Charles River at Jefferies Conference: Strategic Caution and Optimism

On Tuesday, 18 November 2025, Charles River Laboratories (NYSE:CRL) presented at the Jefferies London Healthcare Conference 2025, outlining its strategic landscape amidst a mixed market environment. The company's COO, Birgit Girshick, shared insights into improving biotech bookings, stable pharma operations, and strategic pricing measures, while also addressing challenges such as geopolitical pressures and competition.

Key Takeaways

• Charles River Laboratories is aiming for $70 million in annualized cost savings by 2026.
• The company is exploring strategic acquisitions, particularly in bioanalytical services and China.
• The NHP supply chain has stabilized, with no concerns found in recent DOJ and SEC investigations.
• About 30% of programs are now in-licensed from China, impacting preclinical work in the West.
• Charles River is strategically using pricing to maintain market share amid competitive pressures.

Financial Results

• The net book-to-bill ratio was 0.82 in Q3, consistent with Q2.
• Biotech bookings have shown month-over-month improvement after a summer low.
• A strategic pricing approach is being used to retain and attract clients, with the pricing environment stabilizing.
• The company is working towards additional cost savings of $70 million by 2026, supplementing an existing $225 million program.

Operational Updates

• Biotech bookings are recovering, while the pharma business remains stable.
• The Discovery business is currently soft due to tight biotech funding but is expected to rebound.
• The NHP supply chain is stable, with improved oversight and diversified sources.
• Research model volumes in North America have declined, while Europe and China remain stable.

China Strategy

• Charles River is monitoring the trend of in-licensing from China, with 30% of programs coming from the region.
• The company is exploring the "China for China" market, with a cautious approach due to geopolitical complexities.
• Potential acquisitions in China are being considered, but with careful evaluation of market conditions.

Future Outlook

• Charles River expects a stable net book-to-bill ratio in the future.
• The company is optimistic about a rebound in discovery services with improved biotech funding.
• Strategic initiatives aim to protect or enhance margins through cost savings and operational efficiencies.
• Greater access to internal NHP supply is anticipated by the end of 2026 from the Novaprim farm.

Q&A Highlights

• Minimal pull-through from discovery to safety assessment due to the size of discovery services.
• The goal is to maximize client engagement by offering a comprehensive service portfolio.
• Charles River is closely watching the impact of China's in-licensing trend on Western pharma.

In conclusion, Charles River Laboratories is navigating a complex market landscape with strategic caution and optimism. For further details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Jefferies London Healthcare Conference 2025:

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: All right. Good morning, everybody. Seems like the morning's flying by. I'm Dave Windley with Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research. I'm based in the States, actually in Nashville, Tennessee. I cover CROs for Jefferies and passed my 25th year of doing that for Jefferies this year. So I have hair, but it's all gray. We're very pleased to have, again, Charles River Laboratories here with us, and Birgit Girshick, the company's COO. Thank you. Todd Spencer is lead IR in the audience with us as well. Birgit, thank you for being with us.

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Thank you.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: We've done a triple header with Charles River this year. We went to one of their important sites yesterday and a breakfast this morning. Birgit is definitely tired of me already. Let's start off just with a discussion of the demand environment. I think that's been topical. The bookings, softness in biotech that you saw through the summer and how you're seeing that kind of accelerate, I should say, bookings, RFPs, requests for quote, but how you're seeing that progress as you move out of the summer and into the fall and winter.

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yeah, certainly happy to. In our earnings call, we discussed what we're seeing in forward-looking KPIs as well as backward-looking KPIs, really. We discussed what we have seen in Q3, which was kind of a little bit of a mixed bag still. We announced our net book to bill to be at 0.82, flat from Q2. We also indicated that it was mainly driven by biotech being a little bit, had a little lull in Q3. What we've been seeing is improving bookings in biotech over the last few months. Going from a low in the summertime with improving month-over-month bookings, which is a positive indicator for us. We also have seen good proposal volume both in our biotech segments, in our global segments, which gives us a lot of confidence in the future and into the upcoming quarters.

