Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. (DIM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Foreign Language] Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby declare open the 2021 ordinary and extraordinary Annual Shareholders Meeting of Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A.. My name is Joachim Kreuzburg, and as Chairman of the Board, I will chair the meeting. Given the current context of the pandemic crisis and to protect our shareholders, our employees and our service providers, this annual combined shareholders meeting will exceptionally take place in camera. That is to say in the physical absence of our shareholders as provided by article 5 of the Ordinance 2020/321 of March 25, 2020, modified and extended by the Ordinance No. 2020-1497 of the 2nd of December 2020. I would like to thank all shareholders who casted their vote remotely ahead of the shareholders' meeting. And I also would like to thank all those who are now following this live on Internet. Further, this webcast will remain available also after the transmission. Indeed, I think that this new format could offer the potential to facilitate a higher level of presence and participation of shareholders, particularly also international shareholders I would like to add in future annual meetings. Next to me are Mr. René Fáber, member of the Board of Directors; Mrs. Katrin Sebastian, Head of M&A and Corporate Compliance; and Mr. Benedikt Orzelek, Head of Investor Relations. We now need to appoint the offices of the assembly. I would like to appoint Benedikt Orzelek as Secretary of the annual combined shareholders' meeting. And under article 8 of the decree of April 10, 2020, I asked René Fáber and Katrin Sebastian to act as Scrutineers, which they accepted to do. We also have our auditors following this live on teleconference. Now I have to inform you about several formalities. As it is impossible for the shareholders to be physically present because of the sanitary precautions implemented by the authorities involved in the fight against COVID-19, shareholders were asked to cast their vote remotely ahead of the ASM by electronic means or by post using the respective voting form. Based on the attendance list, participating shareholders represent more than 1/5 of the shares with voting rights, so that we've got the quorum to hold the shareholders' meeting as follows: Voting rights represented our 150,154,601 out of a total number of voting rights of 155,530,788. This represents 96.5%. Number of shares represented are 81,880,182, out of a total number of shares of 92,180,190. This represents 8.8%. So as the quorum is completed, the annual combined shareholders' meeting is in the legal situation to vote. With regard to convening the annual combined shareholders meeting, the agenda and the resolutions were published in bulletin #19 of the bylaw of February 12, 2021. In the bulletin #28 of the of bylaw March 5th of this year, and in the legal newspaper, La Provence, of also March 5, 2021. Other information is taken from the 2020 Universal Registration Document. All documents required by law, which you may have received from BNP Paribas or your financial intermediary were also available on our dedicated web page and are available during the meeting. No draft resolutions or new items on the agenda were requested. I will now introduce the agenda of today's annual combined shareholders' meeting. Under the competence of the ordinary shareholders' meeting, we have, first, the reading of 3 reports of the Boards of Directors, respectively; the Management Report on the financial statements incorporating the Group's Report; the General Meetings Proposed Resolutions Report and the Corporate Governance Report. Second, reading of 3 reports of the statutory auditors, respectively, the report on the financial statements for the year ended 31st of December 2020, the report on the consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2020; and the report on the regulated agreements covered by Article L225-38 and subsequent of the French Commercial Code. Three, approval of financial statements for the year ended 31st of December 2020 and discharge to all directors. This is then resolution #1. Four, approval of the consolidated financial statements for the year ended 31st of December 2020. This is resolution #2. Five, assignment of the financial results for the year ended 31st of December 2020, resolution #3. Six, approval of regulated agreements and commitments covered by Article L225-38 and subsequent of the French Commercial Code, resolution #4. Seven, setting of the annual Directors' fees, resolution #5, approval of the information mentioned in the Article L225-37-3 Section 1 of the French Commercial Code concerning the remuneration due or awarded to the corporate officers for the 2020 financial year. This is resolution #6 then. Nine, approval of the fixed, variable and extraordinary components of the remuneration and the benefits of all kinds due or awarded to the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer for the 2020 financial year, resolution #7 is about this subject. Ten, approval of the corporate officers' compensation policy, resolution #8. And 11, authorities granted to the Board of Directors to enable the company to trade in its own shares. Resolution #9. Twelve is about the renewals or end of terms of mandates. Here, we have the renewal of the term of Mrs. Graffin as a Director, resolution #10 is about this. Further, the renewal of the terms of Mrs. Dexter as a Director, resolution #11 covers this subject. Then the renewal of the terms of KPMG as statutory auditor, resolution #12 is about this subject. And then finally, the end of the term of Salustro Reydel as alternate auditor. Resolution #13 is about that. And 13 is the proxy to carry out formalities, resolution #14 is about this topic. Under the competence of the extraordinary shareholder meeting, we have 14, the reading of the report of the Board of Directors on the proposed resolutions. 