Tecan Group AG (TECN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everyone in the audience and those streaming. Welcome to the 2022 UBS Global Healthcare Conference. I hope you were all able to grab some breakfast and have been enjoying the speakers thus far. My name is Carlos Vasques, and I'm an Associate Director here on the Health Care team, and thank you for joining us. It's bright, early on a Monday, but we're excited to be speaking with Tecan Group Global Laboratory and Life Science Equipment Company. To walk us through the story today, we're pleased to have Dr. Achim von Leoprechting Chief Executive Officer at Tecan Group. Dr. Achim has spent nearly a decade with the company, having led as its CEO since 2019. This is meant to be an interactive session. So if you have questions, feel free to submit them by scanning the QR codes provided. As a reminder, right after Dr. Achim through his presentation, we can dive into those. So Dr. Achim, thank you so much for joining us. The floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Carlos. And good morning, and welcome. It's a pleasure to be here, and thanks for the invitation to UBS. Welcome to people in the room and also online. It would be my pleasure to go through the company update and talk about where Tecan stands today, and then we're very happy to answer any of your questions that you may have. So going right in before covering the presentation, as always, I have to point you to the safe harbor statement as I will be making forward-looking statements in this presentation. So maybe to start us off with our purpose statement. Tecan is a very purpose-driven company. And as you can see, we are aiming to improve people's lives and improve health care. And we do that by scaling innovation all the way from Life Sciences into the clinic. And we work with companies and partners worldwide to achieve that mission. Now as a quick introduction to Tecan for those who are not yet familiar with the company, founded 40 years ago on Lake Zurich, have grown over the time as an innovation leader, as a trusted partner to the Life Sciences industry to a pharma industry to the diagnostic industry. And with the recent acquisition that we executed last year, we're spending also into the medical device field. We are benefiting from many trends in what we would call the century of biology and probably coming out of the pandemic, it has been never been more tangible and more concrete what that could mean and why advancements in health care technology are so important. We have highly complementary business segments, which I will introduce to you in a minute and are really an innovative company that fuels growth from partnerships but also our own developments in that continuum from research all the way into the diagnostic and clinical space. We are active and then globally deployed as a company with our sales and service force for our own products in 52 countries and then work with the distribution network in other countries as well. Headquartered in Switzerland and by now, with the Paramit acquisition, our presence from a global distribution is 1/3 in the U.S., 1/3 in Europe and 1/3 in Asia. And I will explain so later why that is not only important for our current business execution, but also for the future growth and development of the company. Around 3,300 employees and constantly growing and fully floated and listed at the Swiss Stock Exchange. Now as I mentioned, Tecan has executed the, to-date largest acquisition with Paramit Corporation. We are now 9 months into the integration, Paramit, a world-leading OEM developer and supplier predominantly to the medical devices or medical electronics industry. The integration is progressing extremely well, and we are already in the process to transfer one of our larger California sites into the Paramit environment, which eventually producing a high-growth product range that we would call Cavro Components, ultimately somewhere in Penang, Malaysia. So integration is pretty well underway. Also very pleased with the reception on the commercial pickup of this new offering in the framework of Tecan where we, of course, can leverage key account management and a very strong commercial end. The -- I think the other point that I would like to make on the integration slide is that we have successfully passed the first ever FDA audit in Paramit and that is, again, a very important milestone, not just illustrating a kind of housekeeping item, but particularly serving the regulated IVD and medical industry that is a very important milestone that we could accomplish in a highly collaborative fashion. And now of course, going forward, we are aiming to expand the commercial reach and the technology reach of Paramit being part of the Tecan framework. So this is a pretty busy slide, but I wanted just to illustrate how Paramit now fits into the end markets that we're serving and also our strategic expansion going forward. As you can see here, the 2 market segments called Life Sciences and in vitro diagnostics, each of which come with an addressable market at around EUR 4 billion to EUR 5 billion were the end markets that Tecan was serving prior to the Paramit acquisition. So in there, you see these numbers 1, 2 and 3, our strategic growth pillars, which were expanding in the areas that we're already serving in lab automation, adding new tools and technologies, particularly in the Life Sciences space. But over the last years, we have also greatly expanded our reach into reagents and consumables, which, of course, allows us now to offer more complete solutions into the Life Sciences market in particular, but also additional consumables into the in vitro diagnostic mark. Now with number four, you see that Paramit reinforces our presence in the life science and in vitro diagnostic market. So approximately 30% of Paramit's revenue comes from that part of the segment. But now with