With the book to bill, there's actually two factors to it. So there's the actual net book to bill, which is still not quite over one, but we're also looking at how quickly work is being booked, which has accelerated for us in the last few quarters. So we often see work being booked in the same quarter or the next quarter, which certainly helps our top line. So a little bit of good news story here with some mixed indicators like the net book to bill. We're seeing pharma being a lot more stable for us and biotech improving. So looking forward to a hopefully more stable net book to bill in the future, but at this stage, that's where we are.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Got it. Very helpful. Within that, consistent with attracting the business, pricing discussions have touched on using pricing strategically, trying to defend or gain share. I think pricing discounting was a little more aggressive in the market generally and maybe for Charles River included earlier in the year. Maybe discuss the progression of that. Should we think about the pricing and the backlog that we'll see in revenue in the near term as being better than, worse than? Is there a pricing factor that we should be thinking about in the near term?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yeah, maybe let me touch on competition here for a second first. Charles River, in the safety assessment market, holds about 30% market share. That's our estimate. Our next largest competitor is about half the capacity that Charles River has. The competitors after that are considerably smaller. Charles River is known to compete based on regulatory compliance, our client centricity, our strengths of our portfolio. We are definitely the market leader in specialties and providing consistent and high-level quality to our clients. In a market where demand is a little bit softer than we all would like to, many of our competitors are using price discounts to buy themselves better capacity utilization.

During a time like this, we will strategically use price to maintain market share, to gain new clients, and to win work that we really, really want, like some of the specialty work as a follow-on work of like a four-week study. In 2023, 2024, we saw quite a bit of a shuffling going on with pricing. Since then, what we have been seeing is really a stable price, stable spot price. If you think about it this way, the discount has not gotten worse, but pricing also has not gotten much better since then. We are in a stable environment for that. If you look at our quarters over the last three quarters, we actually see a price-mix ratio. We are always looking at price and mix together. That has been actually a tailwind for Charles River.

We're not seeing a headwind from price, particularly in our safety assessment business. All our other businesses are getting price as well, so that's also good news. Going forward, we don't see any indicators that this needs to necessarily change. Not looking at headwinds from pricing per se.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Okay. Within DSA, discovery is a relatively smaller, quite a smaller part of that business. I think logically, maybe an area for clients that can be sacrificed in the short run when budgets are tight, and so that has been softer for some time. How is that environment stabilizing or not?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yeah, certainly happy to touch on that. Our discovery business is a relatively small part of our company. It is actually 10% of our DSA segment, just to size that. Dave, you're right. Discovery in a time when biotech funding is hard to come by has been quite soft for us. Even so, we are in a niche play for our discovery services where we work with biotech clients mostly that do not have the internal capacity to run studies themselves. We have seen certainly the need for discovery services decline over time. We do believe that this will rebound with better biotech funding. We do think that many of our services are required in that space for clients to get actually towards the toxicology services. Therefore, we should see some uptick in that.

We will certainly continue to refine our portfolio to make sure that we have the most competitive portfolio available for the company.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Got it. Remind me from a sales go-to-market and strategy standpoint. I think some years ago, you went to a combined DSA Salesforce. How does the Salesforce adjust to that demand environment? How much is, I think the answer is small, but how much is safety assessment dependent on pull-through from discovery, your capture of clients at the discovery stage?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yeah, let me start with the second question here. Because of the size of our discovery services, the need for pull-through and even the pull-through from discovery into safety assessment is relatively minimal in our sales strategy. The way we look at it is that we provide a portfolio to our clients that will maximize for us to be able to get a share of the wallet of the client. A lot of times, we actually start working with them in safety assessment. Then because of the reputation, the quality, the service we provide to clients, they actually backwards integrate and give us some discovery services.

Rather than starting necessarily with a very early stage and it goes into safety assessment, our clients are picking and choosing throughout the portfolio and not just in DSA, but also in manufacturing and RMS where they want to enter with us and what the work they want to do. Everything we look at, the way we look at our services and products is how can we maximize the share of the wallet. That said, about a year ago, we decided that it would be more synergistic for us to operationally and from a go-to-market perspective run our DSA business holistically as one DSA. That allows us to utilize scientists, leadership, sites, and our sales organization and marketing organization better and more holistically.

