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On Thursday, 25 September 2025, Repligen Corporation (NASDAQ:RGEN) presented at the Bank of America Global Healthcare Conference 2025, outlining its strategic vision and financial performance. The company emphasized its leadership in bioprocessing innovation, driven by disruptive technologies and strategic acquisitions. While Repligen faces potential headwinds in specific gene therapy programs, it remains optimistic about future growth, particularly in Asia and new modalities.
Key Takeaways
- Repligen reported a tenfold revenue and EPS increase over the past decade, with a total addressable market of $14 billion.
- The company expects to outpace industry growth trends of 8% to 12% by approximately 5 percentage points.
- Repligen’s strategy includes productivity gains, disciplined M&A, and a focus on new modalities like cell therapy and ADC.
- The company plans to expand its Asia presence, targeting 20% of sales in the region within five years.
- Repligen’s diversified portfolio and customer base contribute to a de-risked business model.
Financial Results
- Mid-teens topline growth in the first half of the year, excluding COVID-related revenue.
- 20% growth including COVID revenue from the previous year.
- Biopharma and CDMO orders increased by more than 20% in the first half.
- Revenue grew from $270 million in 2019 to $634 million last year, with a midpoint guidance of $725 million for the current year.
Operational Updates
- Repligen’s product portfolio covers most of the bioprocessing workflow, with plans for further expansion through internal development and M&A.
- Geographical diversification includes manufacturing presence split between the U.S. and Europe, with a goal of 80% dual-sourcing by next year.
- The company emphasizes a nimble, collaborative culture, which has facilitated increased sales to big pharma and CDMOs.
Future Outlook
- Repligen aims to capitalize on industry growth trends, focusing on China with a local-for-local strategy and potential local partnerships.
- Investment in new modalities and differentiated technologies like ATF is a priority.
- The company expects modest M&A to double its size in the next five years, supported by organic growth.
Q&A Highlights
- Industry recovery is bolstered by acquisitions of small biotech by larger pharma companies.
- The Biosecure Act has benefited smaller CDMOs significantly.
- Repligen’s pricing strategy aims to balance customer satisfaction with margin growth.
- EBITDA margin is approximately 30%.
Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of Repligen’s strategies and insights.
Full transcript - Bank of America Global Healthcare Conference 2025:
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Thanks everyone for joining us. We’ll kick off our next session. My name is Mike Riskin. I’m on the Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team based out of New York. I’m excited to host Repligen for our next session. We’re joined by Jason Garland, CFO, and Olivier Loeillot, CEO. The format of this session is going to be just some brief slides to get us going, and then we’ll go into fireside chat and Q&A. With that, Olivier.
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Thank you so much, Mike. Good morning everybody, and thanks for attending our session. As mentioned by Mike, I’ll try to be fast on the deck, but for those of you who might not be very familiar with the company, we thought we would just give you a little bit of an overview about the company. Who are we? We are really considering ourselves to be the innovation leader in bioprocessing, and every time we are talking to people on what is really differentiating ourselves, it’s really all about innovation. We are supporting both biopharmaceutical and CDMO customers, and we’re helping them with a very differentiated portfolio of both hardware and consumables to enable them to manufacture their biological drug more efficiently. Innovation means we are really launching disruptive technologies.
We like to say about 80% of our portfolio, we don’t really have direct competitors, meaning we are creating new market segments that were not existing before. We have a pretty global manufacturing presence, almost half of our site in the U.S., the other half in Europe, which is great, particularly with the challenging Paris situation, because already about 60% of our portfolio is on dual-sourcing, European and U.S. We are aiming to work to reach about 80% by the end of next year. Another specificity about Repligen, we are 65% clinical, 35% commercial, meaning that obviously the move of those drugs towards a launch is a real tailwind for us. Even though people associate us a lot with new modalities, because we love it a lot, the vast majority of our business is 80% going into traditional protein like monoclonal antibody. We grow very fast.
