Bio-Techne at Baird Global Healthcare: Strategic Growth Amid Challenges

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Bio-Techne (NASDAQ:TECH) presented at the Baird Global Healthcare Conference 2025, highlighting its strategic growth and challenges. The company reported 3% organic growth in Q4, with robust performance in pharma and China, but faced hurdles in the biotech and U.S. academic markets. Bio-Techne is focusing on maintaining margin stability while navigating uncertain market conditions.

Key Takeaways

• Bio-Techne reported 3% organic growth in Q4, with pharma achieving double-digit growth.
• The U.S. academic market declined, while China experienced double-digit growth due to tariff-related pull-ins.
• Growth pillars, including cell therapy and proteomic analytics, now account for 45% of revenue.
• Bio-Techne plans to buy back stock and pursue strategic M&A opportunities.
• The Wilson Wolf acquisition is crucial, with expected growth of 20-30% next year.

Financial Results

Bio-Techne’s Q4 results showcased varied performance across different markets:

• Pharma: Achieved a return to double-digit growth, marking a recovery.
• Biotech: Recorded low single-digit growth amidst funding challenges.
• Academia: U.S. academic market saw declines, impacting larger purchases.

• Geographic Performance:

- Europe: Maintained solid mid-single-digit growth.

- China: Achieved strong double-digit growth, partly due to tariff concerns.

- Rest of Asia: Experienced slight low single-digit growth.

Bio-Techne anticipates low single-digit growth for fiscal year 2026, with potential upside later in the year.

Operational Updates

Bio-Techne’s growth pillars have been pivotal in driving the company’s success:

• Growth Pillars: Cell therapy, proteomic analytics, ProteinSimple franchise, and spatial franchise now contribute 45% of revenue, up from 30% five years ago.
• Analytical Instruments: Saw mid-teens growth, primarily driven by pharma.
• GMP Reagents: Increased over 30% in fiscal 2025, supported by cell therapy market strength.

The Wilson Wolf acquisition is a significant component of Bio-Techne’s strategy, with expected revenue of $236 million annually and an EBITDA margin of 60% upon full integration.

Future Outlook

Bio-Techne is navigating a challenging market environment with a cautious approach:

• Pharma: Uncertainties persist, prompting a cautious stance.
• Biotech: Faces unpredictability due to dramatic funding declines.
• M&A and Capital Deployment: Focuses on targets with clear synergies and has a 10B5-1 plan for systematic stock buybacks.
• Margin Outlook: Expects a 100 basis point margin expansion, aided by a 200 basis point lift from the exosome divestment.

Q&A Highlights

• Academic Sentiment: No significant change observed yet, but NIH award activity has increased.
• Headwind Ranking: Reviving market health is crucial for long-term growth.
• Growth Pillar Performance: Cell therapy, proteomic analytics, and organoids are seen as key growth areas.

Bio-Techne remains optimistic about the opportunities and challenges in the next 12-18 months, particularly regarding end markets and their impact on overall performance.

For a deeper dive into Bio-Techne’s strategic insights, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Baird Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Catherine Schulte, cover Life Sciences and Diagnostics here at Baird. Very excited to have Bio-Techne joining us. From the company, we have CFO Jim Hippel and Dave Clair from IR. Dave, Jim, thanks for joining us.

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Yeah, thanks for having us. Thank you, Catherine.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Maybe just to kick things off, give us a State of the Union on the fourth quarter. You delivered 3% organic growth. Maybe just talk a little bit about what you’re seeing from your end markets, and then we can dive into each of those.

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Sure. Our key three end markets, of course, would be, starting from kind of largest to smallest, our pharma end markets, roughly 30% of our revenue, followed by smaller biotech, which is roughly 20%, and then academia, which is also around 20%, although, like, roughly, oh, a little, just slightly over half of that’s U.S.-based, and the rest of it is mostly U.S.-based.