15, the reading of the statutory auditor special report. 16, the delegation of authority to the Board of Directors to reduce the capital in accordance with Article L22-10-62 to the French Commercial Code, resolution #15 is about this. And then finally, the proxy to carry out the formalities, resolution #16 is about this subject. Ladies and gentlemen, we have prepared a presentation that includes information about the activity of the Sartorius Stedim Biotech Group, including the main results for the fiscal year 2020. And some additional information on the company, Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. And I thought it might be helpful to give you an overview of the main topics before moving forward with the formal part of the combined shareholders meeting in a short presentation, that I now would like to give. Before I do so, I have to remind you that this presentation, as other such presentations, include also statements concerning the future performance of Satori Stedim Biotech and this is because statements are based partially on assumptions and estimates. And we, of course, even though we believe that such estimations and assumptions are very realistic that we cannot guarantee that they will actually materialize and we cannot also always update respective future statements, and therefore, you have to take this into consideration now. So 2020 was both very intense and also a highly successful year. And I would like to take the opportunity to thank all our employees for their tremendous effort and successful contribution for what we have achieved in these very special times. The main highlights probably were that Sartorius Stedim Biotech really made and still is making a very valuable contribution towards overcoming the pandemic situation. I will come back to that in more detail as I will come back to all those points in more detail later on. We definitely have achieved very significant profitable growth across our entire portfolio and across all geographies. We were able to close 3 acquisitions that added complementary technologies and made our offering even more relevant to customers. And we also have published and defined a very positive outlook for 2021 and beyond. So coming back to the contribution to overcoming the current pandemic. Companies as well as research institutions across the globe are working very hard and with a lot of pressure and dedication on developing and manufacturing coronavirus vaccines and medications to treat COVID-19. We can really say that almost all of these players, these companies, these research institutions are customers of ours and that they receive daily deliveries of essential products and technologies from us. We, of course, as you can imagine, also had to adapt to the disruption around us. And maybe a few highlights or key aspects on this subject as well. First of all, we had to maintain safe working conditions for all our employees. That's included, of course, protective measures as well as testing policies. Our employees have conducted in total more than 30,000 tests so far. And there are several hundreds of tests every week that our employees make here on site. We were lucky that we had an under proportionate number of infections and particularly no severe cases. And we tracked all cases so that we are able to say that nobody acquired an infection on site. So our protective measures really do work. Of course, the way how we work together has changed very much also towards customers. I'll come to that in a minute. Of course, pretty much all meetings are virtual now. Business travel is reduced dramatically. We nevertheless onboarded a lot of new employees, but of course, that is not so easy and virtual formats really reach some limits here. It's also worth mentioning, I believe, that working from home is not an option for everybody and in all situations actually given the fact that the majority of our employees are working in operations. This majority of our employees cannot work from home and even more so, we have changed to a 24/7 mode, so really working around the clock in pretty much all of our sites already around a year ago. So we have to keep that in mind also when we talk about working conditions and how far they could change and then how far they couldn't change and what people had to also manage in their private lives to keep up with that. Maybe one other figure, vaccination. This is a big topic across the globe at the moment. We would estimate that around 5% of our employees are vaccinated so far. We would expect this number to jump up to 20% within the next, I would guess, around 3 weeks. But then we will be dependent, of course, very much on the further progress in the different countries and geographies. We believe, and I said that already that a number of changes, particularly in regards to customer relationships and interactions with customers will stay even though that quite numerous of our products are quite complex, so therefore direct interaction, consulting and support is essential. But nevertheless, there will be rather a combination, a seamless integration, one could also say of direct and digital sales elements. We recognize that even larger investments are made by customers in a completely digital way or processed in a completely digital way. So we don't think that we