Waters Corporation (WAT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. I'm Tycho Peterson, and welcome to Day 2 of healthcare conference. It's my pleasure to introduce our next company this morning, Waters Corporation. [Operator Instructions] And with that, let me turn it over to Udit.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Tycho. I'm Udit Batra, the CEO of Waters Corporation. Today, I want to speak to you about the indomitable spirit of our company, Waters Corporation. Indomitable is a word that was likely popularized by a quote by Mahatma Gandhi. The strength does not come from physical capacity, it comes from an indomitable spirit. And today, I want to talk to you about our spirit. I joined Waters Corporation on September 1, 2020. It is tough enough to join a company as CEO under normal circumstances, let alone in the midst of essentially defining pandemic. And to do so when you cannot see most of your colleagues physically, most of your customers, most of your shareholders and many of the analysts physically can be quite daunting. This could have impacted both the speed and the quality of the learning that I was to go through. And it would have, most importantly, hindered my understanding of the most important aspect of Waters, our culture. Roughly 4 months in, I can tell you that I've had ample exposure to facts, to my new colleagues, to customers and to many, many of you and many investors and shareholders. This has especially been intensified, given that there was little time lost in travel, little time lost getting jet lagged. I have virtually traveled across Asia to China, to Korea, to Japan, to India, met many customers in those geographies, through Europe, through U.K., Ireland, Germany, France and Italy and then, of course, in the Americas, across our 4 large sites across the United States and through Brazil. So a lot of this has happened virtually. And I can assure you that I've spoken to customers across most of our segments in pharma, in clinical, in food and environmental and materials and to many government and academic colleagues. The immersion through facts has been complete. I've spent a fair amount of time at our headquarters, which is where I come to you from today, meeting my executive management team and many of our colleagues who are still in R&D labs at this very site and many manufacturing colleagues who are on site. I must say our spirit is well and alive so -- and this onboarding has been extensive. It would not have been possible without the warmth and generosity of many of our colleagues at Waters, and I want to thank them for this. So today, I will share with you a few of the learnings over the last few months and the actions we are taking as a consequence. Now I'm going to move to Slide #3. I have 3 simple messages. We, as Waters, have a solid base in a highly attractive life science tools market. Number two, even with this solid base, we have lost momentum in recent years due to weak execution and a portfolio disadvantage versus many of the key competitors in this space. And finally, as a consequence of understanding the current status, we've launched a transformation program that I'll speak to you about briefly. Moving on to the next slide. So let's get started. Waters operates in large and growing end markets. It's a $65 billion or so market that we operate in, with roughly mid-single-digit growth. This is Slide #4 now. From left to right, we traverse from our largest segments, the first 3 columns, really talking about the ones that are exposed to healthcare, this is pharma, biomedical research and clinical, roughly $40 billion out of the $60 billion overall market, growing mid to high single digits. And here, the growth trends are driven largely by the increasing use of biologics in R&D, in manufacturing, contract manufacturing as well as clinical diagnostics. As I traverse to the right-hand side of the slide, the food and environmental market, the applied markets are roughly $14 billion, growing mid-single digits, and these are sustained by increased focus on food and environmental testing. And finally, the last column, is the materials science market, which is also about $14 billion, growing slightly shy of mid-single digits, largely driven by capital spending in the materials market. So Waters indeed operates in large and growing markets. And move on to the next slide. In these large and growing end markets, we've established a strong foundation over many, many years of work. And on this slide, you’ll see 3 pie charts which is basically dividing up our sales from 2019. The first one focuses on portfolio. We have a large installed base of over 100,000 LC, mass spec or thermal analysis instruments and recurring revenues which constitute over 50% of our sales, and these are around consumables, services as well as informatics maintenance. Moving now to the middle of the chart, you’ll see the customer exposure. Roughly 75% of our customer segments are growing mid to high single digits, the largest being pharma, which is slightly shy of 60% of our sales. So really attractive exposure to growing markets. And then finally, from a geographic standpoint, we are highly diversified, the U.S. being the largest market, slightly shy of 30%; Europe being slightly more than 1/4; APAC being slightly less than that; and China being almost 20% of our market. So if you just traverse across the slide, you'll see a strong portfolio with recurring revenues, with exposure to growth segments and attractive segments and a diversified geographic base. With the variation across -- with COVID-19, we have seen variation across major geographies throughout the year. However, our largest market, pharma, has seen continued improvement, and we started to show that in Q3, throughout the year, and that has continued through the fourth quarter as well. In this attractive market, where we built a strong foundation, we also command industry-leading margins and strong financial flexibility that you see now on Chart #6. Our operating margin at 31% leads the industry. You’ll see this on the left-hand side of the chart, and a return on invested capital and a free cash flow that is really attractive. And this has sustained through many years, given a very strong brand that we've established through close customer relationships and a very strong technology. So in an attractive market, Waters has built a strong base with deep technological understanding and relationships with many, many customers and a strong financial flexibility in the market. Now I'm on Slide #7. However, in recent years, we have seen this momentum slow down, especially in terms of sales due to weak execution. Let me elaborate on this point. And now I'm on Slide #8. On the left-hand side of the slide, you see that we've lost momentum in recent years. And here, I'm stating the sales growth starting from 2017 going all the way to the first 3 quarters of 2020. As you can see, the sales growth has gone from roughly 6% to almost flat in 2019, and the first 3 quarters of the year have been severely impacted by COVID-19. We looked at the sales growth amongst the top 70 leaders at Waters and we convened ourselves across many days and multiple workshops to dig deeply into the facts, to dig deeply into what the customers were saying, to understand our technologies, and we came to the conclusion that it's -- the loss of momentum is really owed to 3 root causes. And these are on the right-hand side of the chart. The first is weak execution. The second, our portfolio, while strong, is not necessarily aligned with the fastest-growing segments in the market, which many of our competitors are exposed to these days. And finally, we can do more to tweak our performance management system so that it's aligned with the intent of the organization. Let me go deeper into each of these. Slide #9. And here, you see the underlying drivers that we think are causing the weak execution. And let me read each of these in turn. First is a loss of market share, largely driven by weakness in execution across our instrument portfolio. Second, low attachment rates for recurring streams, such as services, consumables and informatics maintenance. Third, a lower exposure to faster-growing contract organization, be it research or manufacturing for pharmaceuticals or contract testing for food. Fourth, a weaker e-commerce platform relative to our peers. And finally, a slower portfolio renewal and launches that have not really met our internal expectations. Let me now dig into the second root cause, which is a portfolio that has not been aligned with the faster-growing segments and opportunities, and I am now on Slide #10. What you see here from -- in each of the columns is a percentage of the sales of a few peers and Waters all the way to the right. And we've shaded in dark the percentage of portfolio that is -- that comes from the fastest-growing segments in the tools markets, be it bioproduction, be it consumables and biologics, contract manufacturing or clinical diagnostics. And as you traverse your eye from the left to right, you see Waters has some of the lowest exposure to these faster-growing markets. And this indeed causes us to grow slower than the overall market. It's no coincidence that many of the peers who have had exposure to clinical diagnostics and bioproduction, in particular, have seen a faster impact on their revenues from COVID. So those are the first 2 reasons for weaker -- for a slowdown in growth, weak execution and a portfolio that is not necessarily aligned with the fastest growing segments. The third reason that I mentioned was a performance management disconnect. Like many other organizations, Waters indeed has a robust performance management process, and you see this delineated on the left-hand side of Slide #11. We have an established process with over 90% employee participation, where we set objectives, review the feedback and give performance ratings. However, there is a disconnect between these ratings and overall company performance. If you'll recall, starting from 2017, we saw progressively slower growth rates, while during that period, on the right-hand side of the chart, you see the percentage of employees who have been meeting or exceeding our expectations, and this is well north of 95% through the 3 years. So performance management has not necessarily gone in sync with company performance. So I now move to Slide #12. In an attractive market, we built a solid base. However, we've lost momentum in the last few years, largely due to weaker execution in a portfolio that's not aligned with faster-growing markets and a performance management system that needs