Emergent BioSolutions at RBC Conference: Strategic Turnaround Focus

On Tuesday, 20 May 2025, Emergent BioSolutions (NYSE:EBS) presented at the RBC Capital Markets Global Healthcare Conference 2025, outlining a strategic plan that balances past achievements with future ambitions. CEO Joe Papa emphasized the company’s robust history in biodefense, while addressing challenges such as debt and litigation. The conference highlighted both the positive trajectory and hurdles faced by the company.

Key Takeaways

• Emergent BioSolutions is executing a three-phase turnaround plan: stabilization, turnaround, and transformation.
• The company reported a significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA from a negative in 2023 to $183 million in 2024.
• Narcan, a key product in the fight against the opioid crisis, holds a 70-75% market share.
• Revenue guidance for 2025 is set between $750 million and $850 million, with adjusted EBITDA expected to range from $150 million to $200 million.
• Emergent is expanding its international reach and exploring opportunities to support reshoring manufacturing in the U.S.

Financial Results

• 2023 Adjusted EBITDA: Negative
• 2024 Adjusted EBITDA: $183 million
• 2025 Revenue Guidance: $750 million to $850 million
• 2025 Adjusted EBITDA Guidance: $150 million to $200 million
• Anticipated reduction in R&D and SG&A expenses year-over-year

Operational Updates

• Stabilization Phase Completion: Addressed debt issues, settled $50 million litigation with J&J, and improved operating performance.
• Turnaround Phase: Investing in R&D and business development to drive growth.
• Narcan Accessibility: Expanding distribution through partnerships with retailers and e-commerce platforms.
• Manufacturing: Maintains U.S.-based manufacturing to mitigate tariff impacts.
• CDMO Capabilities: Exploring opportunities to support pharma companies in reshoring manufacturing.

Future Outlook

• Transformation by 2026: Aiming for sustainable growth and profitability.
• Narcan Expansion: Aims to significantly reduce opioid overdose deaths.
• International Expansion: Focused on increasing revenue outside the U.S., with Q1 2025 revenue at $90 million internationally.
• Government Contracts: Continuing to supply medical countermeasures to the U.S. and international governments.

Q&A Highlights

• Narcan Market Share: Holds approximately 70-75% of the naloxone Narcan market.
• Growth Opportunities: Expects mid-single-digit volume growth for naloxone and Narcan products.
• Government Policies: Limited impact from tariffs due to U.S.-based manufacturing.

Emergent BioSolutions continues to navigate its strategic turnaround, with detailed insights available in the full conference transcript.

Full transcript - RBC Capital Markets Global Healthcare Conference 2025:

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: To RBC Capital Markets twenty twenty five Global Healthcare Conference in New York City at the InterContinental. I’m Jose Ricardo Moreno on the life science tools and diagnostics teams for RBC. It’s my pleasure to introduce our next company, Emergent Biosciences. On the stage with me is CEO Joe Papa and CFO, Rich Lindahl. Welcome, and thank you for being here.

Let’s get started. We you’re welcome. We have a lot of investors that may be new to the Emergent BioSolutions story. So can you give us a brief breakdown of where you sit in the health care paradigm?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Sure. Happy. Thank you again for the invitation. Happy to be here, everyone. Emergent is a biopharma company that’s been in existence for twenty five years, and we started initially focusing in the area of biodefense or medical countermeasures, where we make products for U.

S. Government initially and then governments around the world that are looking at protecting from whether it be smallpox, anthrax, products that we hope never to need, but in reality, we want to be prepared. And so we’ve been making those products for countries around the world for, as I said, over twenty five years. We have products that have a significant moat around them because they’re very difficult to make. You can’t imagine the difficulty of making a live attenuated virus vaccine for smallpox.

First of you can’t even get access to smallpox, so people don’t want you to have access to smallpox for protection and making sure you can contain it. But beyond that, you obviously have to protect all your employees and everybody involved in the process. So a very significant moat around our smallpox products, our anthrax products, our botulism antitoxin products, our products we have Ibanga for Ebola, we have raxibacumab for a therapeutic for anthrax. So very difficult products to make with significant moat around them. And we think that’s important that we help people prepare and be prepared in case we live, as you know, in an increasingly dangerous world.

We want to make sure everyone’s prepared. We do that. We also make Narcan. Narcan is one of the other public health threats, a threat that obviously has resulted in approximately one hundred thousand people dying in The U. S.

