins in the mid-20s and almost 800 employees worldwide. In terms of our blueprint, right, and when you think about my earlier comments about how you compete and win, our competitive advantage is that we're really combining a combination of disciplined M&A and R&D. And so in terms of M&A, we've done 5 deals in the last 6 years. And cumulatively, those deals have contributed about 40% to the overall revenue in that same time period. In parallel, as we do these deals, we also invest in R&D and bring new products to market. So we brought about 12 next-generation products to market through our R&D team. These products are what transforms the bioprocessing industry for us. These are the high-impact technologies that differentiate us versus the other 4 or 5 big players in our market. So we've brought these new products to market. We've expanded our applications. So examples of application expansion in 2019 was really the acceleration in gene therapy and probably the movement for Repligen into the world of process analytics. In parallel, we also have to pay attention to our manufacturing operations. So 2019 was a big year for us in terms of scaling to stay ahead of demand. So we invested about $20 million in capital expansion projects and the implementation of Phase 1 of SAP. So again, I think our portfolio is diversified. Our markets are further diversified versus where we were, say, 12 months ago. And we continue to deliver those results and create value for not only our customers but also our shareholders. And that's really represented in terms of our addressable market. 4 or 5 years ago, our addressable market was under $1 billion in 2019 and here again in 2020, it's about $2.8 billion. And our 4 franchises from chromatography to filtration to proteins and the latest franchise, which is process analytics, all contribute to that overall addressable market. What's important about these franchises is the fact that we -- the maximum share that we have in any of those markets is about 20%. So chromatography represents about 20% of share of the market. It grew last year at 40%. Our filtration business, which is essentially -- and has an addressable market of $1.4 billion, we have about 10% share. And last year, our business grew at 30%. Our proteins business, which is really one of the legacy businesses of Repligen, 10% market share and last year was one of the -- really an important year where we saw significant growth in our proteins business, where it grew greater than 20%. And then finally, process analytics. Obviously, new business for us. We moved into it in June last year. We have about 5% overall share in the market and in terms of growth last year, about 10%. And part of that growth was really due to the fact that when we acquired C Technologies, they had distributors and one salesperson, so we really had to build up the commercial organization. And as you'll see in a few slides, our Q1 for C Tech has significantly improved above the 10% mark and we grew in Q1 at 22%. So we have this differentiated technology. And as I said, our performance has been outstanding over the last half dozen years. We've really taken the company from 2014 where we were -- 28% of our revenue was coming direct, 72% of our revenue was coming from what we call our OEM businesses. So these are our proteins business and ligands and growth factors. And the strategy was how do we flip that? How do we go from basically 28% direct to 80% direct. And so by the end of 2019, 76% of our revenue is now going -- coming from direct business. So we're selling to the large biotech CDMOs. And 24% is coming from the OEM part of our portfolio. So our Protein A ligands and growth factors. In terms of CAGR, just to give you a sense of the pace that we've been growing at over the last 5, 6 years, we've been able to grow at around 35% CAGR. Obviously, that's a combination of organic growth and also the impact of doing M&A, but also our profitability has increased by a factor of 4. So again, really good performance. And I think the core to what we do is in the 2 parts of our strategy, which is really around accelerating growth through M&A, and we've done now 5 deals in the last 6 years. 3 of these deals have been focused on filtration, which is the Refine deal in 2014, the TangenX deal at the end of 2016 and the Spectrum acquisition in the middle of 2017. We've done one acquisition that's strengthened our chromatography portfolio, specifically the OPUS product line, and that was Atoll, which we executed on in April in 2016. And then last year, we acquired a company called C Technologies, which is really a market leader in protein concentration measurement. And again, that happened in the middle of last year. So one of the things we like to do when we do acquisitions is really spend usually the first 6 to 9 months after acquisition, really addressing some of the gaps that we see at the companies. Typically, it could be commercial, building out the commercial team or it might be operational. And as we look at that, we then say, hey, look, let's look at the first full year of ownership after the acquisition and see what the performance is going to be. So we've set some pretty high targets for ourselves, and you'll see on this slide that the businesses we've acquired have grown anywhere between 24% to 48% revenue growth in the first full year after ownership. So we'll see how C Tech does this year, but we're forecasting north of 20% in that 20%, 25% range for C Tech for 2020. Now what we get from these deals is not just great technology. We also get an R&D portfolio of products that need to be further developed and brought to market. And so for each of these, you can see on the next slide that if you look at filtration, our R&D team has been able to bring next-generation ATF to market, which we call single-use ATF. For those who may have listened in on the call last week, in Q1, our single-use ATF portfolio doubled year-on-year in terms of revenue. So that's been a really impressive product line for us. We're coming out with additional products for ATF later this quarter, which is called our lab controller systems. We've also taken the Spectrum product line and really built out the systems part of the business with our KR2i and KTF product lines. And then our flat sheet cassette business, another filtration product that came from our TangenX acquisition, we just launched earlier this quarter the gamma radiated version of the flat sheet cassettes, which will go into gene therapy applications. And then finally, from our Spectrum deal, there