Trajan Group Holdings Limited (TRJ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Trajan's Full Year Results Investor Webcast for FY '23, the period ending 30th of June of 2023. [Operator Instructions] Today's webinar will feature a presentation from Trajan's CEO and Managing Director, Mr. Stephen Tomisich and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Alister Hodges followed by a Q&A. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand over to Stephen Tomisich, CEO and Managing Director of Trajan.

Thank you, Amy, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for being on this morning's call. It's just over 2 years since Trajan went to IPO in 2021. And when we went to IPO, we said there were 3 key things we wanted to achieve. One was that we want to fund our M&A opportunities to really grow and add critical mass to the organization; 2, that we wanted to fund a program that would see us drive margin expansion with a series of initiatives; and 3, that we wanted to ensure that we were accelerating the commercialization of some of our new technologies. One of the things that you can see today when we report out our fiscal '23 results is that in each of those 3 areas, we've achieved some outstanding success. And I think that you too will be able to share with us the -- those achievements as we look at these results today. First of all, I want to start with this particular slide. And this slide has our 5 values across the top here. I do regular town hall sessions with our staff, both in person and virtually. And one of the key things in all of those presentations is to talk to the Trajan team about these 5 values. Why? Because it's the way that we want to behave. It's the way we want to operate. And these values provide us with guidance and direction every time we reach a decision point. Sometimes people ask me about the stickiness of some of our very large-scale global customers. And from time to time, we need to not only share with our global customers good news, but bad news, news about things that we weren't as good at as what we thought it may have been. And we use these values of respecting the customer and a baseline of integrity when we do that. Not long ago, one of the Senior Vice Presidents of one of our key customers, upon me sharing with them some news about a task that we didn't think we could quite achieve based on our core value of integrity, gave me the feedback and said, Stephen, that's why we work with Trajan because we know when you can do something, you will do it at best practice. And when you can't, you'll tell us. And that is the tangible value of us observing these values in the way that we operate. And I hope that you, as the investors in the business, partners in this business also experienced that we treat you in the same way. And if not, I would certainly like to know. We are definitely a globally expanding and scaling business, and we have been focused on these 4 key areas of clinical, pharmaceutical, environmental and food and the rolled analytical science and measurement plays in each of those sectors. An important thing to remember about Trajan is that we're a manufacturer and a product innovator, and we build IP into our business model in both of those activities. It's not just about the unique design and development of products that we bring to market, but it's also the way that we fabricate and manufacture those products on scale. When we look at our activity around the world, we can put our hands on our hearts today and say that we are delivering services products around the world that are making a difference to the environment, to the well-being of humanity where we play a role. The key things that we'll be talking about today, first of all, of course, going through the financial highlights, speaking about some of the operational highlights, looking at some of the trends. An important point here on this agenda is that we will talk a bit more about transparency of our performance that Trajan is made up of really 2 different business streams. And the results that we report out are always the consolidation of those 2 streams. And today, for the first time, we want to share with you more insight into those 2 parts that make up the business. We'll also speak to our positive outlook for fiscal '24 and a little bit about ESG, environmental, social, governance and the initiatives that we'll be starting in that area. So to the headlines. A great result of AUD 162.2 million in revenue, up by over 50% on the comparable period last year. Sometimes I'm asked how are the acquisitions going we've made over the first couple of years. And the point that I would make here is that if you look at that revenue growth and particularly if you look across and see that we're still achieving double-digit organic growth as well, there's no way we could achieve those results unless we were successfully integrating and developing and growing the companies that we've acquired along the way. We look at our normalized EBITDA up nearly 70%. And as I go through this presentation, what you'll start to be able to see is that the result was tracking even stronger than that. And we've intentionally put funding into some of the high-value disruptive technologies in fiscal '23, where we can see the voice of the customer telling us that we really are building and creating something of significant value. The gross margin performance has continued to expand in line with our expectations and probably no surprise that we have also been funding a reduction in our debt. And so when you look at that financial snapshot, we're very pleased with where we've landed and remain very confident about continuing to grow the Trajan business into fiscal '24. An important thing to remember about Trajan is the globalness of this business. The chart here shows you the breakup of our revenues by geography, and Australia is less than 5% of our total revenue, but perhaps also importantly, the growing presence of Trajan around the world. We have about 150 people now in Malaysia, 130 in the U.S., around 80 in the U.K. and Europe. And yes, we still have around 280 staff here in Melbourne, Australia. But it is that globalness, that diversity of markets that we address around the world and also the pathways to market that we use that underpins the resilience of this business and allows us to continue to confidently plan our pathway forward. We have really 3 key customer groups that we address. We are incredibly grateful and proud of the relationship we have with some of the original equipment manufacturers in this global industry. Those relationships are strongly collaborative. They are noncompetitive. And as we partner together, we're able to realize real impact and market share gain around the world. But we also are able to service 2 other key streams that take our products to market through component and consumable suppliers or distribution networks and also to some extent, our direct sales teams around the world. When we look at our business mix, a reminder again of the diversity of our business, over 8,000 products, over 1,000 different customers with a strong focus again on these 4 vertical markets. These markets are the ones that have an impact on human well-being and increasingly understand the analytical data as it relates to samples that come from those 4 sectors play a role in health. We've got 3 examples here today that we just want to highlight to help people get a more tangible grasp on the sort of things that we are doing. The first one here talks about a leading automated measurement system to detect the presence of carcinogenic contaminants in the global food chain. One of the regulations has been put in place in the EU is the need to detect some of the mineral oil contaminants that are entering the food chain. They are coming about because of not just agricultural equipment and lubricants used agricultural equipment at the sources of food, but also in production equipment as well. Being able to detect those contaminants is not an easy thing to do. But Trajan is now the world leader in the automated workflows in analytical labs that are used not only in research and in regulatory authority laboratories, but also now in the labs of some of the world's largest food suppliers to be able to detect, measure and report on the level of those contaminants. Also, the second point, if we look at where we have arrived at our HDX technology. Without question, we are the world leader now in this technology that allows scientists again, in research, but also in big pharma to be pursuing and understanding the structure and behavior of proteins in drug development and drug discovery. And the last one there, we are increasingly seeing real-world examples now of the deployment of our microsampling tools. In the U.S., now through one of our partners, consumers can purchase our microsampling devices to be able to detect the presence of organic toxic pollutants or forever chemicals in their bloodstream. Now there's an interesting example recently that I think really highlights how this future world could look when the individual is empowered with this sort of capability. We've been working with a key opinion leader in Europe. And he took a sample of his own blood with one of our microsampling devices. And a surprise to him was he found a relatively high value of PFAS or the [ per- and fluorinated ] components in his blood. He then tested his wife and his 2 sons, and he found that his wife and one of his sons also had high levels of PFAS in blood, but one son didn't have a presence at all. What was the difference? The difference was that 1 son was not eating the eggs from the hens that they kept in their own backyard, which led him to discover a level of contamination in soil in their own backyard that had resulted from a property nearby once upon time being used for training for firefighting activities. So an early detection made possible by utilizing microsampling tools. And it's just 1 example today, but it is a great example of how once we empower individuals to have a better understanding and knowledge of their own health and well-being, the preventative and personalized strategies can start to be deployed in a modern health care system. So from there, I'll hand over to Alister, who will talk you through some of the headline results from a financial point of view.