Paramit and their strength in medical devices and we would doubt maybe medical mechatronics, we are tapping into an addressable market that is actually twice as large as the addressable markets for life center and diagnostic combined. And Paramit, also being a, kind of, market leader for 30 years in their respective industry, have a lot of credibility and lots of strength to now move into this market segment with the additional support and strength of Tecan engineering, software development, sales and service support and so on. So I think quite excited about the options and opportunities we now have as a group going forward in this framework. Now maybe back to the clarification on how we're operating and how now Paramit fits into our footprint. We are running 2 highly synergistic divisions. One is called Life Sciences business. The other one is called partnering business. In Life Sciences, we would be commercializing our products and services under the Tecan brand name. And as you can see here, this kind of product range expands from lab automation, robotics, into detection solutions and increasingly also into reagents, consumables and software. So a very complete portfolio that has been derived from organic innovation, but also from a few acquisitions that we executed over the past periods. Now on the Partnering side, this is where a Paramit kind of will be incorporated and is being incorporated. This is the area of Tecan where we are serving what we would call an OEM market environment. So we are working here with the world leaders in the in vitro diagnostic and medical device segment where Tecan acts as a developer or a provider of entire systems, consumables or modules and building blocks to analyzers and systems that typically spend more complete workflows in this range. And you can see here also on this picture, partnerships with companies like Agilent, with Ortho Clinical, with kind of Japanese company called Sysmex and quite a few others that are kind of highlighted here, including some smaller footprint solutions that Paramit brought into the framework that are in the area of near patient and point-of-care system. So I think now a very complete and very rich range of capabilities that then cater to the life science and the Partnering OEM business, which focuses more on the in vitro diagnostic and medical side. Now just to give you a feel for the area that we would call out as recurring revenues and our end market distribution. So as you can see on our Life Sciences side, the split between research and maybe the regulated or semi-regulated markets called LDT and IVD make up approximately 50-50 of what we do in Life Sciences. Similar to where we already arrived with our recurring revenue profile in Life Sciences, spending approximately half-half in that division, very strong growth and contribution from consumables, obviously, but also a starting point for reagents and functional consumables in that environment. The partnering side, clearly now is a different profile. It is now incorporating Paramit for the market represented on the end market ring here. But the recurring revenues, of course, for partnering due to the nature of the business is more kind of smaller than what we would see in the Life Science division. However, we have been quite successful to also constantly grow that framework of recurring revenue on the Partnering side. And maybe due to the nature of the business reality being in regulated markets, the Partnering business in itself could be qualifying as a recurring business because it's typically very long term and very stable partnerships over many, many years. Now looking at the kind of maybe macro environment. So what drives investments in our space and how do we, as a company, contribute and as I said earlier, really live up to that claim to scale innovation for the benefit of health care all the way from life science research into the regulated clinical and medical space? So what drives most of our partners and investments is probably listed in the health care use. Prior to COVID, I would have said, it is cancer metabolic disorders, noninvasive prenatal testing and cardiovascular. Of course, with our presence in infectious disease that was bumped up over the past 2 years quite significantly towards infectious diseases. And what we're seeing right now, that is moving back again into the areas that I mentioned before. For us, that means we continue to focus our build-out of capabilities in the applications and product use cases that I mentioned here. And the big ones for us are called genomics, which include classical technology like PCR, which had become a household name under COVID, PCR testing, but also very important for us that whole area of next-generation sequencing or advanced genomics. Then we move on with our capabilities into what we would characterize as protein analytics. So this is where mass spectrometry and other technologies play a bigger role increasingly into the Life Sciences, pharma and also continuation into the clinical space. And then the last element listed here for obvious reasons is cell and tissue analytics. So this is spending the area of cancer oncology but also infectious disorders and many, many more. Now with Paramit and also with some of our pre-existing partnerships, we are broader even than this. So we expand environments like transfusion medicine and with Paramit's partnerships, even areas now with robotic surgery, patient monitoring and many advanced medical fields. Now the commonalities that bring them all together under the Tecan roof would be listed as scalability productivity, reproducibility and standardization. We see, of course, in all the areas, the kind of very high need for precision as we're increasingly touching the clinical environment, but also a very important that we are able as a company to scale these technologies up to really bring them from a good idea to