Particularly for small clients, we're touching on a lot of times the same contact or at least the overall same decision maker in an organization. For our sales reps to go into a client and have this holistic discussion, not just a point-in-time discussion or point-of-service discussion, is helpful to create that synergistic buying pattern. This is why we went there and did that. That's about a year in now. I think it helps us to understand the client better and in some cases helps the client to understand our portfolio better.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Thank you for that. That confirms what I had thought you had done. So thank you. Let's talk about China as it relates to this. First of all, you do have some lower-cost competitors to your DSA business in China. I want to get to the growing licensing activity by Western Pharma out of China. Talk about how kind of that competitive interplay with China preclinical CROs.

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yeah, certainly. China is actually a story of a few different legs for us. I'll start actually with the in-licensing of programs from China by many of the larger companies here in the U.S. and Europe. About 30% of all the programs are now in-licensed from China. This is something that we are watching very closely out of two reasons. Number one, most of that work is already done in China, the preclinical work and often the clinical work. By the time it's in-licensed by one of our clients, the need for preclinical work is minimal. Sometimes they will redo a study. Sometimes there is post-IND work that still needs to be done. Sometimes it's just some pushback from a regulatory agency. Generally, the touch from us for Charles River on this work is minimal. Obviously, that's one reason we continue to watch it.

Second reason is just the impact on biotech in general. How will this impact the funding, the study that are being run in the U.S. by biotech companies? Which programs will they do versus what comes out of China? Definitely a concern of ours. The other area that we are watching with China is particularly drug discovery going to China. That is a trend that has happened now for a few years. A lot of the chemistry work is done in China. Some of the biology work is now done also in China. There are some really good providers. You might remember one of the acquisitions we were trying to do with WuXi. Now basically one of our main competitors in China is there. This is a train that seems to have left the station a little bit.

Obviously, we'll continue to see what other services they will take market share from. Regulatory work is still very, very infrequent, but certainly something we will be watching. Thirdly, the market that is China for China. That is an area that is of interest to us. Obviously, a market that we are not playing in a lot right now. We have some RMS products and services in China. We are looking to see if, when, and how we will expand our services portfolio there.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: That expansion, I wanted to make sure we got to, and I think of the in-China for China being more of the low-cost development work for products to be commercialized in China and perhaps in China only as distinct from global pharmaceutical companies wanting to develop at GLP standards to commercialize ex-China or globally. Is your interest in both?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: The interest is in both. The market there is quite split. There are players that are servicing outsourced work from Western countries into China, and there are players that are primarily servicing the China for China. At this point, we're learning more about the Chinese market, the Chinese players. That's why I said if, when, and how. We need to learn a lot more of the market, the right timing. We're certainly watching the geopolitical pressures that are going on as well. There will be quite a bit more information gathered before we do anything there.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Got it. Let's transition to RMS. You had some benefit in the third quarter from NHP shipments and the timing of those pulled from third quarter to fourth quarter. Maybe using that as a step off, where is the NHP market today in terms of quantity of use, price stability, sourcing, all that fun stuff?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yeah, happy to talk about it. For RMS specifically, what we talked about was an NHP shipment that we had planned for in Q4 that was pulled forward into Q3. The full-year guidance was still accurate, but the timing between the two quarters just shifted. Just see it as a shift as such. Maybe as a background, the non-human primates are being used in our safety assessment DSA segment on studies. We also have non-human primates from farms that we own that are sold in the open market, both in China as well as in Mauritius. In China, we're doing that because we don't have any activities in China right now and can't get the animals exported.

In Mauritius, when we took ownership of the Novaprim supply source, there were contracts in place, and we're honoring those contracts with sale directly to a customer here in the United States. That said, the supply chain of non-human primates, I would call as stable. We have done a considerable amount of finding new suppliers, firming up new suppliers, finding different sources of supply, but also firming up how we oversee those farms. We feel that we are in a pretty good state right now and will have enough non-human primates going forward for the upcoming years. Maybe also good news, we closed out the DOJ and SEC investigations in the past few months. SEC actually just announced that this week with no indication that there was any concerns about the animals. We are really happy about that.