You probably are familiar, we were a $270 million U.S. dollar business in 2019. We did $634 million last year. The midpoint of our guidance for this year is at $725 million. How did we grow so fast? We grew by both launching these very disruptive technologies on one side, but also we acquired quite a lot of companies. We acquired about 15 companies in the last 11 years. If you have to remember one thing about this presentation, it is we have a very broad product offering already today. I mean, in fact, when you look at the full workflow that is needed for most biological drugs, we have more or less everything apart from these three red dots that you’re seeing here, two on the upstream side, namely bioreactors and cell culture media, and one on the downstream side, which is more virus filtration.
We have everything else, which I love. In my past life, I built the entire A2Z offering of another company’s portfolio. That’s something we really love because customers who start to really understand what we are capable to support them with now realize we’ve got a very broad portfolio of products. What is our value creation equation? It’s a combination of the right strategy and the right capabilities, which is leading to the result I showed you earlier. If you think of our strategy, we are really a 100% bioprocessing focused company with some analytical play, but that are directly linked to bioprocessing hardware. The disruptive technology we talk quite a lot is really focused on productivity gains.
Partly those days where there is a lot of macro questions on the NSM side or on the tariff side and so on, where a pharma company might have more pressure from a cost of good point of view, we are really happy that we are enabling our customers to be more efficient from a productivity point of view. Finally, discipline M&A, we are making sure we have really strong return to create the differentiation. On the capability column, I won’t go through all of them. The one I would really pick up here is our culture. We are smaller, we are nimble, collaborative, and transparent. This has enabled us to open a lot of doors with big pharma companies and big CDMOs over the last couple of years where maybe we were selling them one product two years ago, now we’re selling them three to four products.
That’s going to be another big tailwind for us over the next five to ten years. Results, tenfold increase in revenue in ten years, EPS from $0.24 to $1.58. Probably even more important is our total addressable market has tripled in the last ten years, meaning we have a total addressable market of about $14 billion today. If you make the math, that sells around $700 million. We’ve got a lot, a lot of chances to grow very fast in the next five years for sure. How do we outpace market growth? I mean, again, I mentioned we’re creating new solutions, 80% of the portfolio really being differentiated. The best example is the ATF technology where process intensification didn’t really exist back five, ten years ago. We created that market. The growth is accelerating a lot. Another good example is also launching new resins.
We launched a double-stranded RNA purification resin. When you manufacture an mRNA drug, you’ve got one big impurity, it’s double-stranded RNA. All of you guys who got the Moderna vaccine injected in your arm, you probably got a bit of double-stranded RNA here. We’ve got very good technology to get rid of it. That’s another example where we’re creating really new solutions. Where we compete with others, it’s all about differentiating our portfolio by having the right technology. This is where Process Analytics is playing a big role, but we’re also making sure we’re going to become bigger in Asia because today only 15% of our business is in Asia, where most of our competitors are in the 20% to 25% range. Finally, we are making sure we benefit from the mix of products.
We are more exposed than others indeed to some of the new modalities, but that’s something we like because we see a lot of growth. Half of the funnel of our customers is in new modalities, and we are really very excited to be able to play a big role here. Our portfolio has evolved a lot during the last ten years. If you look back from a customer point of view, back ten years ago, 81% of our business was done with our top ten customers. Today, it’s only one, sir. In fact, our biggest account in 2024 was only 6% of our sales. We have a very diversified customer base. In terms of segments, the product mix has changed drastically as well. Ten years ago, we were a ligands company selling mostly OEM ligands to two of the big bioprocessing companies. In 2024, that 70% became only 12%.