something that has scale on a global environment. And lastly, as I mentioned earlier, a very important for us also compliance on the regulatory side. So this is where we see a big, I would say, competitive benefit of Tecan being so well entrenched in processes and having a very capable team on that side. Now even one kind of step upwards, the kind of discussion on what drives kind of investments in our space on a higher level. I would call out kind of maybe 6 specific bullets there. One is the growing and aging population, which inherently brings more chronic diseases like cancers and metabolic disorders into the health care environment with the associated, I would say, cost and efficiency pressures. We see a pretty high level of investment in health care, particularly now coming, of course, out of the pandemic where there was maybe in many, many countries that have not the infrastructure in place, a bit of a wake-up call to now really look very carefully at the infrastructure. And we see now also new modalities being developed in that continuum. We continue to see development and commercialization of more targeted drugs and medicines. Again, this means for us and our partners a higher requirement for testing. Because that notion of precision or personal medicine can only be executed once the patient is diagnosed in a much more deep profile with genomic, proteomic biomarkers and the associated data that allows the clinician to make best use of these medicines. We see -- and also from our side, an explosion of biological knowledge that is not just leveraged into the diagnostic and medical markets, but also into applied markets like food where we see, for example, sequencing, taking a pretty strong foothold in some of the development programs there. We see testing modalities, reaching the consumer. Of course, again, this was maybe even accelerated due to COVID, but we see and saw that before in kind of accessing now consumers with genetic profiling and maybe even more advancements even in the prevention space using data and information that allows patients to prevent and then change their lifestyle if they have predisposition. And lastly, a lot of what drives our world and our investments as Tecan is also the environment of digitalization and the ecosystem of technical solutions from central testing all the way to the patient. Now this, in aggregate, means we see more testing. We see more surgical procedures. We see more automation. We see more robotic and technology demand and all on the back end of advanced software solutions and connectivity solutions in these respective end markets. Now we, as a company, have been quite, I would say, significantly growing over the past periods. You can see here our sales development starting in 2013 to 2021. Now 2021 incorporates the Paramit acquisition as of August 1 of last year. But you see both from the revenue and top line development, but also from the profitability development, we are pretty proud about the progress that we are making. And of course, we are now taking this forward on a much broader footprint, both allowing us to significantly invest back into the business organically but also I think a very rich environment that we still see for M&A and inorganic expansion of the company. Now maybe just a couple of more examples on this kind of transition that we are seeing and Tecan's role being a chaperone and facilitate of the scaling of innovation from Life Sciences to the clinic and how the divisions actually synergistically work together. So as our Life Science division typically picks up innovation when it's quite early in the development, and we come with our automation solutions to scale them to either reach higher throughput or more compliance or traceability with our solutions, we then see also, of course, a bigger demand and we work with our OEM partners on the Partnering side that tell us where they want to be for oncology management, infectious disease management and many of the diseases before, leveraging the technologies that we have already grown up and scaled in our Life Sciences division. So this is where the proverbial developed lab-developed test space for us is a very important playground and learning ground to see which technologies have the critical, I would say, benefit to the health care environment and which may not make it. The examples are listed here. I mentioned before, areas like next-generation sequencing or advanced genomics, mass spectrometry in various forms, liquid biopsies as an upscale modality also requires quite significant preparatory processes and lab automation processes. And this, again, has been kind of a modality that has benefited greatly from the corporate restrictions where clinicians had to learn how to diagnose cancer patients far less invasive than just relying on tissue pathology. But there's a couple of other examples as well. So tissue pathology, we also believe still a space to grow into. But just for the sake of the argument I wanted to say, these are technologies we typically kind of get to low and scale up in our Life Science division and then bridge them over on the back end of modular systems and platforms that are prepared for the FDA journey into the FDA environment. Now very recently, actually just a few weeks ago, we launched a very exciting new product for us in that continuum of scaling innovation. And we are moving now even further upstream into the research environment with a product that we call MagicPrep NGS. Again, this is kind of probably the first real razor/razor blade system that we are commercializing, featuring Tecan, instrumentation, consumables and our proprietary reagents for this very important growth environment called next-generation sequencing. And with this push-button appliance, as we would call it, we make these workflows extremely easy to use now and addressing a market that is far upstream from the last scale