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

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Trajan's Half-Year Results Investor Webinar for H1 FY '26, the period ending the 31st of December 2025. [Operator Instructions] And 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 session. [Operator Instructions] Please note we will hold all questions until the conclusion of the presentation. I would now like to hand over to Stephen Tomisich, CEO and Managing Director of Trajan.

Thank you, Marie, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the report out of Trajan's H1 results for fiscal '26. A few headlines to take away from today when we go through the presentation. First of all, that you'll find that we will yet again reconfirm our guidance for fiscal '26 results. And that in itself means that we are still projecting that this will be another record year for Trajan in terms of our group revenue. You'll hear us also talk about the contrast between the first 2 quarters of that first half, and why the strength in the second quarter gives us confidence about the full year projection. But you'll also see how in that first quarter, there was a number of factors, including decisions made by ourselves in the best long-term interest of the business, regardless of the short-term optics. Things like we decided that we had to invest in creating in-region, for-region capabilities to deal with the tariff volatility and tariff volatility in the world. And that will stand by us in the long term. Another investment you'll see that we made was to increase our inventory levels to ensure that we improved our delivery performance to our customers, particularly in consumables. And so those actions took place, and some of those impacted our quarter 1 outcome. But overall, the business continues on a very positive trajectory. So let's get into some of the detail here. First of all, as a reminder, Trajan started as a business that was determined to see science translate into benefits for society. One of the key themes behind our activities has always been that we envision a world that ultimately is heading towards personalized, preventative, data-based healthcare. And we realized early on to achieve our goals, in other words, to play a meaningful role in that emerging world, there was a suite of technologies and activities we would need to participate in. And today, they are broken up really into the segments of the business that we report out, components and consumables, our capital equipment group and our emerging disruptive technologies. If I look at the trajectory and where we're tracking, things like components and consumables, we have had a mature but also very robust revenue flow from our consumables over our nearly 15-year history here as an organization. But really from an exciting perspective, what I see now is emerging new consumables that relate and are aligned with our visions, things like our emittives for mass spectrometry, our precision tubing that's being embedded in some of these new mass spectrometry systems, our plasma-coated well plates that are providing glass-like services to plastic consumables that is enhancing sensitivity and driving laboratory productivity. So these things are playing out in our consumables portfolio. We invested in capital equipment because we knew in order to see adoption of some of our technologies, we needed to provide complete workflows to laboratories. And I was very pleased recently to be in Boston and to see at an exhibition Trajan for the first time, demonstrating complete automated laboratory workflows starting with our disruptive blood microsampling tools, using our consumables and delivering an automated preparation of the sample introduction into a mass spectrometer. That is unique. There are other companies in the world that are involved in things like micro sampling, but typically one technology, typically venture capital-backed. Trajan is the only organization now in the world that has a developing and expanding range of microsampling tools that is a publicly listed entity that is also has the ability to develop and deliver completely automated laboratory workflows. And in our disruptive technologies that include some of those microsampling tools, I'm also pleased to report that our portable miniaturized technology is also gaining traction in terms of the feedback from key customer sets. So they are our 3 key reportable segments. They marry, and they work together to deliver us towards our vision, driving our strategy. Now one of the things I wanted to talk about today was the first half, but in terms of the 2 quarters of that first half, quarter 1 being the January through to September period and then quarter 2 being October through to December. And it's a little bit unusual for us to do this, but I felt it was necessary to understand the contrast between those 2 quarters and why it gives us confidence as we head into the second half. In that first quarter, we saw a slowdown in orders coming in for our capital equipment business. And you will recall that when we had our AGM in October, we reported that the revenue for capital equipment was down circa 20%. So it was a very tough quarter for capital equipment. At the same time, we were subject to some timing gaps in terms of being liable to pay tariffs on product that was being imported into the U.S. before we could recover those tariffs from ongoing charges to our customers in the U.S. So that created a bit of a headwind there as well. But we also made the strategic decision to invest in region for region capability. What does that mean? It means that we up-scaled some of our U.S.