We have a much more diverse portfolio of products across the board, filtration being by now the biggest franchise for us. In terms of modality, of course, I mentioned about new modalities. Ten years ago, we were 95% into monoclonal and so on. Today, we’ve got about 20% of our portfolio that is outside of monoclonal. Very diversified portfolio, customer base, and markets, thanks to all of the organic investment as well as the M&A we’ve done. With this, I will close it here. I’m looking forward to a good discussion with Mike.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Great. Thanks so much, Olivier. Maybe I’ll just start with a high-level one. You know, you’re about three quarters of the way through fiscal year 2025. There’s a lot of moving pieces this year, both from an end-market perspective, but also Repligen’s specific perspective. Maybe if you could just give us a high-level overview of how the year has played out relative to your initial expectations so far. What surprised you to the upside, versus maybe what’s coming a little bit softer?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, no, sure. I mean, obviously, we’re really happy about how the first half of the year played out for us. I mean, with topline growth, mid-teens, 15% exactly, excluding COVID, because last year we still had a significant COVID component coming in quarter two after a restatement. All those up 20% obviously is something we’re absolutely delighted about. Beyond the number, what I’m really happy about is growth happened across the board. Each of our franchises has done extremely well in the first half of the year. Last year, chromatography was a little bit behind. We’re not extremely happy about it. Chromatography had a fantastic recovery in the first half of this year. It really played out very well, setting us up for a very strong full year 2025 with again all those 20%. This enabled us to enter in a very strong position for quarter three.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: What is driving that order strength? If you could dive into that a little bit, how sustainable do you think that is? Is it driven by any particular segment or is it a little broader based on that?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, no, again, beyond the product line, which all did very well, the customer segment also were doing very well across the board, maybe with the exception of small biotech. I’ll come back to that in a minute. The real big changes we’ve seen over the last one year were really more on the CDMO side. We had a very strong recovery from biopharma already a couple of years ago, but CDMO were lagging behind. I’ve always said, for me, the health of the CDMO business is very important because that’s really the best reflection whether the ecosystem is doing well because they are kind of at the end of the food chain. Having had orders increasing by more than 20% at both biopharma and CDMO in the first half was a very strong signal indeed, like the entire industry is recovering very well.
Small biotech, I mean, we had an interesting quarter too because sales were up quite significantly, but orders were still pretty muted. Obviously, we all know like biotech funding is still at a pretty low level. That is obviously a segment we are watching out carefully. We only have exposure about 8% of our business to that segment. In the longer term, I mean, that is a segment we want to see a better recovery of for sure.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Okay. In terms of that underlying market recovery, things getting better, working through some of the challenges over the last couple of years, the VM market is seen overall. What do you think are the key drivers that we need to see that? I mean, in biotech, is it as simple as funding needs to come back and IPO activity needs to accelerate? You touched on CDMOs and large pharmas. What are the indicators we should be looking for that indicates that things have fully normalized?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, no, I mean, I think back to the smaller biotech, it’s an important component for sure. When you look at what has happened in the last six months, there have been a lot of acquisitions of some of these small biotech companies by big pharma because we all know a big chunk of these small biotechs maybe have less than a year of finance funding in their pocket today. That’s obviously a potential big challenge. There has been a lot of acquisition. Beyond that as well, big pharma has started to acquire a lot of IP from China lately, which is quite interesting to watch because when you are a big pharma today, you need innovation to come from somewhere.
If it’s not coming from the small biotech U.S., it has to come from other small biotechs somewhere else, or you have to double down on your own research and investment. From that point, we’ve not seen a real slowdown at all from the early phase projects at big pharma because the needs had to happen anyway because at the same time, they’ve got some of their product moving towards biosimilar, say, to expiration of the patent. They have to launch those new drugs, but it has to come from somewhere. I would say funding of small biotech is something we need to still track. If this is not happening, it’s really understanding where is the innovation going to come from in the next two to three years here.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Now that you’re seeing that recovery in CDMO, do you think that’s durable? Is there anything in particular that you think is driving that, or is it just as simple as budgets being released and customers being more comfortable spending?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: What’s interesting about CDMOs, because we really like to understand that indeed better and better, is we kind of subsegmented the CDMOs in three segments. We looked at the top three big guys who are on a total roll. I mean, we all know that. They are announcing capacity expansion constantly and as soon as their capacity is ready, they are already considering the next one. The big guys are really doing very well. At the other extreme of the range, the smaller guys are doing very well as well. I think where we had questions about how they could benefit or not from the Biosecure Act. I want to say partly in the U.S., a lot of the smaller CDMOs benefited greatly from it, where they got a lot of demand coming out of that.