When we think about those three end markets, starting with pharma, we had predicted a year ago that a lot of the pipeline reshuffling, so to speak, that pharma was doing as a result of the IRA legislation was going to be occurring throughout 2024, which it was, and that it would be mostly behind us by the time we got into the calendar year 2025, and that the R&D funding would be allocated maybe more pro-rata across the portfolio as opposed to leaning towards more early-stage stuff. We were happy to see this exactly kind of how it played out even earlier than we thought. We started even in late November, December, and definitely throughout our Q3 and Q4, which gets us into the summertime, pharma returned to what we call normal, normal kind of growth, which for us is double-digit growth.

It was great because we watched it carefully to see how real it was. The fact that it was over two quarters made it feel real, but also the breadth of the strength. It was strong in almost all of our product categories, and especially on instrumentation, which I know we’ll talk about that a little bit later. Even within our reagents, it was healthy, right? Pharma was back, back to normal. We’ll come back to where, I’ll come full circle to where we are, where we are now when we ended the year, but for the quarter, it was back to normal. Let’s go to biotech. Biotech, being the second largest, biotech for us did relatively well, very low single-digit growth, but anyone who reads all the stats around funding right now knows that funding is down quite dramatically this year.

Unfortunately, back down to almost eight-year lows last time I looked. The fact that we were able to squeak out growth in that environment was, we thought, we’re proud of that, but we’ll talk about that in the future too, but that’s a headwind concern we have going forward. Last is the academic market, in particular the U.S. academic market. I don’t have to belabor that. I think everyone’s, you know, painfully aware of all the noise that’s occurred in that market since the beginning of February. We saw, like I think most peers in our class, declines in our U.S. academic market overall, really for the last two quarters of the year, but it was really concentrated towards kind of larger purchases and instrumentation. Our spatial kind of fell into that too in terms of large purchases.

Our core reagents continue to do, you know, they kind of hold their own and hold steady, which considering the dramatic reductions in funding and the behavior of our customers anticipating major drops in funding, we were also proud of that result. That was kind of the mix of how it worked from a, call it, an end market perspective. From a geographic perspective, Europe has been doing well for us for quite a while, continued to do well. It was very solid, mid-single-digit growth, I believe, in our fourth quarter, and we expect that kind of momentum to continue in Europe. Europe’s been so far kind of unfazed by all the political dynamics that have gone on here in the U.S. With regards to Asia, I think we’re encouraged there as well. We had a very strong quarter in China.

We had the first double-digit growth in China in a very long time. Admittedly, it was somewhat induced by, we believe, pull-in, particularly on the instrument side in China, where they, you know, that was when the real tariff war was heating up. We believe some of our buyers were concerned about what would ultimately stick there, and so they pulled ahead there. When you back that out, though, we still believe China performed relatively flat for the quarter, which is, we’ll take it because it’s not a decline. We see that being kind of steady going forward and steadily building from here. We can get into some of the dynamics of why we think that, but I don’t think we’re alone in saying that either.

For the rest of Asia, kind of very similar to China, kind of follows China in a lot of ways and, relatively flattish, slight, low single-digit growth in our Q4, but we see momentum building there as well. It gives you a sense of where some of the, maybe the tailwinds are geographically, but also where the headwinds are from an end market perspective. You know, and back to kind of where we ended the quarter and our thinking in the current state is, first of all, I don’t have any updates to give. I have no different view than what I did a couple of months ago. That’s also partly because the first two months of the year fall right in the dead middle of summer for us, and it’s by far the lowest volume months of the year. Trying to depict a trend is very difficult.

Really, it’s September and October, by the time we get to our next earnings call, where we can kind of set the stage of how it’s really looking. That all being said, our view going into fiscal year 2026 was that really until there’s all these unknowns that are floating around out there, both on the U.S. academic side, but frankly now on the pharma side, which is another potential headwind we have then. We’re not seeing a call on a first severe drop-off. Pharma tends to be a lot more pragmatic and don’t get so emotional in their buying based off of news tweets and so forth.