will return to the pre-COVID type of interaction at all after this situation. And of course, this also includes even interactions like training, for example. We are training manufacturers of vaccines at the moment intensively through digital and partially hybrid means. So let's have a look on our financial results. And maybe let's start by putting the results of last year into the perspective of our last decade of business because we said based on our 2011 figures, a midterm target for the year 2020 and we initially shoot it for EUR 1.6 billion of sales revenue for Sartorius Stedim Biotech and the profitability target that was below 30%. We increased that then over time, but we still were able to overachieve that. We have now reached, as you can see here, a little bit more than EUR 1.9 billion of sales revenue because of a very strong growth last year, but we believe also because of some fundamental reasons. Overall, as you can see on the left-hand side, we have achieved an average growth rate per year of 16% over this decade, and an increase of our EBITDA margin by almost 11 percentage points. So let's have a closer look on these results. 2020 was characterized by an exceptionally dynamic growth, which was significantly above our expectations. That was also because why we raised our guidance during the year twice. We have achieved, as I mentioned, EUR 1.9 billion of sales revenue, representing a growth of roughly 35% in constant currencies. Growth in order intake was even stronger, close to 57%. And we were reaching just a little bit less than EUR 2.4 billion of sales revenue. So we build up a substantial volume of orders on hand, therefore, so which gave us also a strong start, of course, into the year 2021. EBITDA margin increased very strongly by almost 44%, and we have reached a bit more than EUR 600 million of EBITDA, representing a margin of 31.7%. Earnings per share were up by almost 46% and reached EUR 4.16. Let me briefly talk about 2 further aspects in a bit more detail. The sales revenue growth included 2 factors that are worth to mention, in particular, 12%, we would estimate were coming from additional business in the course of the pandemic, particularly then in the second half of the year in relation to manufacturers of vaccines, and 6 percentage points came from the acquisitions that we were able to close in the year 2020 and at the year -- end of the year 2019, I'll actually come to that later on. But still that means that between 16% and 17% of top line growth were really core organic growth. Second remark, the very strong increase of our EBITDA margin was partially due to, I would say, an overemphasis of the economies of scale that we have anyhow, maybe half of that were because of some, let's say, unplanned savings, as, for example, less business travel and also a little bit less hiring in some functions than we would have done in a different situation where hiring is a little bit easier to do. So now let's have a look on the geographical distribution of our growth. I said at the beginning that we achieved growth pretty much across our product portfolio. The same holds true from a geographic perspective, pretty much the same growth numbers, as you can see here. And I guess I don't have to read them out for the 3 geographies, Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, all around 35%. That's also why the geographical composition of our sales revenue remained very much unchanged with 40% Europe, 35% Americas and 25% Asia Pacific, as you can see on the right-hand side of that chart. As said a minute ago, 6 percentage points of our sales growth in 2020 came from acquisitions. And just as a reminder, we have a very focused acquisition strategy. We are completely focusing on complementary additions to our portfolio. So we are focusing on technologies that are relevant for our pretty much existing customers, but that make our offering even more relevant, more consistent, more complete. And more precisely, last year, we closed 3 acquisitions. We acquired very substantial downstream processing portfolio from Danaher. We acquired BIA Separations in November 2020, and WaterSep BioSeparations in December 2020, 2 companies that offer tools for gene and cell therapies, in particular. And the Danaher business, as you can read here, we closed end of April 2020, the acquisition of that businesses. And when we talk about the nonorganic growth contribution, we also have to mention the acquisition of Biological Industries end of 2019 of cell culture media products. Overall, as you can see on the left-hand side, we closed 8 acquisitions since 2015. So a bit more than one per year added substantial number of employees, experts in their respective fields through this. And of course, we also made substantial investments in this regard. Even after a year of these quite very intense M&A activities, we still can publish very robust, very solid financial indicators as there are, in particular, our equity ratio reaching a bit more than 48% at the end of last year, and the net debt to underlying EBITDA ratio of 0.8, which leaves a lot of further headroom and significant financing means for further potential acquisitions or other investments. At this point, a brief look on the balance sheet of the parent company. And the main message here, I guess, is also an extremely robust balance sheet with an equity ratio of about 90%. I now would like to present to you the dividend proposal that is subject of today's meeting, as I mentioned before, when I read out the agenda. We proposed to the shareholder meeting and pretty much an increase by 100% to EUR 0.68. As a reminder, as you can see in the second bullet