automation that we have historically supplied into this very exciting market. But it's literally a 10-minute push a button and go system, which is unprecedented in this market environment. Again, just a showcase on how we kind of look at markets and identify market opportunities. And of course, it's early days, but we have very good hopes on these systems. Then maybe moving on to kind of our overall company development and scale up as a global provider of Life Sciences, diagnostics and medical solutions, we take sustainability very close to our heart and our strategic development programs. And you can see here the focus areas that we have called out and identified as most prominent for us in the environment of the environmental impact focus where we look at recycled materials and circular economy opportunities, particularly when we look at our consumables businesses, but also other products as well, where we are looking how to reduce the carbon footprint. I think historically, we had a very strong execution focus on governance. But of course, now becoming even more global, we take very diligent interest to make sure that particularly our supply chain is in good shape and compliant and then, of course, on the social impact focus and the area of culture. I think this is where I look back at Tecan, we have made tremendous progress so far. And I would dare to say that the execution that we've seen under COVID was a great testament to the maturity of Tecan culture globally. But of course, we are knowledging a very dynamic market environment, a very intense competition on the labor market. So we are not standing still, and we do everything that we can to expand our credibility as a great supplier and as a great company to work for and a great place to work for. Now I probably don't want to go into much details on the financial highlights of '21. As you have seen, it was a transformative year for Tecan. We continue to see both strong contribution from the COVID environment, particularly in the first half of last year. And then as of August, we incorporated in our financials, the Paramit acquisition, which led to kind of nearly 30% growth in local currencies, but organically, again, very strong year for us with around 14%, good expansion on the profitability. And yes, we continue to now, of course, work our way through 2022 with all the aspects that I mentioned before, and I will come to the guidance and the outlook just in a few moments. Maybe just to take one moment to decipher some of the discussions on how much was the COVID contribution and how do we kind of think about the continuation after clearly COVID isn't over. But on the infrastructure and instrumentation side, for us, COVID from a Tecan perspective was more or less already over in the H1 of 2021. So we try to guesstimate numbers. And this is -- with all due respect, a very deliberate expression. So we're really guesstimating here in what the contribution could have been and guesstimating because we are, of course, not a supplier of COVID-specific solutions. So one of the things that you need to keep in mind that what we commercialize or put out under COVID either directly or through our OEM partners are typically very versatile and modular solutions. So they had -- when COVID trailed off already last year, a very dynamic life, allowing users to use other modalities and other tests on the very same systems. So having said that, we try to quantify it, as you can see on the bars here, last year, around EUR 170 million of COVID still contribution, as I said, instruments more or less finished in the first half, and there was some level of pull-through that we also try to quantify with around 40% of that category that continued as consumables and spare parts and services that were kind of associated to these COVID instruments. Now this is, of course, a very, very good basis now to lead into the outlook. And of course, we very soberly took all the learnings from last year into consideration. And this is why we said we are in a very healthy and very dynamic environment. COVID has probably been a bit of a wake-up and transformative call to our end markets per se, where we see very strong and good pickup of demand in a variety of fields, including new clients in various geographies, but also, of course, now focusing back on the businesses that have been more subdued under COVID, which were, as I illustrated before, cancer diagnostics and many other fields of use for us that did not benefit from COVID. So clearly, we are looking at a kind of normalization here in 2022, where we said we intend to grow in the mid-teens percentage range. and coming in with an adjusted EBITDA at around 20% of sales. So as we are moving to 2022, we, of course, also wanted to give you a bit of an outlook how do we see the future. And again, this is maybe a reflection on the strength and the investments and the market trends that I mentioned earlier. I think we see very solid investments around the globe, including Asia going forward. And then we feel very confident that we, as a company, can contribute and outgrow the underlying market segments by quite a bit. And this is why we said we want to grow in the mid- to high single-digit percentage range and continue to, of course, now go back into the improvements on the bottom line as we go through this growth here. So with this, probably, I stop here and just by saying that we feel extremely well positioned for 2022 and beyond. And I think with the strength in innovation and a substantial range of partnerships around the world that continue to grow in the very diversified end markets that we're serving, we believe we have the right focus and the right capabilities. And I would argue also the best culture and team that is able and willing to go against these opportunities. So with this, probably, I stop here. And if there's any questions, more than happy to answer them.