to be improved. So now what? What are we going to do? We have a transformation program underway, now I'm moving to Slide #13, that has 3 phases. First, we will regain our commercial momentum. Second, we will strengthen our performance management in parallel. And third, we will focus on enhancing our portfolio and capabilities. Today, I want to spend a bit more time on the first of these, which is regaining the commercial momentum. So now I'm moving to Slide #14. Here are some example initiatives of what we are trying to do to regain this momentum, and these will tie back to the areas that I showed you earlier that caused weaker execution. Number one, we will drive replacement of hardware, especially in liquid chromatography and mass spec. Second, we'll work to increase attachment rates and value proposition for recurring revenues across services, consumables as well as informatics maintenance. So for instance, for services, we see a disparity across different geographies in terms of our attachment rates, both at the point of sale and for renewal. And we will work strongly to increase those attachment rates. Number three, we will strengthen and expand our coverage in contract research -- across contract research, contract manufacturing and contract testing organizations. This is something I mentioned in the Q3 call as well. Over the last few weeks, we have actually reached out in the food testing organizations in China to over 50% more customers than we had in the past. So we are starting to see momentum build up as a consequence of these actions. And then number four, we want to improve our focus on e-commerce. And finally, we want to drive launch excellence. In 2019 alone, where we launched several new products, the launches did not meet our own internal sales expectations, and I'll show you what we're trying to do on that front. I will take 3 of these initiatives and elaborate a little bit more to give you color. Now I've moved on to Slide #15. The first one is to drive replacement of Waters' instruments. And this is the example that I've taken from HPLC. Roughly 20% of our actively serviced Alliance instrument base is dated. And it's not being actively serviced. As we look at our 500,000 or so licenses of Empower, we also find something similar from many of our competitors. We have taken a strong database effort to identify the accounts where there are aged instruments and we've gone after those accounts. To give you an idea of what this has already yielded. We've contacted over 60% of these target accounts. Q4 of this year has yielded the highest win/loss ratio that we have seen in over 3 years at Waters for HPLC. In fact, some of the largest orders in the history of Waters actually come in, in Q4. So I think it's safe to say that there is progress on this particular initiative. Let me move on to the next slide, which is Slide #16. We are increasing our focus on e-commerce. Again, something I mentioned in the Q3 earnings call. And on the left-hand side of this chart, you see the percentage of sales that Waters derives from e-commerce for our consumables portfolio. And comparing this to our peer group, we are basically well shy of the 50% to 60% that goes to e-commerce for many of our competitors. With our consumables portfolio, that is close to $400 million. There is a significant opportunity here. While it will take us a while to improve and upgrade waters.com to industry standard and well beyond it, we've already taken some pragmatic actions to bring more people to our e-commerce site through search engine optimization and through paid search. And this is already yielding a double-digit increase in eyeballs that are coming to our website. In tandem, we have also implemented our e-procurement platform. Initially, it was only at 25 customers, and we're working very strongly to increase the coverage of that platform to many more accounts. And you'll ask, why is that relevant? It makes it much easier to transact with Waters if we are plugged into the e-procurement platform for many of our customers. So we're working pretty hard to improve the e-commerce platform, and you'll see much more news on that in the coming months and years. As I move to the third initiative that I wanted to highlight, this is now on Slide 17. I know many of you are wondering what's happening with BioAccord. So first, let me start by saying BioAccord meets a clear unmet need for QA -- for a robust and reliable QA/QC instrument for large molecules, and I am absolutely confident that we'll see more and more momentum with this particular product. What we've done is tweaked our commercial model and we've done really 3 things, amongst many others. I'll just highlight 3 of these pieces that are working pretty well. First, we've gone from a generic approach to seeding broadly to a very targeted approach, and this is on Slide 17, by the way, to a very targeted approach linked to specific modalities like mRNAs or mAbs. And this has been pretty beneficial during -- especially during the current pandemic. Second, we've gone from a generalist sales model where all sales reps were trained to go and try to sell the product to a very specialist-oriented model, where a few reps are trained to go across many more customers to describe the instrument and train the customers in the methods. And then finally, we've gone from limited collaborations to rather an extensive set of collaborations and deeper collaborations with many of our customers, either by embedding our colleagues at customer sites or bringing the customers to our sites to develop methods together on the instrument. And this has already shown some early benefit. In fact, this quarter has been -- this last quarter has been the highest quarter in terms of units sold for BioAccord since its launch. So we think some of these initiatives are also having an impact. So I hope I have given you some flavor of what we've been up to in trying to regain our commercial momentum and a lot more will be said at our earnings call. Before I conclude the monologue, let me come back to where I started, our culture. At Waters, we have a deeply technical culture, a culture that is very close to our customers. But most importantly, we want to leave every place that we found better than -- we want to leave every place better than we found it when we started. And this is very apparent when you look at our sustainability report, and now I'm on Slide #18, and our ongoing commitment to deliver benefit to society. And on this slide, you'll see the 3 columns: environmental, social and governance. I won't read through all the verbiage on the slide, but let me highlight a few points. From an environmental perspective, we're actively reducing our environmental footprint, and this is apparent by our commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions from roughly 35% from our 2016 starting point. From a social perspective, I'm especially proud of our colleagues who are working to embed STEM education for underrepresented communities, and we've done that across the globe. And finally, from a governance perspective, we're strengthening our processes. We began 2020 by separating out the Chairman and CEO role, and we've onboarded 3 new directors in the last 3 years alone to refresh the Board. Moving on to our commitment to society, this is also apparent on Slide #19 now, through our work during the COVID-19 pandemic. We've had really 3 priorities to the pandemic: to keep our employees and family safe; to bring the best of Waters to this public health crisis; and number three, to maintain business continuity. Let me give you an example from each of these. From an employee safety and well-being perspective, we are using a highly data-driven approach, really sophisticated models to repopulate our sites, measuring ventilation in rooms such as this and populating them to the best capacity that the models suggest. And this is much lower than what would be -- what it would be at full capacity. We've implemented, of course, social distancing guidelines, masks, but also on-site diagnostic testing at our key sites as well as wearable sensors that delineate the distance between colleagues, so we can keep proper social distancing across our different sites. Second, we're doing our part to help mitigate the public health crisis, and this started well in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We set up our innovation response team, which reached out to virtually everyone who's working on therapeutics and vaccines in the pandemic and offered our services, and we're collaborating with most of those investigators. In fact, we're working with the U.S. -- with the U.K. government very closely on the Moonshot program to test the full population across the United Kingdom. And third, we're working hard to maintain business continuity. And I think this has been elaborated before as well. In particular, we're working very closely with our customers and our suppliers to make sure that there is supply chain continuity. So as I come to close, let me repeat our capital deployment priorities, which is on Page #20 now. They remain the same. We want to maintain financial flexibility by having a strong balance sheet and an optimal capital structure. We want to continue to invest for growth in organic -- in organic as well as inorganic approaches. And then finally, we want to continue to return capital to our shareholders through our share repurchase program. That remains the same. So as I conclude, I come back to my key messages. We have a solid base in a highly attractive life science tools market. However, over the last few years, we have lost a bit of momentum. This is due to some weak execution, a portfolio that has not necessarily been aligned with the faster-growing segments and a bit of tweak that is required to our performance management process. We've begun our transformation program, which has 3 phases. And today, I talked to you a bit about the first piece, which is regaining our commercial momentum. I want to thank you for your attention, and happy to answer any questions at this stage. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Udit. That was a terrific overview. Lot to kind of hone in on. Maybe I'll just start with kind of the weak execution, which you highlighted. Reversing share loss is obviously not easy. Competitors aren't sitting still. In your view, what do you see as kind of the root causes of the weak execution? Is it the lack of product cadence, which you alluded to? Is it the sales force not being properly motivated and compensated? Can you maybe just dig in a little bit as to what's behind the weak execution in your view?