Thanks, Stephen. In the graph on the left, we can see the revenue and pro forma gross margin for the business over the last 3 years. FY '23 was another strong year, with AUD 162.2 million in revenue, the 43.2% pro forma gross margin. On the right, we can see the normalized EBITDA margin grew from 11.7% in FY 2022, 13% in FY 2023. Normalized EBITDA includes research and development costs. Research and development costs are expensed in full in the period in which they are incurred. During FY 2023, the business invested AUD 6.1 million in research and development, and this is an increase over the prior corresponding period of AUD 4.8 million invested in FY 2022. Also included in normalized EBITDA is the non-trading-related revaluation of the foreign exchange contract hedge book. During FY 2023, the revaluation was an expense of AUD 0.6 million. This was an increase over the prior corresponding period of AUD 0.1 million expensed in FY 2022. The impact of the revaluation of normalized EBITDA is visualized in the next slide. This slide shows normalized EBITDA for the last 4 reporting periods, including the half-year results for FY 2022 and FY 2023. The FY 2023 results on the left show a lower level of normalized EBITDA increment within the year, whilst on the right, excluding the impact of the revaluation of the foreign exchange contract hedge book shows the underlying trading-related normalized EBITDA profile. In the next slide, within the Analytical Products segment, second half revenues are lower than the first. This is the result of working capital management or inventory stocking by major OEM customers during the second half of FY 2023. This destocking activity is expected to be fully completed into the first half of FY 2024. The gross profit margin within the Analytical Products segment continues to increase. This increase is expected to continue into FY 2024 driven by organic growth and also the continued contribution of Project Neptune, which Stephen will speak about in a moment. Within the Life Science Solutions segment, we can see continued revenue growth driven by organic growth and the contribution from acquisitions. The gross profit margin within this business segment has also increased in FY 2023, albeit at a lesser rate than the Analytical Products segment. Thanks, Steve.