The middle segment is maybe where there is still some question mark, even though we’ve seen some of these mid-scale CDMOs starting to get very, very important big deals happening with some big pharma companies. There were a couple of announcements being made in the last six months. Out of the three segments, that’s maybe the one where we want to see more sustainable growth coming in the next few quarters here.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Okay. Looking at business from a different lens, you talked about the various segments, you know, filtration, chromatography, analytics, proteins. You touched on how chromatography was a little bit, you know, had some fluctuations. Broader picture, you know, these all seem to be trending in roughly the same direction in fiscal year 2025. Anything in particular to call out, or is it really just sort of a broad-based recovery there?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: No, I mean, we just went through our five-year strat plan, which we do every year in July. Every time we go through that one, I’m looking forward to seeing what the different business unit leaders come with in terms of sales growth perspective for the next five years. I have to say for one of the first times in my entire career, I didn’t have to stretch anybody because more or less everybody came with very ambitious and very similar types of growth across the portfolio, which we love because people have a tendency to summarize like, hey, Repligen is just an ETF company or it’s just an opus company and so on. Remember the slide I showed earlier, we’re a very broad portfolio product company. In fact, we expect very similar growth across the entire portfolio in the next five years.
The only decision we’ve made is to, what we say, supercharge towards the specific businesses because we think there is probably to grow even faster than people came with, meaning a little bit more investment into those two segments because we think they have the ability to probably grow two to three points faster than the rest of the portfolio. There is a lot of alignment across the board, meaning we think we’re winning. What is common with all of these product lines is we have a very strong commercial organization and partly the key account management strategy is working beyond our expectations.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Okay. During your prepared remarks earlier, you touched on the product groups in terms of new modalities versus traditional proteins, with new modalities now a much bigger piece of the pie, 20%. Can you talk about what’s driving that in particular and where Repligen is best positioned to serve those customers?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, so remember when I said about what is where we are differentiating ourselves is really from a culture point of view, nimbleness, flexibility. That’s exactly what new modality market needs because, I mean, we shifted from a business where you could enjoy those beautiful huge maps where you would have the same platform working on 100, 200, 300 different monoclonal antibodies. When you were designing in one big monoclonal, you could probably generate up to $100 million U.S. dollars sales if you were designing across the board. Now comes new modality where the size of each new modality is probably a fraction of the size of a big monoclonal where maybe if you’re lucky, it needs a big biggest new modality product can be in the $20 million U.S. dollar of revenue range or so.
More and more, if it’s more in the single digit, maybe it’s $2 million to $3 million, $5 million U.S. dollars of revenue. For a company of our size, it’s still very attractive. Obviously, if you run a business that is in the billions of U.S. dollars, you’re thinking like, wow, what an investment needed and so on. That’s probably why we’ve been much more focused on it and definitely much faster in terms of innovation to really develop and launch products that didn’t exist before and where a lot of these companies had to use products that were developed and launched for monoclonal and that were not working very well in terms of yield.
Now they have a sharp partner like Repligen that is enabling them to increase their yield and productivity very, very much and we’re much more focused than others on that side because again, a $5 million business, I take it tomorrow, where if you are 10 times bigger, maybe you feel like, yeah, is it really worth the investment here? Innovation plays a big role here.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Can you talk about the customer mix and maybe some of the concentration risk with new modalities, maybe split between commercial and clinical, and if there are, obviously, there’s some major customers with big programs. Once they get to commercial stage, sort of how are you managing some of that risk?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, so we’ve decided when we reported out Q2 to be very granular on one specific gene therapy program because we were a bit tired of being constantly associated and blamed for whatever was happening there. Beyond that specific program where we mentioned indeed it’s going to be a 1% headwind this year and potentially a 2% headwind next year, we’ve been doing really well across the board. Obviously, new modality has been doing a little bit less well this year than the rest of the portfolio, which is why it’s even more impressive that we managed to increase our guidance for the full year, meaning again back to the fact we have a very diverse portfolio of products and customers. The monoclonal business has been doing fantastic for us so far this year, which has enabled us to increase our guidance for the full year.