Yes. I think if you just stick to the sales point, Tycho, right, I mean we've -- when I start talking about weak execution, I mean you should not take away from the fact that we continue to enjoy some of the deepest relationships with our customers. I'm a PhD researcher myself, I've spent 9 years, including my PhD in the lab and then later also at a pharmaceutical company. Waters -- the Waters brand name is still robust. The TA brand name is still robust. Our relationships are terrific. I think what's really happened is we have not been able to use the tools that are at our disposal. So for instance, CRM tools. We've started to use CRM tools now to target -- and let me talk about the LC initiative that I mentioned -- the HPLC initiative that I mentioned. We now have used our database to target exactly those accounts where our instruments are on limited support. We've used the Empower license database to target the same for competitors, and we're going after this, right? So it's less about weaker relationships, it's less about commitment to customers, it's more about using CRM. Let me give you another example from a CRO and CTO perspective. In China, we were not calling on 50% of the contract testing organizations. And we got this database together, and now we target them. We've at least called on them. Now it's early days, I don't know exactly how much that's going to yield in the short term, but at least we're calling on them, and we know where they are. The same you can apply to smaller contract manufacturing organizations. We have deep relationships with the larger ones. But when you look at the next year and every day, there's a new contract manufacturing organization that comes up. We have not been as nimble to go after them. We've not been using a database approach. And I think the question that might be on your mind is, is the compensation program okay? The compensation program is just fine, right? The sales compensation program is just fine. There's no change in structure. I think it's just a question of arming our reps, our colleagues with the right type of data and then making smart tweaks to our commercial model. And I mean, I mentioned e-commerce. I mean, that's a fast and growing channel that you very well know from other competitors. I mentioned getting more specialist focused on launches. So it's really basic blocking and tackling and use of data, not necessarily something that would really surprise anyone.