It was hard for us to imagine that pharma could continue, and for us, it’s normal double-digit growth in an environment where in the month of July, it was a target big time for the administration on all different fronts, whether it be tariffs or MFM pricing. Like everything right now, it’s very dynamic. There’s been a little bit of better news on that when some of the details of the EU agreement came out, but not much public comments from the U.S. administration on that. I think there’s still just a lot of uncertainty there. I can just say, putting myself in my customer’s shoes, I’d be a little more cautious as well. That’s why we’re taking a little more cautious stance on pharma in the near term. Academic, we’ve seen two quarters have been relatively the same for us.

The momentum hasn’t gotten any worse, but we still, we performed very well in that U.S. academic, the first half of last year. Those are some headwinds that we have, at least for the first half of the year. Once we lap that, assuming things don’t get worse, and I personally don’t think they will, I think our customers are already behaving in that segment as if the worst has already happened. Then that should start to get a little easier with regards to at least the comps. Lastly, it’s biotech. I think, you know, biotech is really the hardest one to predict, and it’s the one that might take the longest to recover just because, as we just talked about, the funding has been down, you know, dramatically, frankly, for this year. There are some green shoots.

I think you’ve published this, I’ve seen it in other places over the last couple of months. It’s returned to growth again, but, you know, that’s still coming off of the first six months of some really, really tough months. It’s encouraging, but there’s also a lag of when, you know, the obvious, you know, this is when the funding comes in the door and when it actually gets spent. There could be maybe a little bit of an air pocket in the future for that. We didn’t see it yet, but we’re also being cautious about that.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: As we think about that in a low single-digit outlook going forward, you just did 3% in the fourth quarter, but as you noted, pharma grew double digits. You had some pull forward in China. I know low single-digit isn’t necessarily a guide, but should we think about that as at least a floor for the first half?

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Yeah, I mean, how I would think about it, I think the analysts, you know, we’re in line with the analysts’ view. They have us pretty much at low single-digit growth for the year, and you know, we believe that is very possible, very doable, even in this dynamic environment. We’ve positioned the company for that rate of growth from a cost perspective to make sure we can hold and even grow our margins. The dynamics within the quarters can be a bit noisy. We already talked about the headwinds that are more near-term than perhaps in the back, the first part of 2026 calendar year. I think the noise will settle down by then, and that’s what we’re just looking for. It’s for a baseline where our customers can now know what to work from.

Also, frankly, a little bit of a, suffered a little bit from our own success from last year, right? I don’t think there was any other company out there that reported 9% growth in the December quarter and very few that reported mid-single-digit growth in the September quarter. We’ve got some pretty tough internal comps to overcome as well. It might be a bit bumpy along the way, but overall, we’ve planned for low single-digit growth for the year, and, you know, from a cost-based perspective and investment perspective, with the hopes that there’s upside in the back half that, you know, we can see some even stronger margin pull through.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Yep. Maybe on the academic side, it seems like NIH award activity has picked up quite a bit in recent months. There’s kind of this fiscal year-end from a government standpoint to get those awards out the door, which is encouraging. Have you seen any improved sentiment in July or August from researchers if that’s being unlocked?

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Yeah, I mean, like I said, I wouldn’t even comment on July and August because every year, whether it’s good years or bad years, July and August drive me crazy because it’s off such low baselines. To answer your question, we obviously still are having conversations with customers and so forth, and we haven’t seen or noticed any notable change in behavior yet. They’ve all been a bit shell-shocked, and yes, some money’s being released, and that’s great. I think, you know, it’s also, you’ve heard me say this for years, Catherine, we’ve been trying to figure out the algorithm between NIH funding and our growth in U.S. academic since I’ve been there for 11 years plus, 11 years plus, and still haven’t figured it out. I think it’s for a number of reasons.

