Collegium at Jefferies Conference: Strategic Growth and Market Positioning

Published 05/06/2025, 20:22
Collegium at Jefferies Conference: Strategic Growth and Market Positioning

On Thursday, June 5, 2025, Collegium Pharmaceutical (NASDAQ:COLL) presented its strategic vision at the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference 2025. The company outlined ambitious growth plans, projecting an 18% increase in net sales for 2025, while also addressing challenges such as maintaining market share in a competitive biopharmaceutical landscape.

Key Takeaways

  • Collegium projects 18% growth in net sales for 2025, reaching up to $750 million.
  • The company emphasizes the durability and market strength of its pain management portfolio.
  • Jornay PM, a key product for ADHD, is expected to see significant sales growth, bolstered by an expanded sales team.
  • Collegium plans to continue strategic share repurchases and debt reduction to enhance shareholder value.
  • The company remains focused on U.S. operations, minimizing exposure to international pricing pressures.

Financial Results

  • 2024 net sales reached $631 million.
  • 2025 net sales are guided to be between $735 million and $750 million, reflecting an 18% growth.
  • Adjusted EBITDA is projected to be between $435 million and $450 million.
  • Q1 2025 revenue was $177 million, marking a 23% year-over-year increase.
  • Cash from operations in Q1 2025 was $55 million, with cash and cash equivalents at approximately $200 million.

Operational Updates

  • Jornay PM sales exceeded $100 million in 2024, with a target of over $135 million in 2025.
  • The sales team for Jornay PM expanded from 125 to 180 representatives by April 2025.
  • BELBUCA net sales were $211 million, Xtampza ER $191 million, and the Nucynta franchise $177 million in 2024.
  • A $25 million share repurchase program was announced in May 2025.
  • Prescription growth for Jornay PM was 24% year-over-year in Q1 2025.

Future Outlook

  • Collegium plans to maximize growth from Jornay PM with increased marketing efforts, especially during the back-to-school season.
  • The company aims to achieve a leverage ratio of less than 1x net debt/EBITDA by the end of 2025.
  • Patent exclusivity for key products like Xtampza ER extends through September 2033, providing a competitive edge.

For further details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Dennis Ding, Biotech Analyst, Jefferies: Hi. Good afternoon. Welcome to day two of the Jefferies Healthcare Conference. My name is Dennis Ding, biotech analyst here at Jefferies. I have the great pleasure of having Collegium Pharmaceuticals here to give us a presentation.

We have CEO Vikram Karnani here. So welcome Vikram.

Vikram Karnani, CEO, Collegium Pharmaceuticals: Thank you Dennis. I’d like to remind everyone that during this presentation I will be making forward looking statements. Please refer to the risk factors discussed in our latest SEC filings. Thank you to Jefferies team for welcoming us and giving us the opportunity to introduce you to Collegium. At Collegium we have a mission of building a leading diversified biopharmaceutical company.

We’re committed to medicines for people with serious medical conditions primarily in chronic pain as well as in ADHD. We have significant revenue and a high growth profile as a company. As you can see, we have five marketed products in 2024 we generated $631,000,000 in net sales and we’re expecting to grow 18% at the midpoint of our guidance for this year, which is $743,000,000. We have a history of cash generation and successful business development and we’ve been creating shareholder value for our shareholders, which includes discipline and smart business development as well as returning value to our shareholders through stock share repurchases. A little bit about the company.

I think it’s important to understand the history and the journey that we’ve been on. The company was founded in 2002 with the goal of addressing the opioid crisis, opioid epidemic. We became, we set a vision to become the leader in responsible pain management. And I’d like to say that over the next several years with the launch of Xtampza ER and the acquisition and the introduction of Nasinta as well as BELBUCA into our portfolio. We over the years successfully navigated that journey and became the leader in responsible pain management.

In 2024, we began our diversification strategy. So in addition to bringing relief to chronic pain patients, we set about through the acquisition of Ionshore Therapeutics, which brought Jornay PM into our portfolio. And Jornay PM is a terrific medicine for ADHD. It is highly differentiated and more on that in just a few minutes. A little bit about our product portfolio.

Our portfolio consists of highly differentiated medicines. That is one of the common features or common threads across our entire portfolio. Starting with Jornay PM, Jornay did about a little over $100,000,000 in net sales in 2024. And this year we have guided that we expect to do in excess of 135,000,000 in Jornay net sales. Key differentiation factor, Jornay is the only medicine, ADHD medicine with once daily evening dosing and that’s important because it provides symptom control upon awakening.