Alone in 2023. Good news is we’ve been able to reduce that now down to about eighty thousand deaths per year in 2024, but it’s still eighty thousand deaths per year, and NARCAN can save lives. And that’s another area we’re really excited to help in dealing with public health threats. So that’s the emerging company. We had I only joined about a year ago, fifteen months ago now.

And we’ve been focused on first stabilizing our company and now turning it around. So we’re excited to be here and have a chance to talk more about Emergent.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: Fantastic. Thank you. And Joe, you’re a very experienced leader in the health care space, including much larger organizations like Parego, Bausch and Lomb, and Cardinal Health. What is it that attracts you to Emergent, and what are the challenges and opportunities that you see at a smaller organization like Emergent?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Sure. Well, first and foremost, I love health care. And as I looked at the mission of what Emergent was all about in terms of protecting and saving lives, it clearly was one that appealed to me and what I was looking at doing. Number two, I found with Emergent, the moat I mentioned to you before in terms of products that are just excellent products that we could work on and continue to make a real difference in people’s lives around the world. And then number three, I looked at some of the challenges that Emergent faced, and they were very similar challenges to things I faced in the past in terms of turning around companies.

We had a debt issue that we had to deal with. And Rich, who’s with me today, our CFO, did a fabulous job. We had to work on the debt. We had to extend the maturities, reduce the debt. We had to improve operating performance, all things they had experienced within the past and felt that as I looked at what was going on with the merchant, things that can help to turn around for the company.

So I joined Emergent with the concept of being able to turn it around into a company that could truly continue to make a difference, continue to make these very important products that had the most around them.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: Right. And then for Emergent, I know you’ve just described a little bit about the transformation over the past few years, and you’ve shared about your strategic plan in turning around the company. Where are we at right now? And what does the future look like in that strategic plan?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Sure. Great question. So as we were thinking about what you need to do in turning around a company, we felt there were three phases, and this is something I had familiarity with in my previous companies. First phase is to stabilize the company. And by stabilizing, it was really dealing with many of the issues I talked about.

We had too much debt. We had to reduce the debt. We had to extend the maturity of the debt. We had some legacy litigation that we had to resolve. We had a litigation with J and J over some of the issues that we had where we were suing J and J.

J and J was suing us. We did end up settling with J and J, and J and J actually paid us $50,000,000 to resolve that. But we had to solve that. These are all things that were part of this initial stabilization phase of the company. We had to absolutely improve our operating performance.

Unfortunately, our operating performance in 2023, our adjusted EBITDA was negative in 2023. Good news is we were able to turn that around. And in 2024, our adjusted EBITDA was at $183,000,000 So we made a nice transition as we went through the stabilization phase. Having said that, the next phase for us is turnaround and then final stage being transformation. Let me just comment a little bit about our turnaround phase that we’re in right now.

We see that turnaround phase is the next logical phase, where we are looking at what areas of the company we can invest in, and investment will be both in terms of dollars, resources and just projects that we can invest in that will initiate growth for our company. That growth is something that we expect to do both organically through this internal R and D projects that we have, but also externally through business development activities where we can bolt product A, B and C, with the belief that it can go after the two main areas of our company. So we sell products to the U. S. Government, as I mentioned.

How do I sell one more product to the U. S. Government and or other allied do that. And that’s one area that we do business. The other business area for us is NARCAN, and we sell those to first responders.

How do I sell find one more product that we can sell to the first responders, whether it be the local, municipal, or statewide first responders, through that first responders channel. Those are the things that we’re working on today from our own organic r and d, but also the future business development projects. We’re looking for those things. But that’s the turnaround phase. Where do we invest?

And then ultimately, we expect to get to transformation, which is 2026 and beyond, how can we get to a transformation of our company where we have a long term, growing, sustainable growth company that’s profitable for the future, and that’s what I would call our ultimate phase of transformation. Once again, multiyear process. We’ve completed stabilization. We’re in the turnaround phase, the investment phase and ultimately hope to get the transformation in the near future.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: As we’ve entered into the investment phase, wanted to ask, how should we think about the current portfolio of products and services currently offered by

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Emergent? Sure. Good question. Emergent has a number of products, but all told, about 10 products, a little more than 10 products, that are predominantly focused on what we can do in terms of this whole area of medical countermeasures, biodefense. The good news about those products is that there’s not a lot of things that the U.