One of them being that NIH still, as a group, funds roughly 30%, 33% of the overall university budget. It’s obviously a big chunk, but it’s not by any means the only chunk, nor the majority of the chunk. That’s part of the reason. The other one is, remember Franklin, one of the old PhDs, went with us for 40 years. He used to tell me, the analogy we’d use is, you think of NIH funding as the river. When the river water level goes up and when it goes down, it’s always better when it goes up. What’s more important is where the current is. Water level could be up, but you could be stuck in the backwater and you don’t notice anything much different, which, by the way, happened during the COVID years when there were double-digit increases in NIH and our results in academic U.S.

were still roughly mid-single digit. We weren’t necessarily in the current of COVID research vaccines. That’s not where our products play. Even if the water levels come down, where the current is, we could actually grow in that environment. We’ll see where the rhetoric, if they put their money where their mouth is from a rhetoric perspective, but what we are hearing from the administration that is a positive, at least for us, as it pertains to NIH funding, is that they want to double down efforts on both prevention and treatment of chronic type diseases, whether it be in cancer, diabetes. Those are exactly the type of applications that are the sweet spot for all of our products and our applications. We’ll see.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: As we think about this kind of low single-digit near-term outlook versus the mid-teens CAGR that you guys expect long-term, how would you rank these headwinds of pharma uncertainty with MFN and tariffs, biotech, China, academic, what do you think is, how would you rank order those in terms of the biggest, driving the biggest delta between what you’re seeing today versus your long-term expectations?

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: It makes it sound like a bit of a cop-out answer, but the biggest delta is just getting the markets healthy again. I mean, I believe that what’s kept us in the black throughout this entire, we call it COVID hangover period, much less the first two quarters of this, I call it the new disease, which is the Trump effect in our industry at least. What’s kept us afloat has been those growth pillars that you just mentioned: cell therapy, our proteomic analytics instrument, our ProteinSimple franchise, our spatial franchise even, although hurt by the academic recently, still didn’t end up with mid-single digit growth for the year. Our growth pillars are what have been carrying us. If anything, their performance in this down market has given us added confidence of their ability to lead with very solid double-digit growth when the markets normalize.

When the markets normalize, then the 55% that’s our core will no longer be a drag on the growth, but will actually help contribute to the growth. When you add those two together, it makes for, I hate to say simplistic, but actually a pretty logical rationale as to how we get to double-digit. I’ll add one more to that from a quantitative perspective. If you go back five years ago, right before COVID hit, these growth pillars we talk about made up roughly 30% of our revenue, and our core made up roughly 70%. Fast forward five years later, and those growth pillars now make up 45% of our revenue, and the core makes up, massively.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: 55.

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Thank you. Not good. They’re not good with numbers, and it’s not because our core shrank during that time period. Our core is still significantly bigger than it was five years ago. It just gives you the sense of how much now those growth pillars have made an impact in our company. By the way, they’re all still very well underpenetrated in their markets. If anything, they keep on expanding their applications and growing their market potential. I think it was a snowball that just, and that next term, the snowball can be even more accelerated growth. You just got to get the markets to cooperate a little bit here.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Maybe on one of those growth pillars, and in an environment where research instruments are having a tougher time, your analytical instruments grew at mid-teens in the quarter. Can you just talk through what’s driving that strength and how you expect the instrumentation portfolio to trend going forward?

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Yeah, I mean, the simplest answer is it was driven by pharma. Pharma is, big pharma is the biggest end market for our instrumentation. The return of pharma, two quarters in a row, getting back to health in terms of their allocation of spend across the portfolio. They always spent the same amount. In 2024, it was all about near-term stuff. Now they’ve rebalanced it. We saw that come back in spades in our instrumentation. I’ve been saying for quite a while now, which sounds a little bit counterintuitive because the main thesis out there, which is usually true, is that when you’re in a recovery of markets, you usually see it in your consumables first and your instruments later. I actually believe, at least for us, we would actually see it in our instruments first.