With that, took the opportunity to just implement a lot of improvements such as genetic testing and expanded audit programs, expanded oversight of the farms. Overall, we're really feeling good about that.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Got it. So you mentioned with the Novaprim contracts, you're honoring external clients. I think in our previous meetings, you had said that one of those, you have kind of a step function increase in your access at the end of 2026, kind of gradual increase and then a fairly significant increase in the end of 2026. Maybe walk us through that and how many customers is Novaprim servicing that will kind of expire over the next couple of years?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yeah. So what we're talking here is really about one major client. We have some other spot sales from Mauritius when we don't need the full amounts, but they don't make out a quantity that we should even size here. There is a step down after 2026, at which point we can use the animals on our own safety studies if we need to, and then a more gradual decrease for over another few more years. We bought the Novaprim farm primarily for having supply for our own safety studies. This is giving us additional supply for doing that. I should maybe point out that there's two major supplies in non-human primates. One is from Mauritius and one is an Asian supply that's genetically different.

We will always have two different sources at minimum, Mauritius and another Asian source, to make sure that we have the right animal for our clients. That is why we were just diversifying and that is why we are maintaining different source farms here.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Yeah. When you have greater access to internal owned vertically integrated supply, how does that change your cost structure for those studies?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: It certainly does change the cost structure on studies for our DSA segment. That's also one reason why we're doing that. What it does take away is the external sales. So there's a little bit of a wash in there, but it will make us more competitive for safety assessment studies, allows us to be a little bit more flexible in our cost structure and with our pricing. It's definitely a competitive advantage. However, I would stress that the availability of animals and having the steady supply is the biggest competitive advantage we have.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Okay. Let's transition to the small animal part of the business. Sounds like Europe and China have held up relatively well. North America has been the area where volume has been a little soft. Compare and contrast the regions for us on RMS.

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Sure, happy to. When you look at the different markets, what we're really looking at here is a different client segment. In the U.S., we have seen a heavier volume decline in research models than we actually expected. That was driven by the biotech segment. If you think about Europe and China, each has different dynamics in biotech and different funding opportunities in biotech. Just like with our safety assessment organization, we believe that when biotech funding stabilizes and the demand comes back, we will also see the research models volumes come back equally as strong as with the safety assessment. That said, it's important to note that research models volumes have come down year over year for decades. That is because of our three R programs, so using fewer animals on studies.

Generally, we have enough pricing power in this business to offset any volume declines. When we talked here about the impact on the North American market, here we were not able to use price enough to offset the volume.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Let's skip forward to a couple of topics here in the last minute and a half or so. With the third quarter and with a little bit of an update on the strategic review, the company also added to your longer-term cost-saving initiatives $70 million. What are the sources of those $70 million? What levers are you pulling to be able to top that up?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yeah. You should look at the sources very similar to the initial cost savings that we announced. We announced about $225 million cumulative annualized cost savings with some carryover that is still going into 2026, an additional $70 million that we will annualize cost saving into 2026 as well. Those are everything from some site consolidations, putting efficiencies in our G&A is a big focus area, some outsourcing of maintenance activities in our facilities. There is always, always going to be some procurement initiatives. Then really looking at how we operate in our businesses, particularly in our safety business, digital savings, automation, putting efficiencies in place. This will be an ongoing initiative. With that, we should be able to protect or improve margin.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Okay. So protect or improve. You're not guiding yet, so still to be seen on that. But either of those could be on the table.

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: That's what we're trying to do.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Okay. Maybe a last, yeah, so getting close on time, I know. In terms of deployment, you talked about proceeds from the strategic review. You have relatively low leverage. I think we talked about repurchases on the table, but then also maybe some acquisitions.

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Yep.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Where would those acquisition targets be?

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: We have a clear strategic roadmap for acquisitions. What we are looking at here is areas that are core to our business that will help us to get a bigger share of the wallet for our clients. There are a few different areas that we are very interested in. Some are in the bioanalytical area. We do a lot of that work already, but we would like to expand our capacity and our outreach in this space. We already talked about China being a potential there. Obviously, it has to be seen. There are some ancillary other areas such as potential NAMS opportunities that we will look at.

Dave Windley, Analyst, Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research: Okay, that's great. Nice, efficient answer. I appreciate that. Appreciate the audience's attention and enjoy the conference.

Birgit Girshick, COO, Charles River Laboratories: Thank you.

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