Thank you, Alister. I was asked throughout the year about whether we were going to revisit our guidance based on the widespread understanding and knowledge that there was some destocking happening in the industry. And we repeatedly said, no, we had no need to revisit our guidance. And hopefully now you can see why that even though we knew there was the softening on the analytical side, that the Life Science Solutions side of the business was running at north of 25% organic growth rate more than offsetting that softness that we saw on the analytical side of the equation. Speaking now about the margin expansion program, we can see that Project Neptune is staying to deliver real gains. You might have noticed in one of the slides earlier that we quoted the global headcount at 653. For those of you who are familiar with our half-year report out, you would have seen a global headcount of 689. That reduction in headcount is in no small part due to some of the gains that are starting to be made with Project Neptune. A walk around our production facility here in Ringwood, Melbourne, you'll see now a number of new robotic automation platforms that are starting to have impact in terms of output and delivering real tangible benefits. The continued transfer of operations into Malaysia has been successful. And overall, as this top line continues to grow at these relatively fast rates, we can see the fixed cost continuing to be diluted and contributing to that margin improvement. For a commentary on cash, back to you, Alister.

Thanks, Steve. So operating cash flow in FY 2023 grew driven by earnings growth. The investment in working capital included investment into inventory. This investment was to support the organic growth in the business, plus to support acquired businesses. Trajan believes it is important to support acquired businesses throughout the period of post-merger integration, ensuring they are not starved of working capital and able to maintain connectivity and grow relationships with customers. Capital expenditure increased in FY 2023, over '22, explained by investments in acquiring a warehouse at Axel Semrau in Germany, acquisition of HDExaminer, office consolidation in North Carolina and investments into Project Neptune automation. In FY 2024, the capital investment expenditure is being forecast at circa AUD 3.8 million before project-related activities. Thanks, Steve.