-based activities for our U.S. customers. It also meant that to deal with retaliatory tariffs out of countries like China, we quickly established manufacturing capability in our Penang facility for a range of products that were also being made in the U.S. That involved the development of infrastructure, involved the deployment of resource. It involves shipping around the world of both materials, product and production capability. And all of that was then charged into our COGS. So when you look at some of those margins, be mindful that we made the conscious decision that we were going to make that investment for the long-term stability and benefit of the business, even if it impacted the short-term optics. We came out of that first quarter, and at the AGM, we reconfirmed guidance. We asked ourselves, do we believe now that we can achieve the full year guidance effectively in the remaining 3 quarters? And the answer then was yes. When we completed our second quarter, what we saw was a record quarter, over $45 million in revenue. And even though we achieved that revenue result at the same time in that first half, we then saw the capital equipment order book. In other words, orders that we had in hand that will result in shipments and revenue realization in the second half, it grew by $2.8 million to a high of nearly $11 million by the time we hit January. When we look across the industry, we can see that the public report outs by some of our industry peers, particularly in the U.S., because remember, we are essentially a U.S.-centric business, and our peers and our customers tend to be U.S.-centric as well. And when we look at some of the report outs and the actions that are happening there, what we observe are aligned with the observations that we have ourselves in terms of the return to growth and some of the market segment that has been happening. So margin and guidance as we go into this second half. First of all, many of you may have heard about Project Neptune. So Project Neptune has been dominantly about how do we locate some of our more labor-intensive processes into our Penang facility, but also about how do we drive productivity in other locations through automation. Now the way we realize benefit from Project Neptune isn't so much in those enabling first steps it's always about the second step, which is then how do you reduce the costs that you were carrying previously. One of the things that we have deliberately done has been to be quite conservative in how we realize those cost savings. We've spoken often about Trajan's approach to M&A. And rightly or wrongly, our approach has been that we always focus, first of all, on how do you realize the top-line synergies, how do you realize the growth synergies. And the fact that we remain on such a strong growth trajectory, and again, we will achieve record revenues this year, is testimony to that part of that strategy. And then afterwards, we look at where will we realize the savings through those synergies that should be realized. And we do that in a very conservative way, again, to make sure that we're making the best decisions for the long-term benefit of the business, and we don't put the business at risk. But I can share with you that as we entered into the November, December period, we were ready now for that pivot. And so we have started to accelerate the cost reductions in those areas where we should have realized the benefit from Project Neptune. And those savings will now start to flow into the second half, and they will continue to grow in the second half as well. We had some production site inefficiencies, and into costs or into site costs, I should say, in establishing that in-region for-region capability, but most of that work has now been completed successfully. Another area where we will continue to realize margin benefits is as we wean ourselves off some purchased product that we use as components or materials that go into some of the Trajan products. And we're expecting some of that to start to accelerate in the second half as well. And that's a sizable cost that the business has continued to bear. But when we make those changes, we want to make sure that in doing so, there's no detrimental impact to the analytical performance of our product and no detrimental impact to our customers. So we expect to realize these benefits as we go into the second half. And coupled with that, as per our normal annual practice, we expect to see from January 1, the impact of further pricing actions that were put through. And as I mentioned at the opening, we again confirm our guidance of in excess of $170 million for revenue and in excess of $16 million in normalized EBITDA. That is the guidance that we provided in August. It's the guidance that we provided at our AGM in October. It's the guidance that we confirmed 3 weeks ago when we provided a trading update. That has been consistent throughout this financial year. When I look at the environment going ahead, there are some headwinds. Everybody knows who watches the news, there is a lot of macroeconomic uncertainty and volatility. The tariffs, they do drive volatility, uncertainty in our customer base. One of the strengths of Trajan is our globalness. We are everywhere. We service a global market. We have