How about innovation? I mean, you mentioned not being aligned with some faster-growth segments. Is that a focus issue? Or is it an innovation issue where maybe you don't have the best technology to address some of those markets?

It's a great question, something that I'm still examining, right? So my first focus has been really mostly on the commercial side. And you can imagine, for such a large organization with a global footprint, during the pandemic, that can itself be a full-time job. But that said, from an innovation perspective, I think our base is very strong. We're exposed to the right sort of end markets. When you look at what we've done also in the areas where we have strength, for instance, at mass spec, we have completely renewed our portfolio with the introduction of trace quan platforms, with the introduction of high-resolution mass spec. And we continue to work on HPLC platforms as well. We launched Arc HPLC just recently, and that has an astounding success in the market. So it's not for the lack of innovation in the specific areas that we've been present in. It's more in terms of having specific plans to have proper launches. And I gave you the example of BioAccord as well. I mean, it's a unique product. It's first of a kind in -- and I have worked in biologics myself. This is a clear need to get QA/QC for large molecules that is simple to use, that interns can use. And I've talked to many customers, some of whom are my buddies from grad school and from my time in manufacturing. And they handed off BioAccord to many of their interns to use. And so BioAccord is that simple. It's a sophisticated technique. It's that simple to use. Now the question is, did we have the right commercial approach to embed it? And that's what I mentioned in the monologue. So it's less about focusing on specific areas of innovation and we've been quite active. 2019 was a very active year in that domain. Has not completed the full examination. But so officially, I can tell you that it's -- that's not, in my view, the root cause. Over time, and I also mentioned in terms of portfolio alignment, yes, you will see us examine that more carefully, but first things first, right? We want to get the commercial execution right. We want to make sure the performance management is working. We're starting to focus on the portfolio assessment. I don't think there is a major surgery required on what we are trying to do from an R&D perspective. There might be areas that we invest in that are adjacent or build our presence, getting us more towards the faster-growing areas.