S. Government can get bipartisan support behind. Good news, they are strong bipartisan support for biodefense. So we have both congressional Republicans, congressional Democrats that support this area of medical countermeasures in terms of biodefense. So we that is where most of our product revenue is coming from today.

For once again, the leading product for treatment of smallpox vaccine, therapeutic for smallpox, That’s called Tymbexa. We’ve got the area of anthrax. We’ve got a vaccine for anthrax called Sifendis. We’ve got a BioThrax that we treat all of our forward deployed troops in The U. S.

And other allied nations treat their forward deployed troops to protect them from that. We have a therapeutic for antiretrovaxibacumab. We’ve got a product, Ibanga, for Ebola, a botulism antitoxin, a very potent toxin. We have a product for that. All of our products are really geared towards making sure that we are prepared for the future for our country and all of our allied countries that we work with every day.

And we sell them to those countries around the world. It’s a great business model. We work closely with the U. S. Government.

We get the products through the R and D process, get it approved by the FDA, sell them to the U. S. Government. But the U. S.

Government allows us to also sell those products to other countries around the world, help protect them. And good news, as long as we give the U. S. Government the most favored nation pricing, which we already do, that we are allowed to sell it to other countries around the world. So a great return on investment for all of our shareholders.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: Fantastic. And what is the kind of moat that’s around those kinds of products?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: The moat is very significant because I can guarantee you that somebody is not going to go to their garage tonight and say, I’m going to create a smallpox vaccine. First of all, you’re not going to get access to smallpox because it’s obviously something that people want to keep very controlled. But beyond that, a live virus vaccine and the difficulty in making that is a very difficult process. Fortunately, we have that capability with within Emergent today. Same comment I could make for anthrax.

Those are things that is a controlled process that the government wants to keep in a very tight process so that the product doesn’t get into the hands of some bad actors. But as we know, we live in an increasingly dangerous world, so we need the products. That gives us a moat, though, because of our capabilities in manufacturing, our capabilities in working with the U. S. Government, everything from BARDA, Strategic National Stockpile, Department of Defense, those are relationships that have been built over twenty five years that we think allows us to truly differentiate our product offering from others.

And as I said, unlikely someone is trying to build another smallpox vaccine in the rush, and I don’t think that’s going happen.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: It’d be pretty hard to contain.

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: It’d be pretty hard to contain, and I would not want to be their neighbor.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: Since acquiring Narcan in 2018, Narcan has played an outsized part in Emergent’s growth story. Just wanted to ask, where are we in that growth trajectory for Emergent?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Yes. So Narcan, a very important product, our largest product, actually. It’s a product that saves lives. It’s core to our mission of protecting and saving lives. So as I think about where we are today, we are in a very unfortunate place for the world that there’s still, in The United States, Eighty Thousand people dying every year from opioid overdose.

And we know if Narcan’s available at that time, it can reverse the opioid overdose and help people to start breathing again and save lives. So we know that the product will work. We know that we need to make it more accessible. But what has Emergent done? Emergent obviously took this product in as a prescription item.

We then sought to make the product over the counter, which means you can get it without a prescription. As an over the counter product, the concept would be that we’d make it much more accessible so that everybody can have it. Hopefully, you’ll never need it, but like that fire extinguisher sitting in the corner of a house, and just in case you ever need it, it’ll save the house. We believe the same thing. It’s very cost effective to have a Narcan product available just in case somebody overdoses on an opioid prescription product, or in case somebody shouldn’t do it, but if they’re experimenting with a a college student experiments with a product and it turns out to be laced with fentanyl could kill them.

We can save those lives. And we want to make sure that Narcan is widely distributed across every access point we possibly can make it. We are working with, you know, for example, restaurants to put kits on the wall right next to the defibrillator, Narcan should be there. Because actually, Narcan is probably more cost effective in terms of the number of lives that can be saved with a $40 Narcan on the wall versus a defibrillator, which is, you know, dollars 1,500. So I hope both are there, to be clear, but we think NARCAN could be even much more cost effective there.

Beyond that, we’re working with large retailers to make sure it’s available in their location. We just announced we have a deal with a large e commerce company that’s also going to make it available in their facilities. We’re obviously, sell it on the retail side through all the large retailers, the Walgreens, CVS, the Rite Aid, etcetera. We sell it through all of them. Those are things that we want to make it even more and more.