It provides system control throughout the afternoon as well as into the evening. It also thereby eliminates or reduces the need for any additional short acting stimulant add ons or boosters. And this is really critical because the unique feature of Jornay is what allows it this differentiating features what allows it to deliver on those really high areas of unmet need with ADHD patients. Next is BELBUCA. In 2024 BELBUCA did about $211,000,000 in net sales.

It is the only long acting opioid pain medicine that uses buprenorphine buccal film technology. Xtampza ER, which the founding product for the company, about 191,000,000 in net sales in 2024. It is the only extended release oxycodone pain medicine that uses the best in class abuse deterrent technology known as Deterrex. And then finally the Nucynta franchise with both immediate release as well as extended release formulations about 177,000,000 in 2024 net sales. Again the only opioid pain medicine proven to treat both severe and persistent pain as well as neuropathic pain associated with diabetic peripheral neuropathy.

Common feature, I I think it’s on the slide, but I’ll point it out anyway. A lot of only’s, The whole point for a whole goal for us was to have a portfolio of unique differentiated medicines. Our financial guidance, this was provided at the beginning of the year. In terms of net revenues, we expect to be in the $735,000,000 to $750,000,000 range. At the midpoint that indicates 18% year over year growth.

Adjusted EBITDA of about $435,000,000 to $450,000,000 which also represents 10% year over year growth and adjusted operating expenses of $220,000,000 to $230,000,000 which is growth of 49% year over year in large part driven by the acquisition and the introduction of Jornet into the portfolio. We have a strong track record of delivering both top and bottom line growth. So you can see on the graph, on the left we have grown net revenue significantly over the years as well as on the right side we have 39% CAGR in terms of adjusted EBITDA growth over the same timeframe. It’s a little bit different on this screen. Okay.

So I’m going to try and guess what’s on the screen in front of you. But what you see is a company with a very strong financial foundation to build off of going into 2025 with near term strong near term growth expectations with a very strong team. So from the left to right. Okay. Okay.

Now synced. $630,000,000 in 2024 net sales. We talked about adjusted EBITDA and growing at about 18% year over year. One of the things that we’ll talk about in just a minute here is the expected long term durability of our revenues. We two or at least two of our assets are into the 2032 and 2033 timeframe.

And as I will explain in the next slide or two, we have good reason to believe that the entire portfolio has a strong expectation of revenue durability over time. Our investment priorities in the near term, we investment in Journee to maximize its near term growth as well as creating significant momentum in 2026 and beyond, expanding the portfolio through disciplined business development while also rapidly paying down debt, as well as opportunistically repurchasing shares. Let’s spend a minute on the durability of our pain portfolio. This is one of those areas that is largely underappreciated by the investment community. So there are a lot of words on this slide, but I’m going try to keep the message simple.

I’m going to go one by one, right. But before I go into every single medicine, it is important to understand that there is no potential genetic entrant that has achieved all three criteria that must be satisfied in order to launch future generics. And what are those three criteria? Legal, regulatory approval, as well as availability of supply or manufacturing, okay. Xtampza ER, our projected exclusivity is through September 2033.

We have previously settled on the exclusivity date with the first generic company to file and therefore there and additionally there are no currently approved ANDAs for Xtampza BELBUCA, the projected exclusivity is January of twenty twenty seven. However, no ANDA has been approved. First filer appears to have waived its regulatory exclusivity. Additionally, the predecessor to Collegium that owned the asset which was BDCI reached a settlement with that first genetic filer regarding exclusivity date. And finally, it’s unclear if generic opioids align with future growth opportunity for some of the other potential competitors.

Second filer has postponed market entry until 2032 and ANDA is not currently listed in the Orange Book. And then similar story on the Nucynta franchise, our projected exclusivity for ER is July 2027, for IR is January of twenty twenty seven. Again, it’s unclear if generic opioids align with the corporate strategy for any potential future competitor. And not to mention manufacturing, tapentadol which is the primary material that’s used for Nucynta is manufactured by four manufacturing organizations in the country. Only one of them is at commercial scale and that is our exclusive supplier.

So when you look across the portfolio top to bottom, there is no one generic competitor that has satisfied all three criteria to be able to launch a generic entrant. We can go into this in a lot more detail in a different forum. It something that needs to be thought through and appreciated, but it is a very important point because this speaks to the durability of that pain portfolio, which represents upwards of 600,000,000 in net sales. Okay. Some recent business highlights as we covered in Q1, twenty twenty five is off to a really strong start for us as a company.