One of the other debates on the stock, I think, is just the margins you highlighted, 31% operating margin. You talked about the need to maybe penetrate markets like CROs more deeply. Do you need to add resources? And are you willing to sacrifice margin for growth?

It's a very good question. I think I would much rather be in an organization that has good cost control and cost accountability. I think Waters has demonstrated that as a starting point for many, many, many years, and we're not about to change that. We're going to remain focused and disciplined on our costs, right? So you can be sure of that. That said, I mean, as we uncover these areas of growth that have clear payback, we're not going to be shy to invest, right? I mentioned already the near-term commercial initiatives. For instance, if you need to invest in a broader e-commerce platform once we have started to demonstrate momentum with our early initiatives, we will do it. As we delineate the broader space of CROs, and we can come back with a good payback model, we will invest in that. We will invest more in BioAccord as the model gets better and better. So we will not be shy to invest once we have some proof on the early pilots that we are running. And I think you'll see that coming through. But I think you would also agree that it's much easier to do that and it's much more comfortable to do that once the top line has momentum again because there's leverage in the P&L. It's a terrific P&L. I mean high gross margin, very good operating income. So the first and the most important task in the short term is to get the commercial momentum back. That gives us the flexibility to invest freely. And there are tons of ideas and there are tons of pilots we're doing, and you'll see that uncover over the next few years. But definitely, we're not going to be shy to invest in areas that make sense. I hope that gives you clarity.

Yes, it does. I mean maybe just to pick up on a couple of points. E-commerce, you said 20% of consumables. I mean, shouldn't that -- that could easily get to, I would think, 80%, 90%. I mean, do people need a sales rep to order columns, right?