As far as new modality, we are still very bullish about it. Just on the gene therapy side, there have been a couple of recent announcements that were extremely positive. Cell therapy is very much on a roll lately, and we’re very happy because we are playing a bigger role with the acquisition of 908 Devices on the cell therapy side, but also with some of these cell therapy programs embedding ATF technology recently. ADC, antibody-drug conjugate, is also growing very nicely. It’s all about playing across as many modalities as possible. When you are within one new modality, it’s playing across as many programs as possible so that if you have a headwind on one specific program, as that will always happen, you can compensate with the other program you’re designing too.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: On the customer side, we shared it in 2015, 70% of the business was with the top 10 customers. It’s much smaller now. Our biggest customer we called out for 2024 is only 6%. I think just by continuing to have a broad, you know, based portfolio, we’re inherently reducing that risk. Even within a customer, it’s going to be multiple products. It’s going to be multiple programs. I think from a customer side, very well diversified, continue to do so. You mentioned ADC, cell therapy, gene therapy, still a lot of opportunities there. Has there been any change in terms of, more on the clinical side, customer investment decisions or priorities in the light of some of the policy changes in the administration in the last couple of months?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: We’ve not seen many, honestly, Mike. I mean, obviously, the headwind on the gene therapy happened and so on. I think there are a couple of companies at more or less at the same time said, hey, we’ve made the decision to step out of gene therapy. We’ve not seen any other negative signal on that side. One thing I think people have to realize is 50% of the funnel of big pharma companies in new modalities today. They realize a lot of the diseases that are not being cured today have a real big chance to be cured with some of these new modality drugs. There are three drugs that are in the very late phase of development right now that are expecting a very big readout in the next six to twelve months.
I think that’s going to be absolutely very important for the new modality field to see how these guys make it or not to the market for sure.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Okay. You’ve touched on ATF a number of times in your remarks already. Obviously, a lot of concern here over the last couple of months and quarters about a potential entrant from a competitive product. Could you just take a step back and sort of walk us through your position there? You know, how important ATF is to you and just sort of what makes that such a unique growth driver for you?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, no, I mean, I tell you, with every competitor one day on ATF, of course. I’m almost wishing it’s happening sooner than later because it’s going to help indeed evangelizing even more process intensification and probably accelerating the growth of that type of technology. We’re seeing very little today, which again doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen tomorrow. The real competitor to ATF today is TFF, which we happen to have as well a very good play at. We are winning a lot on the TFF side for process intensification as well because we’ve got 14 years of experience in process intensification. I think we made the exercise originally, combined 250 years of experience of people in process intensification. As you all know, the pharma industry loves to know who they are dealing with and somebody who knows about a specific technology.
Those 14 years of experience developing what we know is the best technology and the leading technology in the market today makes us feel very confident about our ability to stay very strong in that market for the next 10 years.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: We have a lot of penetration within the top pharma and the top CDMOs with ATF. That’s the good news. Even better news is many of them only are using it for one drug or one product and one program. There is a lot of opportunity for expansion that can come with that as well. When Olivier mentioned supercharging certain products, this is one that we absolutely see as a big growth driver for us going forward. All right. Going back to the underlying view of this year and maybe the setup for next year, talk about the order growth. Maybe you could dive into that a little bit more in terms of what you’re seeing on consumables versus equipment, how the equipment demand has shaped up and your forward thinking on that.
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, actually, Mike, we’ve been doing really well in terms of consumable order for the last seven to eight quarters. What was lagging behind was more equipment. I have to say out of the last four quarters, we had three quarters where order intake on equipment was really nice. The anomaly for us was more quarter one where we did see, in quarter one, there were two reasons. First of all, comps were quite difficult for us because we had the highest ever hardware order delivery in quarter one of 2024. It’s also the fact we’ve seen some projects being delayed from quarter one to quarter two. The fact we rebounded in the high teens growth in quarter two for hardware makes us feel like we’re doing the right things. We are very concerned about hardware because we really play in two fields.