production operations in the U.S., in Asia, in Germany, in Australia. And that strength stands by us in terms of resilience and be able to deal with some of that volatility. But perhaps one of the weaknesses is the same thing in that we're also exposed to that volatility everywhere that we go. We did see some movement in availability of government funding in the U.S. We reported out some of our concerns earlier in the year in terms of the funding flowing through to U.S. government agencies such as the CDC and the NIH. But there seems to be some progression in the release of those funding programs that ultimately stand behind some of the purchases of our products. I mentioned there are also geopolitical unrest. And in some ways, this relates to the Ukraine situation and our food-related business. When I speak to our food customers, and these are large corporations like Cargill and Nestle and so forth, who have operations around the world. One of the things that comes through that might not be evident to all of us every day of the week is countries like Russia and the Ukraine, that's #1, #2 in terms of sunflower production. And sunflower oil finds its way into the food chain, into the production activities of many of our customers. And the costs, the uncertainties around that, coupled with many other things that geopolitical scenario, it does impact the behavior of some of our customers. We've also seen the volatile currencies. And while we are well hedged in terms of the rates that we convert U.S. dollars back to Australian dollars, remember, 70% or so of our income is determined in U.S. dollars, and we still have a significant cost base in Australia that we need to service with that income. We still have hedging contracts well below $0.70 that go out until the end of this calendar year. So we've always had a policy of ensuring certainty around those conversion rates. But nonetheless, we're not immune from that volatility. It impacts things like how our offshore assets are revalued. So if we look at things like our debtors offshore that are determined in U.S. dollars, as the Aussie dollar increases, then the Aussie dollar value of some of those assets decreases. So that plays out even in our normalized EBITDA results. And you would have seen when we reported out compared to the prior period, that's a negative impact of $1.3 million that's embedded in this half-year result. Some of the tailwinds, we can see the return to growth in pharma. We've seen a strong resurgence in the capital equipment from our food customers. I've mentioned the government funding. There is momentum picking up again in our components and consumables business. And we really have reached this pivot point with regards to Project Neptune, of saying it's time now to take these next steps around the cost reductions that are enabled through Project Neptune. I should say, as we think about that and look ahead towards margin reductions, there will be more of these sorts of changes ahead. One of the things that will put a cap on to what extent we can realize margin expansion is our indirect costs. When I look at our direct costs, our variable costs of making our products, I can see the trend in a positive direction. But now it's going to come down to that global footprint, the indirect costs, our occupancy costs and all those things that are still being loaded into COGS. Remember, we're a business that was constructed through 12 acquisitions so far. And what comes along with those acquisitions, if I can refer to it this way, is a bit of baggage in terms of underutilized infrastructure and so forth. And those changes and benefits, they all still lie ahead of us as well. I wanted to provide this bridge. And again, it's a bit of an unusual thing for us to do in terms of our half-year report out. But I'm sure anyone who looks at the consolidated H1 result and then sees our reconfirmation of guidance for the full year, the obvious question is, well, how do you get from that H1 result to the full year result? And from inside the business, what we see is that the launching pad for H2 is actually the trajectory and the momentum that's been built up since October in the Q2 activity, which continues on. So when we simply take the Q2 run rate and downsize it a little bit for what we're projecting for the revenue in the second half, that delivers around $8.6 million in H2. When I look at the cost savings that are already in place that will play out in H2 related to those Project Neptune reductions, that will add around another $0.8 million. When I look at the impact of the pricing that was implemented on January 1, another $1.3 million. And if I simply look at the cessation of some of the sourced component materials that will play out in Q4 this year, that adds another $0.3 million. And so my intention wasn't necessarily to land at exactly $16.0 million here, but rather to help the audience appreciate the way that we're viewing this bridge that we're coming off the back of that Q2, going into the second half, reduced cost structure, momentum in sales, strong order book. And so that continues to give us confidence with where we expect to land for the full year. So that's my introduction seeing the scene and giving you an overview of how the business is feeling and tracking from within. I'm now going to hand over to Alister Hodges, our Chief Financial Officer, and he'll step you through some of the key metrics for that first half. Over to you, Alister.