The reason I say that, a couple of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that throughout the COVID hangover and downturn that we had, the utilization of our instruments continued to grow at a double-digit rate. New placements were low, but the consumables, and we know exactly because they have to buy the cartridges from us to use the instrument every time they use it. We had some quarters, 20% growth even during the downturn. At the rate of utilization, we knew what the capacity of these instruments were. First of all, it validated to us that these instruments are used as productivity tools in a down market. At some point, they start to run out of capacity. My thesis is once they have some available dollars, especially for CapEx, we’re going to see it. I think that’s what happened.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Yeah, okay. Maybe GMP reagents, that was up over 30% in fiscal 2025. You know, how is, I mean, what’s driving that strength? We’ve talked about biotech is a bit weaker. What’s your expectations for that part of the portfolio in your kind of low single-digit outlook?

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: I mean, what’s driving the strength is it’s just a great, it’s a great end market. I mean, cell therapy specifically is here to stay. You know, there’s nine approved cell therapies today, so it’s truly not just treating disease, but curing it. It truly is the next generation for treatment. It’s not like money has gone to zero. There’s still money out there. I think it just shows that, how important that is and how exciting it is because what money there is, that gets prioritized, I think, by many of our customers. That’s kind of a market view of the strength. For us specifically, we’ve continued to add new customers. We’re now up over 550 customers that are using our GMP proteins for cell therapy.

We have roughly 80 or so in the clinic, and we have half a dozen or so that are kind of very far along in the clinic. We’ve had, it’s been a win-win-win in terms of the market, in terms of our growth of customers, in terms of our customers progressing through the clinic. To be completely transparent, what drove the dollar growth was these handful or so of customers that are very far into the clinic. It validates again our thesis that the farther you get in the clinic, exponentially the sales grow. It’s a good thing, but also, when you buy for a late-stage study, you might buy once every year or once every 18 months. Therefore it becomes very choppy for a while.

I think it will continue to be choppy until there’s enough critical mass within these clinical trials and/or they become commercial, to where it starts to smooth out again. It’s just part of the life cycle of being in this space. In the early days when we had no GMP revenue and got up to around, call it $30 million, $40 million of GMP revenue, it was like a straight line because it was just adding customers, adding customers, and they were slowly getting to the early stages of their clinicals. Now we’re in that lumpy phase where big customers, big purchases, but not every quarter and sometimes not even every year. That’s what we’ll be facing in the near term. It’s all for good reason. In the long term, it’s going to be fantastic.

We’re seeing that, we got a preview of that with our investment in Wilson Wolf, right? Wilson Wolf, they make a G-Rex, which is a bioreactor that’s specific for cell therapies. It’s truly revolutionary in the sense it’s the size of a laptop. It’s a plastic item, but it’s got IP that allows for amazing cell growth in a very small space. You know, it’s a company we bought 20% of with the full intent to buy 100% of. We will, because it’s basically contractually obligated. We’re obligated to buy them. They’re obligated to sell to us by no later than the end of 2027. There are some milestones in between that where we could purchase it and hopefully do purchase it sooner. I mention that because they’ve been at this a lot longer than we have, and they have over 800 customers.

They’re in roughly 45% or so of all CAR-T cell therapy clinical trials, and of the nine that are commercial, they’re in five of them. We’ve seen their kind of evolution ahead of us. It was interesting because in calendar year 2024, they had relatively flat growth, even though we were still growing north of 20%. I was like, what’s going on here? They had these five customers that had gotten through phase three, but now are on a pause waiting to get the full FDA approval for the manufacturing processes and all that. There was about a year, year and a half slump where they didn’t buy anything. Now they’re through that. They’re starting to actually ship to customers and patients, and they’re expecting that to take off again to 20-30% growth, starting now, essentially. That’s kind of the preview of the path that we’re on with our GMP.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Got it. Should we still expect, you know, strong 20%+ growth for GMP for you in 2026?