I realize I'm on my [ gut ] so I'll just take it.

Okay.

All right. Thank you, Dr. Achim for that. It was great to hear the progress you guys made so far. We'll move on to the Q&A portion of the presentation. As a reminder, if you want to anonymously submit any questions, just scan the QR code on the table there. We do have a couple here to start off with. I think we could start with -- here we go. Valuations are down across the board. Has your appetite for additional tuck-ins change due to this? How do you think about capital deployment going forward, returning capital to shareholders, R&D, M&A...

No, I think clearly, the world is very dynamic. It's probably a little bit more dynamic than anyone could hope for the beginning of this year. But for us, that means, as I said earlier, we have a very strong pipeline in M&A options that we are very interested in. And particularly considering the progress we made with the Paramit integration so far, very pleased with the stability and the ability now to revert back some of our attention to M&A discussions, which are factually happening. And I think when I look at the world, we are quite broadly interested. But as you've seen in my slide, talking about the respective end markets and particularly our continued ambition to strengthen the profile on suitable consumables, reagents and what I would categorize as recurring revenue for the business. But maybe going forward, even with a bigger focus on our Life Sciences division continue to be, I think, very much on our forefront. And then we see great opportunities continue to go forward with. But on the other side, as you know, we are very sober and we qualify our target companies very, very, I'd say, much in light of our strategic ambitions and also the fit to Tecan overall, which I think we've demonstrated over the past years quite well. And yes, I think, as you said, the world is dynamic, and we continue to participate in this. And it's probably too early to say has anything substantially changed, I would say, market expectations or seller expectations are still quite high, but there may be a bit of a sobering up right now, particularly considering that the IPO market is drying up quite a bit. So let's see how this develops, but we have a very clear list of what we want. And we have traditionally also invested quite a bit to nurture and develop relationships with the target companies that we're interested in.

Great. Great. And actually staying on that kind of M&A track, you guys acquired Paramit, you said 9 months ago. You touched on it a bit, but is there any -- has it gone as anticipated? Any unforeseen synergies or costs that you guys actualize?

Yes. Well, I think, as I said, I think, very happy with the integration and maybe also a reflection on the fact that Paramit has been 30 years in business in regulated fields. So they know pretty much how to run such a company. And they've been adding quite a few companies every year and maybe some of it 3 to 5 new partnerships every year in their own profile, considering that they have been more or less focused only with a very, very small amount of people on North America as a commercial back end. So this is clearly what we're focusing on right now. I mean for us, Paramit is a growth acquisition. And nevertheless, we are very, very pleased to see that one of the bigger, I would say, cost synergy efforts that we made to transfer one of the -- the biggest plant that we have in California now into Paramit, which is literally just 30 minutes down the road, was a very logic -- I would say, leverage of the new capabilities that we have. And this business, which was a very, I would say, solidly growing part of our Partnering business franchise called Cavro Components, this growth business is now transferred as we speak already into Morgan Hill and most of the products will eventually end up out of Penang, Malaysia, which again, gives us a very good profile to play with. But the integration so far, I would say, is going very well, and then the reception of the teams have been very positive. So -- and maybe also what I said earlier, the statement on the FDA past order is a testament more to collaboration efforts than anything else. So no, I think so far, very happy with the integration, yes.

Great. Great. So it seems like they're going to be a part of growth going forward. Are there -- and you also said 2022 is going to be a normalization year. But I guess if we look farther out in the distance, what other key growth drivers are there going to be? And is the split 1/3 and 1/3 and 1/3 geographically good exchange going forward?

Yes. I think the kind of maybe starting off with the last part of your question, the kind of 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 and the geographical distribution serves kind of purposes or 2 directions. One is proximity to local clients, which particularly for us has been very important to gain into North America, which still is the largest health care market today. And we've seen great reception there. The other element of this is, of course, going forward, these kind of few, 3 operational hubs, I would call them, offer a very different opportunity to integrate future M&A companies into that we did not have before. But in -- I think in reflection on your first part of the question, we see the investments still very strong and continue to be very strong in the health care associated segment. This is why we are focusing on some of the underlying technologies and workflows that we have identified having the greatest potential to address some of the health care economics or overall kind of patient care questions that we identified as most robust and most invested in. So this is what we continue to call out. And then the last point I would probably mention is our continued focus also to expand not just in North America and Europe, but we have continued strong focus into Asia, which includes, obviously, Korea, Japan, but about China, which has grown quite a bit for us. And I think we have a good way forward in China as well with the duality of a direct product franchise and an OEM relationship business that we, I think, have seen continuously expanding in China in particular.