We drove significant momentum in our commercial portfolio both across Journee as well as our pain franchise. We grew from 2024 at $144,000,000 to about $177,000,000 this year, which represented growth of 23% year over year. We strategically deployed capital and strengthened our balance sheet. We generate about just a little bit over 55,000,000 in cash from operations. We have about 197,000,000, just shy of 200,000,000 in cash and cash equivalents as well as marketable securities.

We’re about our leverage ratio is about 1.5 net debt over EBITDA, which is down from approximately 1.9 at the end of last year. And as we have stated previously, we expect that by the end of twenty twenty five, we should be down to less than one times net debt over EBITDA, which again speaks to the rapid delevering profile that we have because of our strong cash generation. We’re investing in Jorn APM to drive growth. And most recently, we announced a share repurchase program of about 25,000,000 in May of twenty twenty five. And finally, on the executive team side, we’ve introduced three new executive leaders as well as made updates to our board of directors to support our long term growth strategy.

And we continue to publish both on Journee as well as our pain franchise, more scientific papers in leading conferences and leading scientific journals. What is underlying this growth? What is underlying the Jornet PM revenue growth is strong growth in prescriptions. As you can see on the left side, our prescriptions grew 24% year over year in Q1. Our prescriber base grew 22% year over year in Q1.

And how did this translate into market share growth? We grew from about 14% market share in Q1 of twenty twenty four to 20% market share in Q1 of twenty twenty five. And this is as a reminder market share in the branded long acting methylphenidate market. Very strong market growth clearly driven by fundamental growth coming from both prescriptions as well as new prescribers. Okay, so what are we doing to continue to drive growth?

Where we have recently expanded the sales team for Journeys PM. We went from about 125 sales representatives at the end of last year to about 180 sales representatives. And all of those 180 sales representatives are now in the field as of April of twenty twenty five. In addition, we are raising caregiver and patient awareness to drive request with the HCPs and this is anticipated to come from digital programs as well as social media strategies. A lot of that which is getting which is actually being put in place as we speak.

So a point on these revenue expectations, we just expanded the team in April. We’re investing in marketing programs currently. All of this, the timing was important so that it aligned with the back to school season, which starts really in Q3. And so our full year financial guidance of 135,000,000 plus for this year, much of that was driven by the momentum that we had coming into this year, which is why with the investments that we’re making this year in sales force expansion as well as marketing programs, we believe the full impact of that we will really start to see in Q4 and really going into 2026 and beyond. We are extremely well positioned to maximize and enhance the durability of our responsible pain management portfolio as I talked about BELBUCA and Xtampza ER first.

One thing to appreciate about both of these medicines is that the brand fundamentals are extremely strong. As you can see BELBUCA number one highest rated branded ER opioid in terms of product differentiation as well as favorability. Same thing on Xtampza number one highest rated extended release oxycodone in terms of product differentiation and favorability. Physicians have been using and prescribing these medicines for a long time and that the reason for that is they believe in the differentiation, the favorability, the superior efficacy of these medicines while being abuse deterrent. And that’s a really important part of our portfolio.

So lastly what I’d like to say here is Collegium is very uniquely positioned relative to many of its biopharmaceutical peers and here’s why. We have a robust revenue profile with double digit growth. And as we talked about $7.35 to $750,000,000 in net revenue anticipated this year with 18% year over year growth from 2024. We’re highly profitable. Our margins are adjusted EBITDA margins are in excess of 60% and that is after we acquired IronShore and invested in Jornet.

We have a very strong cash generation profile. We generated $55,000,000 in cash from operations in Q1 and we expect that to grow throughout 2025. We have a very attractive balance sheet, very strong balance sheet. We’re one time 1.5 times net debt over EBITDA at the end of Q1 twenty twenty five, and we expect that to be less than one times by the end of the year. We have a history of returning value to our shareholders.

Since 2021, we have repurchased $222,000,000 in of shares. And as I said earlier, we just did announced an ASR in May of twenty May twenty twenty five worth 25,000,000. All of our programs are commercial stage. We have a history of disciplined business development and we’re focused on commercial products. And then finally, there’s been a lot of discussion around the topic of tariffs recently, as well as most favored nation pricing and exposure to ex US.

We are our medicines are primarily sourced in The US and are almost exclusively sold in The US. Therefore, are largely immune to tariffs and or other things that are out there. So finally, our next phase of growth, we expect to continue being a company that is built on revenue growth, increasing profitability and growing profitability. We like our cash generation profile and we expect to continue to be a strong source of cash generation. We’ve been good stewards of deploying our capital very strategically through disciplined business development and repurchasing shares over the years and we expect that profile to continue.

Thank you for your time.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

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