I think this is a question that you've asked me in a previous life as well. And I can tell you from my previous experience, there is absolutely a need for, especially in sophisticated products that use separation, sophisticated chemistry, sophisticated biology through a human interaction, be it in 2 dimensions like now or in 3 dimensions, to explain how to use these products, explain how the technology works, e-commerce and face-to-face selling work in tandem, right? If you remove one of them, you don't see the same robust growth. But of course, there is more efficiency if you have both working, right? And I would rather get those efficiencies and reinvest in one or the other to keep building them. I don't think we're there yet.

Do you think you have the right distribution channel? We've seen some of your peers, like Agilent, put columns to Amazon. Would you explore other distribution channels or no?

Early days, right? I mean, let's walk before we run. Let's get -- let's do what is already in our hands first. And then we will start exploring these broader partnerships. I think I would first want to make sure that the initiatives that we have lined up, we start to see momentum in those. Or if they don't work, we find something else. But I'd rather focus on that first and then start thinking about some of the out-of-the-box ideas. I feel having -- in principle, having a direct customer relationships has a lot of value. Handing your customer relationships over to someone else I think in the long term doesn't pay, right? So we've -- with Waters, we've enjoyed high margins with having a direct field force, a predominantly direct field force. And I think that there is something to that as well.

One other follow-up on the replacement cycle. You talked about Alliance. 20% of those systems are dated. Are you able to kind of dimension the size of that opportunity if you get the extra 10% to 15% penetration?

No.

Or is that…

That's a good try, Tycho. I will not do that. I think I'll let you try to do the math. I mean we have our internal math. It's a pilot program that's starting to run well. And I mentioned already what we're starting to see in terms of early success. We've reached out to 60% of the people who actually have these dated instruments. We're starting to see good conversion. The win/loss ratio in Q4 was the best that we've seen in over 3 years. So there -- that tells you that we are still very competitive in the market. It's a question of focus and execution. And in terms of absolute numbers, some of the largest, as I'm told, I've not been in Waters throughout the history, it's only 4 months, but my colleagues tell me some of the orders that we've received for LC in Q4 are the largest in the history of Waters, right? So this initiative does hold Water. Now I don't want to tell you more than that at this stage. I'll let the results speak for themselves when they come.

Yes. I mean maybe not to be too myopic on the fourth quarter, but can you just talk about fourth quarter trends you've observed, how you're feeling about the prior guidance of down, low to mid-single digit decline? And any comments around budget flush that you may have seen?

Yes. So Tycho, look, our earnings call is in a few weeks, and we'll have a lot of time to discuss the elaborated results at that point. All I can tell you is what I said in the monologue, that we've seen improving trends through Q3, and that has continued to Q4 in terms of activity. Service activity has returned to 2019 levels in most geographies, with the exception of the U.S. It's a bit lesser in academic, labs then in pharma and other segments. But service definitely has returned to 2019 sort of levels. So people have figured out a way to get our service engineers to their sites. But more than that, I will not be able to tell you today.

Okay. But you talked about order trends being strong and you tend to not be a business that carries a ton of backlog, so I think people will assume that maybe that could translate into a better sales number. Are there -- as we think about other kind of higher-growth end markets that you can kind of push into, you talked about biomed, I think, in that chart being the fastest-growth segment at high single digit, clinical has been another area of focus, maybe where you're under-penetrated. Can you just talk about the strategy beyond CROs to drive into some faster-growth segments?

So early days, Tycho, really been spending most of the time on commercial execution and delineating some of these other portfolio areas. We'll start inside out. So for instance, if you think of bioprocessing or bioprocess R&D, in particular, BioAccord is our way in, meaning QA/QC of biologics. I don't envision us to become a consumable spare for bioprocessing in a day or so, that's a highly competitive and a consolidated market. I'd rather that we come in with our own strategies, and we have many ideas. The first one that I mentioned is just to go from our strength into that space. So can we take QA/QC and LCMS into the bioprocessing domain? Can it become an in-process test as opposed to being one at the end? I mean, those are the areas that we will explore further before thinking about anything else. From a diagnostics perspective, again, mass spec is a technique that can be used for diagnostic testing. We worked with the U.K. government and, in particular, some collaborators in the U.K. for the Moonshot program to bring mass spec into the diagnostic space, especially with our DESI technology, with ambient ionization, there is some potential. And we'll see how that goes. So there's a lot of good ideas, but early days. And give us some time to first get the commercial execution right, get the performance management system right and there'll be a lot more to talk about the portfolio expansion and the portfolio development in the coming months and years.