point on the right-hand side, last year, we decided to adjust the dividend proposal because of the uncertainties in the course of the pandemic, which was still at the very beginning at that time to EUR 0.34. So now we propose EUR 0.68 again, which would represent a payout ratio of 16.3%. And this lower payout ratio has to be in comparison to the payout ratio for the years 2014 through '18, reflects our extensive investment program and also the focus that we have as a company on growth and innovation. In this context, I think it's also worth to look on the performance of the shares again. Share price, again, has risen substantially and very significantly above the market average. As you can see, almost 100% increase of the share price. So in other words, you could also say that the share price development is anyhow very much dominating the total return on an investment into Sartorius Stedim Biotech shares. And in comparison, we have the SBF 120 as a French index as well as the MSCI Europe as a European index, both are slightly in the red figures with minus 6.5% and minus 4.5% for the year 2020. We are also happy to again report another significant expansion of our workforce. Actually, we added around 1,300 jobs in total, as you can see on the left-hand side. A key topic, therefore, for us, of course, is and remains to be integration of new employees. The gross number, of course, is even larger than the net number of 1,300. The gross number is close to 1,900 new employees. As you can see, approx 300 of them from the businesses that we have acquired. On average, by the way, the net increase of our workforce is around 700 over the last couple of years. And as a result of this dynamic expansion of our workforce, I think we have a very interesting and strong bandwidth of tenure within Sartorius Stedim Biotech, 55% of our team are with Sartorius Stedim Biotech for less than 5 years. Many of them, of course, with quite numerous years of experience in the industry, but yet fresh blood and fresh thoughts for Sartorius Stedim Biotech. On the other end of the spectrum, we have 14% with more than 15 years of tenure and then around 30% between 5 and 15 years. So a very dynamic and strong mix, I believe. Further, a positive effect from this mix are, I think, 3 aspects. One, we are becoming more and more international as you can see on the left-hand side. 86 nations are represented amongst our workforce. I don't need to read that out. What you can see there on the left-hand side are the strongest countries represented amongst our workforce. Many are younger than 40 years. So something that we cannot achieve individually, we can achieve as a company. We are getting younger, indeed. Average age is lower than, I believe, ever before with 40 years. And we are also happy to see that not only the proportion of women amongst our workforce is constantly increasing, but also the percentage in upper management is increasing, even though we still, as you can see, have a bit more room to further improve there. I now would like to shift for a few minutes from the perspective on quantities to the perspective on qualities. And I assume most of you would agree that sustainability is such a key factor when it comes to the quality of a company and a business. And for us, it's important to really strongly underline that the entire purpose and focus and mission of Sartorius Stedim Biotech is directly addressing one of the key sustainability goals that have been defined by the United Nations. And this is the goal #3, good health and well-being. And as you can see from the mission on the right-hand side, we offer tools to help scientists and engineers in the end to create new and more helpful medicines, be it vaccines, be it therapeutics, and also to generate more affordable medicines through making these processes quicker and more efficient and ultimately, we want to contribute to better health for more people. But of course, it's important to make the aspect of sustainability also tangible, and in that regard also quantifiable. On the left hand, what you can see here is that besides the fact that our products directly address the safety, the efficiency, the speed of the development of important medicines, we also thrive to further improve the efficiency of our processes around handling and manufacturing plastic products. And we are making great progress here. For example, when it comes to making parts of our plastics that we are using in manufacturing available for recycled purposes. Climate protection, of course, is very much in the center of all global sustainability discussions. And I believe for a fast-growing company as we are, it's important to focus on the consumption of energy, for example, and maybe even more relevant to the emission of climate relevant gases and such in relation to the size of the business. And that you can see in the middle where you can see that the development of climate relevant emissions is going downwards, so we are really able to be more efficient in that regard as well. And I think we will see further progress in the years to come in that regard as well. And another important topic nowadays is, of course, yes, the quality, sustainability, the humanity, you could say, partially also of supply chains. We have started to scan our suppliers systematically by using an evolving qualified external help. Of course, we are focusing on bigger suppliers first. So even though we only have scanned a small number of such suppliers, we already have scanned and analyzed 30% of the purchasing volume so far. If you're interested, you find much more and detailed information on our sustainability efforts in our