One is the ATF hardware, the other one is the downstream hardware. ATF hardware, you would say in the toughest time, probably people are going to accelerate process intensification because that can enable them to achieve better cost of goods and less CapEx requirements. For the downstream part of our portfolio, we are definitely gaining market share because we’ve got very strong technology, which are combined with our PET technology flow, VPX, which is now included in 25% of our downstream hardware sales, and which is becoming a huge differentiator where a lot of customers who bought competitors’ hardware in the past are asking us now to even install our PET technology into competitors’ equipment. I like to make the analogy to iPhone, where when you had the first iPhone with a camera and you said, I don’t need a camera, my camera is of much better quality.
Now, 10 years later, you’re buying the new iPhone just because of the better quality of the camera. That’s kind of what we’re thinking is going to happen with our hardware where people start to realize they can’t probably live without having the ability to measure protein concentration live. Next year, we’re going to launch a second technology that’s going to enable people to measure protein aggregation as well. We think this is going to become so important for them to run their manufacturing efficiently that it’s going to become mandatory for them to buy our systems.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: As we look ahead to 2026 and just as we approach next year, high-level thoughts on where you think the industry overall is going to go. You called out some of the specific headwinds you have with that one customer. Any other moving pieces we should keep in mind?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: No, I mean, we all know like before COVID, the industry was typically growing anywhere between 8% and 12%, 8% being a bad year, 12% being a very good year. I don’t see any reason why we’re not going to be back to those trends because, and probably this year we’re already back, probably more towards the lower end of the range. The only two big changes that happened between COVID and now are probably China on one side and new modality on the other side. We would say China is set for a really significant rebound probably from next year onwards, even though I’m always cautioning a little bit, people, by saying it’s not because the biopharma end market is probably going to be back to very nice double-digit growth from the second half of next year onwards. That’s the way to win for us. European and U.S.
bioprocessing companies are going to be the same because there is much more local competition today than there was five years ago. That is why at least from our side, we’re working on what I think is a very differentiating in China for China strategy now to make sure we’re going to take advantage of the end market growing in very nicely. New modalities we talked quite a lot about earlier. It’s all about the ability of bioprocessing companies to win by being faster to develop the right innovation to be able to support those customers’ growth in the next five to ten years. I think the 8% to 12% is probably the right target. We as Repligen, we’re confident that we can grow faster than this 8% to 12% by five points or so. That’s what has happened at least so far this year in the first half.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Okay. You just touched on China there. Maybe we’ll dig into that. Still a relatively small part of the business here, underexposed to China relative to most of the companies in the space, underexposed to APAC as well. What’s your strategy? You talked about local for local being more and more important. Can you get a little bit more granular on that, and how do you see that playing out over the next couple of years for you?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Sure. I mean, our presence in Asia is definitely too low. We’re only at 15%. Our target is to at least move to 20% of our sales in five years being in Asia. I think the strategy in China is very different from the strategy out of China. In China, we talk quite extensively about really working with local partners, probably to start with as an OEM partner, and later on we’ll figure out what the play should be. Outside of China, it’s to definitely have a bigger presence locally and probably focusing on some of the big potential customers in the three main regions that are Korea, Japan, and Singapore, and then making sure indeed we’ve got a bigger player in Asia for Asia for some of the specific parts of our businesses here.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: On the topic of local competition, that’s been a concern for U.S. or European vendors for a number of years. You’re saying you think that’s becoming a bit bigger and bigger.
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Sure.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: In China? Yeah.