Yes. That's actually a good segue. So I guess to move more to macroeconomic, there's, I guess, COVID pressures in China, global supply chain issues and other various macroeconomic factors. Have you seen this be actualized in your business? And what actions have you guys taken to mitigate any negative headwinds?

Yes. I wish being a kind of a Swiss headquartered company, we would be immune or neutral and we would be able to leverage that on a global scale. Unfortunately, the reality is different. Now, of course, we are, as anyone else exposed to some of the kind of pressures on supply, on logistics and we don't believe that is getting actually better this year. So we are preparing for kind of full year of impact of inflation and logistics kind of challenges, particularly supply from electronic and ships as everyone else will talk about. But I think one element that is maybe to be considered is that also we have been growing extensively under COVID. And our procurement and operational teams had already been quite stressed in an environment that was unpredictable. And really, I think, tuning our supply chain, logistic routes. And you can probably assume also our view on inventories has changed a little bit to stay more on the safe side. So no, I'm just saying that to illustrate, I think we are taking necessary steps to prepare. And clearly, as you said, maybe China, some of the clock-up of ships in the harvest is not to be anticipated, but we have an increasingly good system that allows us to forecast and look into the future. And then at least in our reality, kind of mitigate some of the challenges by second sourcing or inventory management and anticipation of freight routes. And no, I think so far, we can manage. But of course, China, I mean that's maybe a discussion in its own right, what is happening right now there. But again, we do everything to support our teams there and as I said, particularly work with our suppliers and the freight forwarders to ensure that we need what we get. And maybe also just to put it in perspective, of course, we are not a household appliance company or a car manufacturer. So when we talk about electronics or chips, we talk about quite, I would say, digestible amounts of parts that we would need to continue our operations and grow.

No, that makes a lot of sense. I guess shifting focus here. We have a question on ESG. So ESG can sometimes have the reputation of being a nice to have? Can you provide some color on the benefits outside of "goodwill" that Tecan captures from having sustainability as part of its ethos?

Well, I think it's actually not an option. I mean, for us, as I said earlier, it's a conviction, and we take a very sober view on what makes sense in our business reality. And when I particularly look at the employee and the culture environment, I would argue with what we're seeing right now with turnover and access to labor, particularly when it comes to a growth profile company, that is something absolutely to be taken very seriously. And I think it would be absurd to claim that we could exclude certain groups or not consider diversity, equity and inclusion as a real core value and the strategic element. But also the other ones, like I said, governance for us as a globally growing company with even more presence now in Asia requires maybe a bit of a kind of additional strengthening of our efforts and processes there. And then lastly, also on the environment side. I mean with no, I would say, argue around is this climate change really, I think we want to do our bit. And we actually see very good pickup and reception from our customers who are increasingly also demanding proof that we are improving the carbon footprint of the company. And there's a supplier of differentiated instrumentation, but also consumables, that is a topic that we're taking very close to heart. And we believe even that offers some competitive advantages as we believe these kind of discussions will get stronger. So we want to be actually an innovation leader in some areas like packaging or recycled materials in some of our products. And we see that as an advantage rather than just a cost block...

Yes. No, I couldn't agree more. I think we kind of ran out of questions, but we have one to wrap it up a bit. It's kind of a catch-all softball question. What area of focus do you see as most relevant for investors when they look at the Tecan story? What are they missing? And what should they take away from today?

Well, I think everyone that invest in Tecan doesn't miss anything. So no, I think it is maybe the visibility that is sometimes lacking on what we do and can do from really translating these technologies from Life Sciences into the OEM space. Of course, in many cases, we cannot talk about OEM partners. Where we can, we advertise them. But we believe when we look at this framework, we have a very substantial impact on what is happening in cancer management, infectious disease management, either directly or indirectly. And this is where I think we continue to see a lot of growth opportunities for us. And that's why this duality is so critical. And yes, I can just say, yes, wherever we can talk about the story and the impact. And clearly, COVID was maybe a bit of a kind of marketing boost for us because we touched many, many tests worldwide, spanning from China all the way into North America as an automation and consumable provider. So I think that helps maybe kind of raising the visibility. But sometimes, like I said, this duality of being kind of a direct and an OEM supply doesn't help with kind of punchy communication, but rest assured, we are very proud on many things that we're doing in these areas.

Great. Well, I think that's it. Thank you for the time. It was great to hear the story.

Thank you very much.