So this is a new slide we want to introduce at this report out to start to talk about the 2 parts of the Trajan business that usually is camouflaged in the consolidated results. Within Trajan, we've been running a number of disruptive almost start-up type businesses. And during fiscal '23, we could see that a number of those were increasingly of high value and merited increased investment driven by the voice of the customer that we were hearing in these areas. In particular, I'm talking about the emergence of our clinical pathology activity in our now medically certified laboratory, coupled with some of our microbiology or micro sampling type devices, including the micro biopsy device and our blood microsampling tools and separately to that, our Hummingbird miniaturized platform development. Now this is not the R&D that's in the core. Alister mentioned that we also invested AUD 6.1 million in R&D in the business in fiscal '23. The vast majority of that was in what we call the core business. The impact of the disruptive technologies here to the EBITDA line was around AUD 4.4 million. And yes, we could see that the business was tracking incredibly robustly during the year, and we made the intentional decision to fund more of the funding into these disruptive technologies because we really have built something here of significant value. What we want to start to do now is look at the way that we report on and the way that we structure the business to make sure that the sum of the parts here, the 2 key elements of the Trajan business are really understood and valued. You can see in the numbers that the accelerating growth and profitability of the core business is going in a very robust direction. And it is funding now these initiatives that in themselves are of significant value. So what we're going to see from us in the year ahead is to rethink not only how we report, but how we structure, how we fund these disruptive technologies and unlock the values very, very significant value that exists there for all shareholders. Going on to our guidance for next year that we are continuing to forecast robust organic growth. So when you look at the revenue line there, that is excluding any extraordinary activities like acquisitions and so forth and really saying that we continue to expect strong organic growth in the business despite some of the softening and continued adjustment of the supply chain on the analytical side. And to provide clarity, we've put here the EBITDA level of that core business and the rate of growth that we expect there, which also reflects ongoing margin expansion. Now you'll see us stop to use this normalization of the acceleration of commercialization costs in fiscal '24, which is something that we started at the IPO with the funds that were directed for those initiatives. With regards to ESG before I wrap up, this is our first, if you like, disclosure of our ESG activities. We are now starting to formalize our approach here and our starting point is really strong. And it's probably no surprise because the core of what we do every day is about doing good and delivering science to benefit people. But nonetheless, we're utilizing now a platform called Socialsuite and looking at the World Economic Forum criteria and starting to put in place now the base measurements as to how we'll track our progress with regards to these 4 pillars: prosperity, people, planet and governance. There is a number of areas that I would call low-hanging fruit when we contemplate the initiatives that we can execute, things like wastage, packaging, energy usage, water recycling and so forth. But we can also see there are some long-term challenges that are worthy of us thinking about as well. We embraced this methodology, this structure. We think that it will lead to benefits for the business and also will underpin our role as a responsible corporate citizen. Finally, to wrap up, to track back again, we just completed our 12th successive year of growth. The business continues to grow from strength to strength, and we continue to actively look at how we deploy funding to build value in the business, not just in the core and the financials that you see there, but also in some of these disruptive technologies that we have had long-term investments in that are now starting to see the light of day in terms of voice of customer creating a pull in the marketplace that we have the global infrastructure in place to support further scale and growth across an existing cost base. And we can say the same for the quality and experience of the management team that we have a business that will continue to grow, I think, at quite an accelerated rate and that we have a strong management team capable of running that larger-scale business into the future. And so with that, I'd like to wrap up today's presentation and thank everyone for being part of the call this morning. But I'd also like to pass along my special thanks to all the Trajan staff at all levels in the organization, whatever their role may be and wherever in the world they may be performing their contribution to the Trajan success story. It really is an honor and humbling at times to see the dedication, the energy, the effort that that team puts in every day. So with that, I'll stop and hand back over to you, Amy.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is, I have read in a couple of places Trajan has the second highest number behind CSL of collaborations. Could you provide an example of one of these and the benefits? I assume it leads to better sales.

Okay. Thanks, Amy. Yes, I think that refers to an article that was in the Australian newspaper earlier in the year. And we too were quite surprised when we saw that article to see that the #1 -- in terms of published papers, the #1 industry partner was CSL and #3 was BHP and there, we were a little Trajan at #2. And that's because of the widespread activities we've had in collaboration with the university sector in Australia, but also in other parts of the world. Some examples. If you look at some of the growth that we just reported on fiscal '23 one of the key product areas imitative to mass spectrometry. And the early work that we did with some of the photonics organizations around the world were collaborative and resulted in some of those papers. If I give a second example, the Hummingbird platform that we have increased our investment in now was also the result of a number of collaborative activities with Australian universities. There is a deep, if you like, bank of IP that Trajan now has through many of these activities. Not all of them will be commercial, but certainly a number of them are of high value that is starting to be realized now and will be realized into the future.

Could you please provide management's strategy to deliver EPS growth and close the recoupling between EBITDA growth and EPS growth?

Okay. Yes. That's a really good question. I'll give you my first pass. Alister may want to build on that. If we look at that gap, one of the first areas has to be about our interest rate servicing and our debt levels. If you look at the relative impact of our interest rates or payments around [ AUD 4 million ] in fiscal '23, which, of course, is not just a traditional interest rate cost, but also our approach to accounting practices and the lease costs of various assets that we utilize in the business, that's one area that can be addressed. But of course, we've had significant investment that leads to depreciation costs and some of the amortization costs as well. Our global [ approach ] to taxation, of course, [ is not ] an area that should be looked at and optimize. But the ultimate answer to all of that review is growing the top line because as we continue to grow the top line and deliver increased profitability, the relative importance of those factors I just mentioned and the gap they create between EPS and the reported EBITDA will continue to be reduced. Alister, I don't know if you wanted to add to that.