sustainability report that has been first time published in a separate report this year. It applies all the GRI guidelines, and we are planning to publish this annually now, in addition to our annual report. So -- and you can download that, as you can see there on the link from our website. So now coming back to sales and profitability for a minute. Last week, we increased our guidance for 2021, so I can focus here already on the increased outlook for this year. Before I talk about the numbers, I would remind -- I would like to remind everybody that the uncertainties in years like this remain very high even in the business that we are in simply because supply chains really are under stress. And I think we really have to see whether they remain being stable until we have all been able to go through this situation. So we are planning to achieve a sales growth of around 38%. We are not giving a bandwidth now because we believe that volatility in the business and all these dynamic influences are so strong, that is very, very difficult to give a reliable bandwidth, but we clearly would like to underline here that the 38% amend as an estimate, and that it might be a little bit left or right of this figure when we approach year-end. For the underlying EBITDA, we are expecting approximately 33% of profitability. This figure should be more robust and more precise than it is possible at this point in time to guide for on sales growth. We believe that the -- that particularly the corona demand is driving this stronger than initially expected top line growth. We are expecting now 18% of contribution from that. Our estimation of the M&A or nonorganic contribution remains unchanged at 5.5%. Further, our CapEx ratio, we are planning at 14% now. This means pretty much unchanged to before. We just have a larger sales revenue that we expect as a base. So therefore, that is pretty much unchanged to what we thought before. I will come back to that when I speak about investment plans anyhow in more detail. Net debt to underlying EBITDA, we now project at 0.6%. So we should be able to finance all this organic developments out of our operational cash flow. Of course, what we don't include here at all are any potential acquisitions because that's very difficult to do. Further, I would like to remind everybody on what we have stated a few times already, and I did that also at the beginning. We are operating very close to max capacity in these days. So therefore, this is also a challenging boundary condition when we are talking about such guidances and growth potentials. And the second further remark that I would like to make is that because of the lower comps, both for our organic business and then in regards to the contribution of the recent acquisitions, we will see higher growth in Q1 and Q2 than we are projecting now for the full year. As a reminder, we closed the largest of the acquisitions last year only in the course of Q2. And also the organic business really accelerated in the course of last year. So comps were relatively low for the first half of last year. Now I would like to present to you the main elements of our path forward. First of all, pretty much unchanged our strategic focus, and that is very clear on a broad coverage of the entire biopharma process chain. That is what we have built over the last 1.5, 2 decades, we are continuing to build on that. We very much, by doing so, are focusing on a strongly growing market or maybe more precisely on a market with strong inherent growth drivers in the different segments. Overarching growth driver is probably the growing and aging population because this is a very general trend that drives the need for medicines worldwide. The second one is the continuously expanding and strongly expanding biosimilar market. You see in the middle there that the projections are around 30% average growth rate per year of this very market segment. And then from a geographical standpoint, we believe that in the mid- and long-term, both the U.S. and China will grow over proportionately. For different reasons, U.S. still the hot bed of innovation; China, accelerating its development in the very -- in that segment. And of course, a huge population that needs to be served there. A very important further aspect is the very significant acceleration of innovation dynamics in the industry that we're serving. And that grows across different perspectives, be it from the perspective of, let's say, type of biopharmaceutical products, as you can see there in the middle, where we give some examples like monoclonal antibody, plasma vaccines, viral vectors and so on, don't want to read them all out. Or the scale of manufacturing, you see that we also see differentiated needs here and different trends also from the efficiency of large volume manufacturing as well as also tools for maybe the manufacturing of individual or individualized medicines. And then, of course, also different aspects that are in the focus of our customers, be it cost efficiency acceleration, sometimes when it comes to more modern or advanced modalities, even more, let's say, basic needs for scalability, yields as such, manufacturability and so on. So a highly dynamic phase in the industry on our customers, and that means, of course, respective needs also for us to continue innovating with that pace. One topic probably that is worth highlighting here that goes a little bit across the entire value chain is digitalization. And maybe again, without going into too much detail as this as many aspects, maybe 2 to be highlighted here. One is, of course, the gathering and availability of data as such. This starts from sensors over data management