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: We don’t, I’m not going to comment on any specific product lines. To be frank, I can’t commit to that one way or the other, even internally because of the lumpiness of the nature. They still don’t always, you know, it’s frustrating as they don’t always tell us where they’re at in their trial and when they’re going to need more. It’s kind of a sense of we’ve made it very available to them, which, you know, it’s good, but it also lets them start visibility a little bit.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Yeah. On Wilson Wolf, you’ve been working with them for years. To your point, you’re getting closer and closer to when that’s a part of Bio-Techne. Maybe just remind us what that will do from a margin standpoint and financial profile standpoint.

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: I actually still think it’s one of the most underappreciated parts of our company that’s not built into most people’s models or thinking about our future. The reason I say that is, and thanks for teeing it up, is because we’ve already talked about the growth rates that they’re now ramping up to again with the commercialized products. They’re running currently at over 70% EBITDA. Now, we model when we own the company for it to be only 60% EBITDA. That’s because we know that there’s investments we’re going to need to make there to make it a public-worthy addition to our company. Nonetheless, it’s very rare you can find an acquisition that’s accretive to our margins. It’ll be very accretive. We think by the time we purchase it, it’ll be right in the sweet spot of its growth curve.

To give you a sense of that growth curve, they’re roughly an $80-$85 million run rate today on revenue. The provisions to buy them out early is if they hit either $236 million of revenue on an annualized basis, TTM, or $136 million of EBITDA, which if they hit either one, it’s going to be the EBITDA first because their margins are tracking way ahead of their goal. That’s still a massive step up from where we are today. Publicly, we’ve been saying we’re modeling in end of 2027 at 4.4 times revenue because that’s the other part of the contract with them is that if they don’t hit these milestones, then we’re obligated to buy the company from the 4.4 times TTM revenue, which is obviously still a smoking deal. John Wilson still thinks it can happen up to a year sooner.

The reality is he could very well be right. That gives you a sense of the kind of ramp that these commercialized products can provide.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Okay, very interesting. Maybe for your own margins, maybe talk about the levers for fiscal 2026. You have the exosome divestment, you’ve got some productivity initiatives, volume leverage. Just maybe talk through what’s embedded in your outlook there and how you’re managing the business for this potentially low single-digit environment.

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Yep. I actually have a higher level of, I’d say higher level of confidence, but I felt like I tried not to give real guidance this year because it was like, it’s this, hey, yeah, we need a low single-digit growth. That’s what we’re managing to. Yet I did give fairly strong guidance on the margin, maybe 100 basis points. The reason for that is because we are managing to that on a day-to-day basis to make sure we achieve that margin, that margin expansion. Starting with, okay, I already told you we are preparing kind of for the worst in the sense of a low-growth environment for at least the next 6 to 12 months. We’re managing our cost base that way. Our commitment is to be able to at least hold our margins in a very low-growth environment, which is still difficult to do.

You still have to take productivity actions to get there because wage inflation is still very much with us. That’s kind of the starting point. Of course, now we can talk about it, exosome no longer in the portfolio, that does provide about a 200 basis point lift, tailwind. We see it less as a divestiture and more as a true portfolio decision to not invest there, but rather invest in our other growth pillars, namely, our cell therapy, our proteomic next-generation instrumentation for both proteomic analysis and for spatial, as well as organoids, which is another exciting area of application for our proteins that’s been growing very fast.