No, I think that's a good summation, Steve. I just think that your last point, that was the most important about growing earnings, which effectively does the impact of the other elements, which you just outlined. So nothing [indiscernible].

How do you manage the large number of products acquired?

The way that we're structured within Trajan is by business units. Each of those business units has a general manager and a P&L responsibility. And so they're able to be quite focused in the way they look at their portfolios. When we acquire businesses, we look at the acquired portfolio and we then funnel that -- those product groups into those business units. And so that provides a really strong and focused structure to be able to look at product line rationalization, future product road maps and so forth by area of specialty.

Trajan has been listed for 2 years. Over that time, what has changed in the markets Trajan services, particularly the mix revolution and post-COVID? How has the Trajan strategy adapted to the changes and what opportunities are achievable in the near term?

Okay. So another good question. Well, a lot has changed since mid-2021. Of course, so much of the change has been triggered by the pandemic and so many of the changes that the world has experienced. I think certainly, the volatility in the supply chains around the world changed a lot of things and continues to change things, but in a far reduced way now. We've seen inventory movements, supply shortages and so forth. And I think as a business, we've come through all of that quite robustly. But I think the other thing that has changed that presents an opportunity for Trajan is the openness, the willingness for the world to explore new and different ways of doing things. Look at the extent of personal testing, home testing that came about because of COVID. And so now when we start to talk about things like the progress we're making in our clinical lipidomics workflow solutions in partnership with the Baker Institute and where and how that might lead to a better stratification of an individual's risk of a cardiovascular event, we're having those conversations now with a broad range of stakeholders, from GPs to heart foundation to clinicians and the conversation is real. I think if we went back 3 or 4 years ago, these sorts of conversations were a little bit, if you like, far off or far reaching by nature. Whereas now the conversations are very much about how do we execute, how do we implement, how do we do that quickly and do it on scale. Hence, some of the increased and accelerated investment we made this year in specifically in some of those areas.

What does underlying organic revenue growth look like if we strip out FX and price rises?

So with FX stripped out, we still -- we're remaining at an underlying organic growth rate of around 8.6%. And price rises contributed some portion of that, let's say, roughly perhaps half of that. But remember, within there, we saw the analytical side of the business relatively flat, not because demand has gone away because that the supply chain went through a destocking activity in the second half of the year. And I've been in this industry for about 35 years, and I've seen this cycle play out before. And the underlying demand, the underlying usage of those analytical consumables doesn't go away. And what we can expect to happen is that when we see the final stages of that stocking activity play out, which I think we'll see in the first quarter or so of this fiscal year, that the underlying demand will emerge through again, and we would expect to see it track back to its historical organic growth rate.

We saw good EBITDA margin improvement. Is that [ spread from ] more synergies from the acquisitions? Where do we get more leverage and scale from here?

Yes. I think we're just at the early stages of realizing the benefits, EBITDA benefit of the acquisitions. And almost in the order of which they were acquired, we can see that the Axel Semrau team in Germany made a very strong contribution to this year's results, but they were the first ones that we acquired post IPO. The most recent acquisition, CRS, that was done about a year ago, has wedded in really nicely. Integration from ERP point of view is strongly underway. And we've realized a little bit of synergy, but I expect we'll realize significant more synergies as we go down the path. So we still have with some confidence in our medium-term goal to see this business track towards gross margins of 50% and to see EBITDA margins approaching the high teens, low 20s. And again, I would refer people back to that slide, just break out the investment in those disruptive technologies in fiscal '23, and you can quickly see the realization of the percent EBITDA margin of the core business already.

When do you expect disruptive tech to generate significant revenues?