As you think about some of these adjacencies, is there kind of a string of pearls or set of bolt-ons you could do to kind of accelerate the move into these markets? Or do you think you're going to focus largely on organic investments in your [indiscernible].

In that -- I mean, in that sequence, there is no real holy grail, right? So -- but we will want to first focus on strengthening our commercial execution, our organic investments, making sure we are doing justice to our launches, and then we'll move on to the bolt-on space before thinking about anything else. And Waters has been doing bolt-on acquisitions in the past, Andrew Alliance was another one to move into the automation space. And there, the focus is to take Andrew Alliance -- the Andrew Alliance software and the Andrew Alliance by betting robotics platform and moving it into the LC-IMS space. So you can see there's already potential to do justice to the small bolt-ons we've done in the past. But I would want to just sequence the events. So you don't -- you won't see us rushing into large acquisitions and big bolt-ons. I'm aware also from history that it's a highly fragmented market, and there's a ton of opportunity for organic investment, ton of opportunity for partnerships, ton of opportunity for small bolt-ons and larger inorganic moves. But everything, step by step.

Are you looking at making any changes to the R&D organization, how you do R&D? Or do you think the engine is pretty good there?

I think early days. But I don't see any -- as I said, no major surgery required. 2019 was a banner year in terms of the number of platforms we launched. Look at mass spec, look at BioAccord, this was launched slightly before then. Arc HPLC came out. We launched our PREMIER Columns, which are first-in-class for high affinity metal binding molecules and mRNA and oligonucleotides being a large class in that. In TA, we're launching 1 to 2 products every year in thermal analysis and rheometry. I don't see a significant R&D productivity problem. I see more a focus on specific areas and executing on those religiously. But that said, I mean, we will examine that much more carefully in the coming months. I mean, this is my first view, and I have not done a deep dive. But just looking at it from what I have learned so far and talking to the customers, talking to my previous colleagues who are still in R&D labs, Waters has a terrific portfolio. In mass spec, for instance, we've really redoubled our portfolio in -- redoubled the focus on the portfolio in trace quan. And the other focus is now to bring Waters connect on to it, right? And that will be a good step forward. For the high res, we've been pretty active in launching many products in that highly competitive market. And the question is how much more can we do in that space to keep our position? So across the board, we have many choices, Tycho. But I don't believe there is a big surgery required in R&D.

Okay. Last one before we run out of time. Investors focus a lot on the core Waters business, but what is your quick take on the TA business? What do you see as kind of the biggest opportunities there going forward?

Yes. Look, I started my -- I did my PhD in Rheology of micro emulsions. In my undergraduate thesis, I worked on thermal analysis of polyamides. Now this might sound like Greek and I'm not showing off at all. I just -- I'm telling you that the TA instruments have actually used and modified for decades -- decades ago. I should not say it's been continuing for decades, but decades ago. And we have leading positions across many, many different categories there, be it thermal analysis, be it rheometry, be it gravimetric analysis. And there is a lot more we can do there. I've recently spoken to customers. I mean -- and I think the question is also leaning towards the industrial segment. I've spoken to materials customers who've been a bit cautious towards the end of the year, but there is no caution as we go into the new year in terms of building on this portfolio. So I'm -- and from a financial perspective, it is a business that is not dilutive to the overall Waters business. So it's a terrific business. And again, focusing on the basics, making sure the products that we're developing are launched properly, that we focus on deriving the best benefit. And then over time, continuing to renew the portfolio, improve the consumables part of that portfolio. So the intent is to increase the consumable fraction in that business and increase the recurring revenues also through service. So lots of plans. I'm super excited about TA going forward, not just because it looks financially interesting but also because I have some personal love with that business. It's financially very interesting, but there's some personal attachment to it as well.

Great, Udit. I want to thank you. This was a terrific overview. So thanks for taking the time and enjoy the rest of the conference.

Pleasure. Thank you, Tycho.

Yes.