Thanks, Steve. So the first half group revenue of $84.1 million was up 3.8% over the prior comparative period. And after a slow start, which Stephen suggested in Q1, further growth is expected in the second half, guiding to group revenue of $88.5 million in the second half and full year revenue guidance of $172.6 million, resulting from the challenging trading conditions in Q1 across both the Components and Consumables and the Capital Equipment segments, group pro forma gross margin decreased by 2.3 points or $0.7 million in the half. The pro forma gross margin in the Capital Equipment segment decreased by $0.5 million, and that was actually offset by an uplift of the same amount in the Disruptive Technology segment. When looking at the Components and Consumables segment, pro forma gross margin decreased by about $0.7 million, and that was inclusive of 2 things that Stephen has touched on, which is the establishment of the in-region for-region capabilities and freight costs, and also the net tariff recovery timing differences. While the group experienced improved business momentum in the second quarter, the first half group normalized EBITDA of $5 million was lower than expectations and prior comparative period by $2.9 million. In addition to the lower pro forma gross margin of $0.7 million compared to the prior comparative period, the group also recognized $1.3 million expense difference from the revaluation of the net trading assets resulting from changes in exchange rates. And Stephen touched on debtors as an example of that. There's also been a net increase in G&A costs of $0.8 million compared to the prior comparative period. Supported by the Q2 run rate, the group normalized EBITDA is guided to increase in the second half to $16 million for the full year. Let's take a more detailed look at the operating segment performance and cash flow. So moving to the Components and Consumables segment. The net revenue increased by 6.1% or $3 million to $51.9 million, up over the prior comparative period at $48.9 million. Customer connectivity remains strong with the 2 largest product groupings in the Components and Consumables segment growing by 9% over prior comparative period. The remaining product groupings' growth performance was a little bit mixed, ranging from 17.5% to the low single-digit rates. Pro forma gross profit margin decreased by $0.7 million to 37.5% or 3.7 points, and expenses, which mainly impacted the segment related to the investment of in-region and region capabilities, which we've touched on, and increased freight costs were $0.4 million. Additionally, the U.S. tariff recovery timing differences, which also mainly impacted this segment were also about $0.4 million. Normalized EBITDA decreased by $1.1 million to $15.2 million in the half, down 6.3%. In addition to the gross margin decrease of $0.7 million, there was also a $0.4 million net increase in expenses attributable to reductions in G&M costs, offset by an increase in employee expenses driven by inflationary and headcount movements. If we look at the Capital Equipment segment, we can see that net revenue in this segment of $29.1 million is down 2.7% or $0.8 million on the prior comparative period. The net revenue decrease is reflective of market conditions in Q1, which Stephen touched on, albeit market customer activity, especially in the EU, is picking up. EU regulatory changes also offer future potential growth opportunities through more stringent olive oil quality monitoring, for example. Expectations for the second half and FY '26 results are buoyed by an increase in the order book of $2.8 million in the first half, finishing at $10.8 million, going to the second half. Pro forma gross margin was 35.3%, a decrease of less than 1% over the prior comparative period or $0.5 million in dollar terms. The lower revenue in the half, particularly in the U.S., which generates a high pro forma gross profit margin, continued -- explained part of the decrease. And also in this segment, sales channel mix, operational efficiencies, expanded product offering, and areas of focus for gross margin expansion in the future. Normalized EBITDA of $4.8 million is down $0.8 million or 14.3%, and this decrease is driven by inflationary cost increases within G&M of $0.3 million in addition to the gross margin decrease of 0.5%, which I already spoke about. If we move forward to the Disruptive Technologies segment. The activity in this segment is inclusive of really 2 things: microsampling commercialization activities, where there remains continuing focus of the team, and generating repeat business from customers, and also continuing investment in the Bversity system, which is expected to be $1.1 million for the full year. Installed systems at sites in the U.S. and Australia are providing really valuable user feedback from customers. Revenue was up for the half by 40.2% to $3.1 million over $2.2 million in the prior comparative period, which is really encouraging. Sales of microsampling tools generated pro forma gross profit margin of 70%, and that was offset in the half by lower margins on the other early-stage technology commercialization activities, such as Hypera, for example. If we now turn to the cash flow summary. We can have a look here at lower normalized EBITDA for the half resulted in lower drop-through normalized operating and free cash flow. Overall increase in investment in working capital of $3 million includes 2 things: a decrease in operating assets, including a reduction in trade receivables, offset by a decrease in operating liabilities, including a reduction in payables. Within the first half FY '26, investment in inventory across both the Components and Consumables and Capital Equipment segments actually peaked in Q2 at $33.4 million and then reduced down to December at $30 million. And this decrease is expected to convert to cash in Q3. The investment in inventory was to improve customer responsiveness, particularly in the Components and Consumables segment during the seasonal end of calendar year. Trajan did tap into available debt facilities in the first half to help fund the inventory build peak in Q2. And as a result, net debt did increase by $2.7 million during the half to $32.2 million. Thanks, Stephen.