If you ask my personal aspiration, I would love to see that Narcan is included in every first aid kit sold in The United States, because it will save lives. And unfortunately, eighty thousand people dying every year. That was a disaster we got to fix. And we’re fortunate. There is bipartisan support for saving lives from opioid overdoses as well.

People think about the fentanyl problem, and that’s certainly part of it. But everyday opioids that people use for prescription could also be overdosed, and we can save people’s lives for that as well. So we’re on a mission to make Narcan more accessible. And as we do that, we will save more lives each and every day.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: Yep. What is the current market share of Narcan? And where do you see the biggest possibilities for growth? U. S, OUS?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Sure. The current market share we have, we are the market leader of the naloxone Narcan products. Narcan is the standard of care, four milligrams of standard of care. We have that product ballpark, we have a 70%, seventy five % market share of that product. There are two generic players out there as well.

There are other players out there. But we still, as the market leader, maintain that market leading position. We think it’s from a couple of reasons. Number one, first and foremost, we have the brand name NARCAN, the very widely known brand name. Number two, we have the manufacturing capacity.

We can make we work with a third party, but we make over 12,000,000, 13 million doses a year. So we have that large capacity to make the product, and it’s all automated, so it gives us a low cost of goods. And then number three, we have distribution capabilities. We have a Narcan Direct capability where we can ship it to about 18,000 different customers’ locations over the course of any given year. So that distribution capability comes with it, make it very easy to do business with the NARCAN DIRECT program.

It also the team is very knowledgeable on where one can get funding to help pay for the NARCAN. So we obviously try to help all of our customers to get the product, get it there in a timely fashion, but also help them think about the ways they can get funding for this. The good news is that there’s a lot of funding available for it, either through the federal government and the current administration that’s been very supportive of NARCAN. But it’s also there’s funding from many of the large pharma companies that made opioids have entered into settlements for their opioid sales, and there’s ballpark $50,000,000,000 coming to The States over the next five to ten years that’s going to be dedicated to reducing the deaths of opioid overdoses. So that funding is also available.

Our team helps the local, state, municipalities try to find funding, and that’s what we think is going to be the biggest opportunity for additional distribution. We expect the volume growth, the unit volume growth for naloxone and NARCAN products to be somewhere in that mid single digit growth rate. We want to continue to be the market leader, and we’re going to do everything we can to have those kits on the walls I described. We’re going to we just recently licensed from ICCMA a product called Cloxado, which is an eight milligram form of naloxone. We now have the four milligram NARCAN brand, but we also have the eight milligram KLOXAYTO brand.

We’re working to try to continue to get more distribution of KLOXAYTO through our NARCAN DIRECT program. So we’re excited about what that means for as a leader, what we can do to continue to help save lives for patients that are potentially overdosing with Narcan I’m sorry, overdosing on opioids and Narcan, or the Cloxidyl can be a solution for them. And as I said, we know that about half the time, or more than half the time, when someone overdoses, there’s somebody in the room with them. And if that’s the case, we can save that person’s life if NARCAN is available. But look to us to have more to say about continuing to make distribution available, everything we could do with kits, clipping on a backpack for college students to make sure that if one of their friends runs into a problem, they can save their friend’s life.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: Fantastic. In quarter one twenty twenty five, Emergent reaffirmed revenue guide of $750,000,000 to $850,000,000 and adjusted EBITDA of 150,000,000 to $200,000,000 What is contemplated currently in the guide? And what gives you confidence that you remain on track as fiscal twenty twenty five progresses?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Sure. Well, I’m going to start, but I’m going to also ask Richard if you want to make some comments on this. But first and foremost, what gives us most confidence as we’ve thought through the issue is, number one, we entered in 2025 with very strong momentum, especially in our adjusted EBITDA. As I mentioned, we had a very good turnaround stabilization phase that happened in 2024, so the beginning parts of our turnaround program. And we’re going to continue to build on that momentum.

And also, through the work of Rich and his team, we’ve done a lot to reduce some of our operating expenses. And I’ll let Rich kind of add on to that, but I think that’s a good part of what gives us confidence about the future.

Rich Lindahl, CFO, Emergent BioSolutions: Yes. And I think that’s right. And I think when you look at the revenue, I think Joe talked about the different elements of it. We have good visibility in terms of what we expect on the medical countermeasure side based on our ongoing dialogue with the U. S.