I would expect that we will start to see some of that in fiscal '24 and to see it accelerate in fiscal '25. We went through a process early in fiscal '23 at looking at our various disruptive R&D activities. We had the leaders of those activities put together business cases including revenue projections. And based on those projections, our modeling around return on investment, that's why we and with the support of the Board, accelerated investment in these key areas that relate to the clinical activity around microsampling coupling into automated clinical pathology workflows and the Hummingbird platform. And so hopefully, that gives people confidence that we think we're emerging from the era of some of those technologies being way off to having increased confidence that in the medium term, we will start to see some real benefit being delivered. And perhaps another reason why we want to review the structure, the funding, the way we report those activities compared to the core of the Trajan business that's been the sole source of some of that funding thus far.

Alister, Stephen, could you please talk to the AUD 3.1 million amortization expense?

I will leave that one with you, Alister.

AUD 3.1 million, it's mainly explained by the 3 acquisitions. We acquired [ the amount of ] goodwill, but also identified intangible assets. So those start to be amortized over the useful lives. So that's why the amortization of those intangible assets has picked up in the financial statements in '23 over '22.

Could you, please, describe how the increasing use of AI technologies by customers within the industries you operate will benefit you?

Okay. Thank you for that question. The first example I've mentioned a few times, I think, is the work that's been done by the Baker Institute, where they looked at the data from a large cohort of patients as it related to their cardiovascular health. We're able to develop algorithms based on the presence of around 700 different lipid species in blood and from that, be developing a model that becomes more predictive around the risk of a cardiovascular event. So as we develop our automated workflows, the quality of the data that we are generating then feeds into those models. And this is one of the reasons why the long-term Trajan strategy has been to look at the design and the development of all those physical tools right into the most simple of tools like nanobore tubing and connections and fittings and so forth that can all have an impact on the quality and the certainty of the data because now as you start to feed that data into algorithms like the one being utilized by the Baker model, it can have a significant impact on the quality of the information that is generated thereafter. If we look at other areas, for example, everyone knows we have a small investment in the U.K. group Humankind Ventures. One of the models that they have introduced has been looking at a predictive model around changes in hormone levels in premenopausal women. Again, a valuable predictive tool based on utilizing AI or machine learning across a broad suite of data inputs. And so this is the way that we can now start to see the Trajan model playing out that different areas of expertise, different groups that have areas of specialization are developing different types of models that then requires good quality data, analytical data to feed into them. If I can then step back for a moment and think about AI more broadly, we've created recently a role within the organization reporting to me to start to ask the question more broadly, where can AI play a role not just in the products or services we deliver to customers, but in the way that we run and conduct our business. And so I think that too is going to be an interesting pursuit to see what we learn and what improvements can be made utilizing that activity.

Are you still actively looking for M&A opportunities? And how do you balance that with the current debt position?

We still have a number of opportunities that are in our M&A pipeline. And I am asked the question often now, well, how do you balance that with the current debt position. And what I would refer to is that of the 12 acquisitions Trajan has made over the last 12 years, 7 of those were done before we went to IPO. And the way we approached them pre-IPO was very careful management of debt position and without any dilution, of course, happening at all. And that came about because of the way we looked at those transactions, the way we structured them and so on. And so when we're looking at opportunities that are in front of us right now, we have a range of tools, experiences to utilize in how best to attack those opportunities and how best to structure arrangements that minimize any impact on debt levels and certainly with an underlying intent to not look at any further dilution.

Could you please flesh out what the funding or change in structure for disruptive technologies may entail?

Everything is on the table, if I can put it that way. I want to flag that to the investment community that we have created now inside of Trajan these assets that we believe are of significant value, and we don't want them to be starved for capital going forward. And so we're open to looking at a range of potential ways we might go about that. We have certainly not firmed up at this point what that might look like, but we are determined now to ensure that the full value of what Trajan has created is realized here. I think it's really important that we unpack those parts of the Trajan business and that investors can have good insight into the contribution being made by both parts of the business.

Thanks, Stephen. There are no further questions. So this brings us to the conclusion of the Q&A session and to Trajan's full year results investor webcast for FY '23. Thank you all for joining us this morning. I'll hand back to you, Stephen, for final remarks.

Again, I'd like to just thank everybody for being on the call this morning. Really appreciate the questions, and we look forward to talking to you all again very, very soon. Thank you.