Thanks, Alister. And just to wrap up, a reminder about some of the key fundamentals of the Trajan business. Our global customer base remains intact. We continue to play a role across the industry with our global footprint, and the diversification of our business across our customer groups, across geographies, segments, and application areas is what contributes to that underlying resilience of the Trajan business that allows us to see through some of these times of volatile market conditions. It was our flexible footprint, really, and some of that underutilization that allowed us to pivot so quickly and develop that in-region for-region capability. As mentioned before, it's the trajectory coming off the back of Q2 that gives us some confidence in terms of what we expect to happen in the second half. And we have a team here that is fully committed to this business. I don't often talk about it, but many people may not realize that our nonexecutive directors, our Board members, since IPO, they receive half of their compensation in Trajan share options. And myself these days, I am still, of course, a majority shareholder, but I am spending more than half of my time outside of Australia, working with our customers, our field staff, our field offices. And one of the things I constantly do is ask myself the question, are we still on track? If I test our strategy, if I continue to probe into the logic of our long-term view of the role of analytical science and, importantly, our role within that realm as it relates to the future of preventative and personalized database health care, is it right? Or is it not right? And what I continue to conclude is that it is right, that there continues to be signs of validation around our strategy, the role we play, and the long-term direction of the industry and the role we play within it. So all of us here at Trajan continue to thank you for your support and involvement in the organization. I continue to be amazed by the Trajan team, particularly up-and-coming younger members of the team that I've had the benefit of spending some more time with over recent months. It's really an impressive group of people. And we look forward to reporting out our results when we get to the full year. But I'll hand back to you now, Marie, and see if there's any questions that the audience has.