We want to take some of the savings that we’re getting from no longer investing in exosome diagnostics and plow that back into the growth vectors that have really been driving our growth for our company, but still leaving some leftover for margin expansion. That’s where the 100 basis points come in. In terms of the cadence throughout the year, as these productivity actions kick in, it’ll be relatively flat early on because we haven’t fully disposed of exosome yet, and these productivity actions haven’t fully kicked in yet. We’ll get some natural lift as those things occur. Anyone who follows our company, it’s just a seasonality thing. We have much higher revenues in the back half of the year than we always do in the first half of the year. We always get a margin lift from that as well on the back half.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: Yeah. As we think about, you know, capital deployment, you’ve been highly acquisitive in the past. I think now you’re pretty happy with your portfolio as it stands today. What are your priorities from an M&A perspective? You’ve been ramping up buybacks as well. Is that something you intend to continue pursuing?

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: On the buyback front, we did formally put out a 10B5-1 plan, they call it, so that we can systematically buy back stock at certain levels. We clearly think our stock, as our actions have shown the past two quarters, or more or less the last year or so, we’ve been buying back stock. Not because that’s become a priority over M&A. It’s just, you know, M&A is our target set tending to be private companies. It’s like a private owner who owns their house. They always think their house is worth more than it is, even in a down market. It’s the last thing they want to let go, right? It’s taken much longer for the private market to kind of realize that the go-go days of COVID valuations are behind us. We’re seeing that start to change here more recently.

A combination of, I think, the reality setting in and normalizing from a valuation perspective, combined with the fact that, you know, when Kim came in a little over a year ago, one of the first things he did was essentially build a very, what I call professionalized corp dev team. Still a very small team, but professionals that come from Danaher, come from the outside banking world. Their first task was to actually drill us internally and, you know, challenge us on our strategy, challenge us on our product lines, what our assumptions were around market sizes and our ability to penetrate. They raked us over the coals. I’m telling you, if this is the use for M&A targets, I wouldn’t want to be one of those targets.

It was also a very healthy exercise because it just reinvigorated our commitment and our belief in our strategy and our portfolios. Those that fell out of that, you know, Kim’s taken swift action to remove. Exosome was one of those. I mention all this because this team now is turning its gears externally for this year going forward. Now that we have our strategy honed down to who we want to be and what we are when we grow up, really focusing our M&A strategy on targets that we’ll never have a doubt to anyone else that will, why did you buy this company? We’re very clear the synergies, the connection to our core reagents. We have a very, you know, we always talk about 100 targets. Yes, well, there’s always 100 targets. Now we’ve got a select few that we know we’d love to have.

We’re working towards trying to make at least one of those happen. I think it’ll be a good year for M&A this year.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: All right. We’ve got a minute left, maybe a closing question. As you think about the next 12 to 18 months, what do you think the two biggest opportunities for your business are and maybe the two biggest potential challenges?

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Let’s see. End markets and end markets. That’s kind of how I would say. I mean, in all fairness, that’s what it is. When you think about the opportunities, I do feel like we are in a, the mindset of our academic U.S. customers and our biotech customers is that the sentiment for them is at an all-time low. I’m very encouraged that when you look 12 months out, the academic fret that we’ve been facing the last six months and maybe for a year before we’re out of it, will be behind us. I think pharma, again, I think that noise will settle down relatively quickly. This will be more of a blip for them as opposed to a whole pipeline review like they had to do with IRA. I feel pretty comfortable about that.

The biotech is the one that still gives me the most pause about the next 12 months. That would be more of the downside challenge. Just even getting those two, pharma back to make sure that stays healthy, getting academic healthy again. I always kind of joke a little bit, Catherine, that if either one of those end markets gets a sniffle, biotech gets a cold. If any one of those get a cold, biotech gets pneumonia. That’s kind of how I feel right now. Very, very upbeat about the next 12 to 18 months. Our internal market work that I just talked about suggested that. It was nice to hear from some of the, call it the big boys out there, talked about 2026, 2027, and kind of validated our view on that.

Catherine Schulte, Analyst, Baird: All right. Great. With that, we’re out of time. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Jim, Dave, thanks for being here.

Jim Hippel, CFO, Bio-Techne: Thank you. Appreciate it.

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