was a lot of excitement at the R&D and management level within Spectrum about a technology that they were in the early stages of development, which was TFDF. We've been able to take that technology and work on it over the last couple of years. And we're being able to apply it now into what we call harvest clarification applications for both CHO-cell and for gene therapy. So exciting times for us in terms of our filtration portfolio. In terms of chromatography, obviously, most of what we do is OPUS related, and you probably have seen a lot of the expansion of the OPUS product line. This is what I would call our homegrown product. This didn't come from an acquisition. This was all developed in-house over the last 8 or 9 years. And then finally, process analytics. We have the Solo and FlowVPE technology. We're working on next gen, which you'll see in the second half of this year. And then that complements really a lot of what we do in the world of proteins. And in terms of our proteins business, we've taken sort of a dual strategy here between partnerships like what we've done with Navigo and Purolite and also partnerships with Sartorius around the integration of the ATF controller logic into their next-generation single-use bioreactors. So R&D is a really big part of what we do and it complements our M&A strategy. And when you put all of that together and you look at our financials over the last 4 or 5 years, and on this slide, you can see basically, 2018 and 2019, in terms of revenue, we're at $194 million in 2018. If you take the midpoint of our guidance for 2020, around the $314 million will be up 62% over the last 2 years. So it gives you an idea of the pace we've been moving at. Our goal is to get to $500 million to $600 million by 2023. In terms of gross margins, they've been inching up over the last year or so from the mid-50s to the mid- to high 50s, so last year at 57%. Again, we'd like to continue to move in that direction, and our latest guidance is in the 56% to 57% for 2020. Ultimately, we want to get close to 60% gross margins for the company. And then our operating margins are almost in that mid-20s today. That's our goal. We'd like to -- we continue to invest back into the company, whether it's into R&D or expanding our commercial organization or making investments into our G&A so that we can scale the company as we continue to scale ourselves operationally. So overall, we're in a really good position. I think our long-term goals, we continue to execute against those goals. And if you look at where we are here in the first quarter or actually after the first quarter, last week, we reported out $76 million in revenue, 16% organic growth. We had really strong gross margin and operating margins in the 58% plus for gross margin, operating margins around 24%. We had a low tax rate, which came from some stock vesting benefits and net income and EPS expansion was very impressive. So if you look at really what happened in the first quarter, clearly, everybody was dealing, including all the players in bioprocessing, with COVID and our goal was to really focus on keeping our manufacturing facilities open and keeping our employees healthy and safe and we've been able to do that. If you look at the business specifically, our filtration, chromatography and proteins demand was very strong. We had a really strong order load coming into Q2. That's maintained itself through the end of April. We saw nice performance in the gene therapy segment, consistent with what we saw in 2019. Our proteins headwind, which we went into the year and if you went back to our February earnings call, we really talked about the fact that we would see a slowdown in GE. So the slowdown was a little slower than we were expecting with some late quarter orders. And so we expect that the Cytiva impact will be a little less than what we were expecting at the beginning of the year. In terms of COVID, so far, our business has performed well. We have pockets of weakness in our portfolio probably related to the research side and early process development labs. But for the most part, our big product lines, whether it's ATF or OPUS or the Spectrum business or C Tech, has remained fairly robust throughout these challenging couple of months. So we're cautiously optimistic about the second half of the year as we look to see where we're going. But probably the other piece that's giving us some really good sort of business opportunities is the CDMOs and the large biotech pharma companies are beginning to develop not only vaccines but also biological drugs targeting -- whether it's a spike protein for COVID. So some new opportunities are opening up and that gives us some additional runway as we move through 2020. So in summary, I think you can see we have 4 very strong franchises, which are driving technology leadership. The products that we have within these franchises are really high-impact products. There's not a whole lot of commodity in terms of what we do. Our addressable market continues to grow and expand. And I think we're conservative in terms of how we assess the size of our addressable market. Our capacity, we've made a major investment in 2019, and we'll be spending another $20 million, $22 million here again in 2020 to continue to expand our capacity and to build our systems in terms of SAP for the company. I think our R&D engine is poised for a great year. We're launching 5 to 6 products in 2020 versus prior years, which have been typically 1 to 2. And I think most importantly is our end markets are strong. And so we're seeing -- despite what's going on with COVID, I think if you look at our business, our markets, you're going to see acceleration of biological drug manufacturing and development, including gene therapies over the next 3 to 5 years. So I think we're well positioned for the future. We have over $500 million in cash, and I think we're well on our way to hitting our revenue targets of $500 million to $600 million by 2023. So with that, I'll stop and if there are any questions, more than happy to answer them.

We've received no questions at this time. Operator, please turn the call back to Ms. Dawes.

If there are no further questions, Ms. Dawes, do you have any closing or additional remarks?

No. We would like to thank everybody for attending our virtual meeting and thank Tony for his excellent presentation. And everybody, have a good day and stay safe and healthy. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's event, and you may now log out of the portal. We hope that you have a good day.