software and then, of course, also goes all the way through to data analytics where we see the increasing use of artificial intelligence clearly -- not only we clearly see the need for mechanistic models as well, but artificial intelligence is a field in which we are investing by and through certain partnerships, as you can read her from that list. So now I would like to shift again the perspective on what I mentioned a minute ago already, and that is our extensive plan for adding capacities to our global network in the course of the very dynamic growth that we have seen recently and currently. Basically, we are planning to expand our capacities in all geographies. This is kind of summary slide, and I will talk briefly about the different geographies in a minute. On the left-hand side, you can see that we are planning to more than double our capital expenditures in comparison to the average annual CapEx throughout the last couple of years. And it goes also pretty much across the different product segments, as you can see from the bottom on the right-hand side. So let's start with Europe. Very high investments in Europe, indeed, quite a focus on German sites, membrane manufacturing as well as manufacturing capacities for equipment is very much on top of our agenda here. We have started respective activities, and plan to have such additional capacities available between end of this year through end of 2022, depending on what we are talking about. The customer interaction is an additional topic. You will see that for the other geographies as well. We are planning to have this available for Europe within roughly 1.5 years. Research and development capacities are an important topic as well. We are adding substantial capacities, particularly when it comes to laboratories, et cetera, here in [indiscernible] as well. Then for Asia, we are talking, in particular, about expanding our manufacturing capacities in China as well as building a customer interaction center for Chinese customers, in particular, both should be available in the course of this year. And we are planning a brand-new site in Korea, close to the very large customers, Samsung Biologics. And construction is about to begin within the next couple of months and operations should start 2 years later than. Scope here, as you can see on the left-hand side, separation technologies, fluid management, cell culture media. And then finally, we are also ramping up and extending our manufacturing footprint in North America. Main topics here are cell culture media. Again, in Puerto Rico, as well as additional clean room capacities for both food management and separation technologies and Mainland U.S. in Massachusetts, we have actually now already in operation, a new customer interaction center that we have built in the second half of last year. So -- and this basically represents an acceleration and partially also expansion of investments that we had on our agenda anyhow, but we pulled them forward and expanded them to reflect the very strong and stronger than initially expected, recent and current growth. So ladies and gentlemen, I now would like to close my presentation by walking you briefly through our ambition for the year 2025, which we have raised few weeks ago and communicated to the public already back then in January. Background here is a higher baseline after the strong growth in the course of 2020, in particular, but also a stronger underlying organic growth that we anticipate for the years to come. And as you can see on the right-hand side, we are now shooting for a top line, so in other words, sales revenue for Sartorius Stedim Biotech of EUR 4 billion. Previously, this number was EUR 2.8 billion. And then EBITDA margin of 33%. The previous number was around 30%. And the growth strategy remains very much unchanged in its cornerstones. We focus very much on a strong and above-market organic growth, which is complemented by additional acquisitions that make our portfolio more relevant and stronger for our customers. We are particularly thriving for an above-average and above-market growth in America, in North America, in particular, and in Asia. And we are planning to continue creating around 1,000 new jobs every year. So thank you for your attention so far. And now I will get along the specific formal topics of the agenda of the ordinary shareholder meeting. And I would like to start with topics 1 and 2. Topic 1 relates to the 3 reports of the Board of Directors. I mentioned them at the beginning when I walked you through the agenda. You find these respective reports as follows, so that I don't read them out here today. First one is the management report of the Board of Directors and the group company management report, which are disclosed in the Pages 19 to 72 in the 2020 Universal Registration Document. Second one is the Board of Directors Report on resolutions submitted to the ordinary shareholders meeting, which is disclosed in its entirety in pages 234 to 240 of the 2020 URD. And then the Corporate Governance Report, which was drafted to comply with the Article L225-37 of the French Commercial Code and is published on the Page 74 to 124 of the 2020 URD. Topic number 2 then relates to the 3 reports of the statutory auditors, respectively. The report on the financial statements for the year ended 31st of December 2020, then the report on the consolidated financial statements for the year ended 31st of December 2020 and the report on the regulatory -- regulated agreements covered by Article L225-38 and subsequent of the French Commercial Code. And now I want to invite Mr. John Evans to read and comment these 3 reports. John?