Thank you, Stephen and Alister. And I'd now like to open up for questions. [Operator Instructions]. And we'll start with one of the pre-submitted questions that we had, and this is around guidance. And the question is, what is your confidence in H2 guidance or forecast and guidance? Given macroeconomic volatility in the Q1 result, how confident are you in Trajan's ability to meet FY '26 guidance?

Okay. Thank you, Marie. What I was attempting to do in the presentation was establish our activity and our results in that second quarter as the basis for developing our guidance for the full year and the expected performance in the second half. As we sit here today, we remain confident in achieving that outcome, but it is not without risk. It is a volatile environment. The currency volatility could very well impact that in ways that we can't plan for or predict. And of course, some of the other factors affecting the global macroeconomic setting, I can't predict either, and I guess many people are able to do that. But all things being normal and no humps ahead, when I look at our order book, so what determines the outcome in capital equipment is really what's the scale of your order book that you're going to build and then convert to revenue in the half. That looks healthy. I constantly track the monthly demand across all the product families in consumables, that looks healthy. So based on all the data inputs that I can tap into the on-the-ground feedback that I get by spending so much of my time now in the marketplace, all those things come together to give me around the confidence in what we're projecting for the full year.

Thank you, Stephen. And the next question is around receivables. And the question is, receivables decreased by $2.8 million. Could you please explain this further?

I'll hand that one over to you, Alister.

Thanks. Receivables decreased during the period was in relation to collection and also timing difference of receipts from our capital equipment customers who pay in larger amounts. So those larger amounts can impact the balance.

I just would also add to that, that if we look back to our capital equipment revenue last financial year, there was a strong month there that meant we ended with a relatively high receivables for capital equipment, as I recall. And therefore, in comparison, you would have seen that reduction.

Thank you. And the next question is around the bridge, and it has the pricing action included in the bridge already been implemented?

Yes. It's the simple and straightforward answer to that question as of January 1. Now one thing to keep mindful of is that while we implement pricing at a certain date, there is already orders in hand that get serviced at the prior pricing levels. And so realizing the benefit of those pricing actions tends to bleed into the margins in the subsequent months. So you start to see it emerge in February, and then you would expect to see it even more so in March, and then into Q4.

Thank you, Stephen. And the next one is around tariffs. How do you envisage the uncertain tariff landscape with the U.S.A. impacting? And to what extent does the in-region for region strategy mitigate this?

The tariff volatility, I think everybody can observe on the news how unpredictable that is -- and that's why that we felt the best protection we could provide the business was to enable ourselves to have different countries of origin across single product families as required. When I meet with senior people in the industry, I can also observe that they, too, have adopted a similar strategy. What does that mean? It means that there's a little bit of cost in doing that because prior to trying to protect the business to tariff volatility through implementing this sort of strategy, we and many other businesses were driven by globalization. How do you create global centers of excellence where you do something extremely well, and that's the only place you do it. The moment, the pivot is to polarization. -- how do you do things both in the U.S. and outside the U.S. to be able to service the global markets in ways that minimize your exposure. And I'm actually pretty impressed and pleased with the way that we were able to build new infrastructure in our Austin, Texas facility and handle some of the activity that was in Australia and equally how we were able to build capability in our Penang facility that is now servicing some of our China-based customers that previously we would have exported out of the U.S. And so as a global business with manufacturing on both sides of the border, in-region for-region is the right strategy to minimize or to shelter us from future volatility in the best way that we know how.

Thanks, Stephen. And the next one is around Project Neptune. Why did you experience delays in Project Neptune improvements in H1? And what makes you think that these will be overcome in H2?

The strategy we've always adopted in making these sorts of changes is on the constructive side, in other words, building new capability, implementing it, do that as quickly as we can. So Neptune involved building new structures in our Malaysian facility, for example, that's now doubled in size. Add the staff and the resource to prove that, that's up and running. We've done that. In terms of the automation capability here in Melbourne, invest in and accelerate the delivery of that capability on the shop floor. And earlier this week, I was fortunate to tour the latest rollout of some of that equipment here in Melbourne, and it is a really impressive achievement that the engineering team has achieved. So that's the first part of the equation. The second part of the equation is how do you realize the benefit from that? And realizing the benefit is about releasing resource, closing down legacy-type operations. And I will again say, rightly or wrongly, our strategy has always been to do that in the least risk way. In other words, to step through that methodically, slowly and only do that when we're confident that it won't disrupt supply to customers, quality of product, and our operations. And so that's -- when I talk about it being slower than expected, some of those things I would have liked to have happened quicker, but we were not willing to make them happen quicker at the risk of any disruption to supply. Why am I confident as we go into H2? Because many of those actions were carried out in November and December, and we're continuing to see the reduction in that cost base as we go into H2. So a lot of that work is now behind us and already done as we go into the second half.

Thank you, Stephen, and thank you, Alister. And we have no further questions for today. So that brings us to a conclusion of the Q&A and to Trajan's half-year results investor webinar for H1 FY '26, the period ending the 31st of December 2025. I'd like to thank you all for attending today, and I'll close the webinar now.

Thank you.

Thank you.