Government as well as with some of the international opportunities. On the commercial side, which is principally our NARCAN revenue and now KLOXADAO as well, we have based on the trends we’re seeing as we come through this part of the year, we feel like we’re on the right trajectory to achieve that guidance on the revenue side. And then on the cost side, you see a significant reduction year over year in both our R and D and SG and A expenses. And the run rates that you saw in the first quarter are very indicative of what we would expect for the rest of the year. So when you combine that with the gross margin guidance we put out there, it gives us a lot of confidence to be able to deliver the EBITDA range of 150,000,000 to 200,000,000 as well.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: And I know this has changed frequently, but the volatility of government policies. But what are the impacts of tariffs to Emergent?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: One of the good news stories about Emergent as we think about what’s happening is that Emergent makes all of our products in The U. S. Or in Canada, but in a USMCA compliant facility. So the good news is that the current administration clearly is trying to move products back to The U. S, which we support, obviously, but we never moved.

We were always in The U. S. In terms of our facility manufacturing and or in Canada, which is a USMCA compliant facility. So tariffs, we don’t expect to have a significant impact on us. We to be clear, we do source one of the actual device for our NARCAN that comes from overseas, comes from Europe, but that’s just one component of our NARCAN product.

Most of and our final is here in The U. S. So our product portfolio is predominantly U. S. Manufactured portfolio or manufactured in Canada through a USMCA compliant facility.

So we don’t expect big issues from tariffs based on our U. S. Manufacturing decision for that. Definitely.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: And as pharma companies have brought back conversations about reshoring their own capabilities, could you provide an update about how Emergent has leveraged its CDMO capabilities and what it sees the future with those?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Emergent’s CDMO capabilities is an area that we have had always had that capability. It’s not an area of focus for us. Having said that, though, we are absolutely aware of many of the pharma companies are seeking to bring back drug substance manufacturing to The United States and or fill finish for some of the injectable products into The United States. And the good news is that we have capabilities and sites that can do this. We have a in our Canton, Massachusetts facility, we have a drug substance capability.

Currently, it’s making our products for a our ACAM product, which is a live virus smallpox product. It has that capability, but it has a lot of extra capacity today. So that’s something we could make available to pharma companies if there was an opportunity for a need to bring back product and manufacture here in The U. S. Our facility in Canton is just a I was up there just recently.

It’s a world class facility. I’ve had a chance to see over a hundred different pharma facilities in my life, and this is absolutely one of the world class facilities. We also have a fillfinish facility in our Rockville, Maryland site, that that’s available for fillfinish of sterile products. Once again, that’s a capacity that’s available if companies are looking for it. So and we’ve got a team in place working with pharma companies to talk about that.

And we also have capacity in our Winnipeg site in our facility that we have in Winnipeg, Canada. And our Lansing, Michigan has a capability for a BSL-three. It’s a very difficult lab capability that we have available. So we’ve got a lot of capabilities. If pharma companies are looking for it, we’ll be ready to help them.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: Maybe just last, if you could look back five years from now, after this transformation that you’ve done at Emergent, what would you be most proud of to have accomplished in that time?

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Well, hopefully, there’s a lot of good things I’ll be able to say here. But I think, first and foremost, to build a world class team of pharma people that are focused on all the right things of protecting and saving lives. And we will have accomplished our mission of protecting and saving lives. My hope is, as an example of that, is that we will have done more to reduce the number of deaths for opioid overdoses from the current level of eighty thousand to something significantly below that. I’d love to say we got to zero.

I think that that might be a real stretch objective, to be clear, but my hope would be we would dramatically improve the opioid overdose deaths that have occurred, and that we are continuing to be a supplier of many new products to the U. S. Government and governments around the world around what we do for our medical countermeasures. And then finally, that we will have expanded our international capabilities and grown. That’s one of the things we in the latest first quarter, we did over $90,000,000 of revenue outside of The U.

S, and my hope is that we’ll continue to expand our geographic footprint that we can provide some of the important life saving products to countries all over the world. And we’ll be really proud of that ability for us to ensure that unless world peace breaks out, we’ll have the availability to help countries be prepared.

Jose Ricardo Moreno, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Team, RBC Capital Markets: Thank you, Jove. Thank you, Rich.

Joe Papa, CEO, Emergent BioSolutions: Thank you. Thank you, John.

Rich Lindahl, CFO, Emergent BioSolutions: Thank you all.

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