Thank you. Good afternoon. On behalf of the 2 audit firms, Deloitte and KPMG, I'll present the main points of our 3 reports. So firstly, the report on the consolidated financial statements. So in terms of the opinion, we concluded that the consolidated financial statements provide a true and fair view of the assets and liabilities and the financial position of the group as of the December 31, 2020. And that result of this operations for the year that ended in accordance with international financial reporting standards. Second part of this report relates to key audit matters. So the 2 key audit matters that we identified in which we performed specific -- have a specific focus relates to goodwill valuation testing and on the accounting for the acquisitions of Danaher Corporation and BIA Separations. So for these 2 matters, we concluded that the accounting is appropriate. The third part of our report relates to specific verifications required by laws and regulations of the group's management report of the Board of Directors, on which we have no matters to report as to its step presentation, and is consented with the consolidated financial statements. The second report relates to the single company -- parent company financial statements of Sartorius Stedim Biotech, prepared under the French accounting principles. So in our opinion, these financial statements give a true and fair view of the assets and liabilities, and the results of operations for the year ended December 31, 2020, in accordance with French accounting principles. Again, we have performed verifications as required by law and regulations, and I have no specific comments pursuant to those verifications. And we have no key audit matters to report on the financial statements of the parent company. The third report is our special report on regulated agreements. So firstly, we confirm, we inform you that we have not been advised of any agreements authorized and concluded during the previous accounting period to be submitted to the general meeting of shareholders for their approval in accordance with the relevant article of the French Commercial Code. secondly, on related party agreements from prior years, not approved by the general meeting of the shareholders, we inform you that one agreement authorizing concluded during the year ended December 31, 2018, mentioned in our special report on regulated related party agreements for the year 2019 was not approved by the general meeting of shareholders, bringing the financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2019. It relates to general assistant and administrative service agreement. Whereby Sartorius AG invoices, Sartorius Stedim Biotech to certain general assistance and admins services carried out by the former to the latter, calculated based on an allocation taking into account the work performed and time spent by the executives for the benefit of Sartorius Stedim Biotech. That concludes the report of the statutory auditors.

Thank you very much, Mr. John Evans, for your report. I will now go through the resolutions corresponding to topics 3 to 13, and I will present their respective voting results. If you allow myself, I will not read them out as they were already presented and detailed when introducing the agenda of the meeting. The first resolution was accepted with the voting result of 99.88%. The second resolution was accepted with a voting result of 100%. The third resolution was accepted with a voting result of 100% as well. The fourth resolution was rejected with a voting result of 22.87%. The fifth resolution was accepted with the voting results of 99.92%. The sixth resolution was accepted with a voting result of 99.06%. And the seventh resolution was accepted with a voting result of 94.48%. The eighth resolution was accepted with a voting result of 93.24%. The ninth resolution was accepted with the voting result of 99.52%. The 10th resolution was accepted with a voting result of 98.79%. And the 11th resolution was accepted with the voting result of 98.83%. The 12th resolution was accepted with a result of 99.91%. The 13th was accepted with a voting result of 100%, and the 14th resolution was accepted with a result of 100% as well. We will go on with the extraordinary shareholder meeting starting with topic 14 of the agenda. Reading of the report of the Board of Directors on the proposed resolutions. The Board of Directors report on resolution submitted to the extraordinary shareholders meeting is disclosed in its entirety in Pages 240 and 241 of the 2020 Universal Registration Document. And I will, therefore, not read it out today as well. Fifteen, reading of the statutory auditor special report. The special report is disclosed and available on our dedicated web page, so I will not read it out today as well. I will now go through the resolutions 15 and 16 corresponding to the topics 16 and 17 and will present their respective voting results. Here again, I will not read out the resolutions, but only the results. Resolution #15 was accepted with a result of 99.93%. And resolution #16 was accepted by -- with the result of 100% and approved by that. As no questions were raised by shareholders ahead of the ASM, I now have to close the general meeting. And so far, as we reach the end of 2020 -- of the 2021 Annual Combined Shareholders' Meeting of Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A., I declare the 2021 Annual Combined Shareholders Meeting of Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. closed. Thank you all very much for following this live on the Internet, and I hope to meet again in one year's time virtually or in person, we will see. All the very best. Bye-bye.