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, for sure. I mean, not only because five years before you maybe had one local competitor on each part of the portfolio, and now it’s probably up to three to four. On top of it, from a quality point of view, those guys have really improved quite drastically. Where probably five years ago or so, people would have had a lot of question marks about working with those guys, their quality has improved quite a lot. They are still struggling probably from a pure innovation point of view, which is why again I think we have a potential real good play ourselves because we are the most innovative bioprocessing company, and this is what those companies still need. I think by finding the right partner and combining their local manufacturing capabilities with our innovative products, we think we have a really good opportunity down there.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Are those competitors more focused on more niche parts of the market or bigger players that are emerging? Just what does that local marketplace look like?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, they are still more specialized, but there are a couple of companies that have become much broader as well. There are at least two companies that are now beyond just having one of the modalities, but maybe two or three. I don’t think there is anyone yet that has got the full offering, but it’s fair to assume like three years down the road or so, one of these companies will probably be across the board, I would imagine.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Okay. In terms of China demand and China end market overall, there’s been a lot of news in terms of gradual recovery in pharma and biotech in China in terms of local pharma and biotech. There’s been a lot of news in recent months in terms of partnerships with multinational pharma and maybe even straight-up acquisitions. How do you see that impacting the demand and where are you targeting that?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Yeah, what I think is really the big game changers that took place in the last six to twelve months in China is all of the money that is being injected with all of these U.S. European pharma companies acquiring IP from some of these local Chinese companies because they were forced like five, six years ago or so by the Chinese government to switch from being biosimilar developers to becoming innovative drug developers. What they were missing was cash because the reimbursement prices of biosimilars went down so much like those local companies were struggling to generate any profit at all. Now with all of the cash that is being injected, I think that will really accelerate the development and the launch of some of these innovative drugs. Keep in mind, almost 50% of antibody-specific drugs funnel is sitting in China today.
I don’t have the exact number on ADC, antibody-drug conjugate. I want to say it’s almost a third, if not 40%. They have a lot of funnel that just need money to be able to accelerate and launch those drugs. That is why I do believe the biopharma market is going to start growing a lot. It’s only probably 18% of the China population today that has got access to the drug, where in U.S., Europe, we are probably around 85%, 90%. Just from a population point of view, there is a huge growth potential for those people to get access to those drugs as well here.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Okay. I want to make sure we got about 10 minutes left. I want to make sure we touch on M&A. You mentioned it earlier in your presentation. I think you called them 908 specifically, but you’ve done about almost a dozen deals in the last number of years, really filled out the portfolio. What do you see as M&A in terms of how important that is to the strategy going forward and where are there still gaps for you to address?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: It is very important, but it’s not critical at the same time. That’s why when we wrote out the Q2 earnings call, we said we really need just modest M&A to be able to double the size of our company in the next five years because just organic growth is going to pretty much bring us there. At the same time, we’ve got about $700 million of cash today and with the aiming of doubling the size of the company in the next five years, we’re going to generate a lot of cash in the next five years.
We are going to obviously watch opportunities, and if we find a good opportunity where we are really bringing very differentiating technologies that ideally bridge one of the three product gaps we have in the portfolio and that brings the right financial either from the topline growth or from a maybe creation point of view, we might consider doing a bigger one in the next five years as well. We don’t absolutely need it to double the size of the business here.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: I think those gaps you called out, you know, cell media, bioreactors, virus inactivation, are those the areas you’re specifically targeting or could it be technology plays or maybe something?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: More than bridging those three gaps because there are very few companies available for that, it’s going to be really looking at what are the breakthrough technologies that are being developed. If we feel there is a segment that we might not have a play at all today, but that is a real big game changer because the technology is absolutely unique, we might move forward. It doesn’t have to be absolutely one of the three areas we talked about here.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Okay. All right. Jason, maybe I’ll pivot to you for a sec. Let’s talk about the margin opportunity going forward, you know, both from a gross margin and operating margin line, a couple of moving pieces in fiscal year 2025 again and go forward plan. Just talk about your priorities for investment in the business and where do you see margins going over the near to medium term?
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: Yeah, I mean, so if you look at the longer term view, we’ve talked about trying to get probably about to the 30%-ish, work towards that from an EBITDA perspective. I mean, the equation is going to be, look, every year you come in, you’re going to have inflation from the salaries that you pay, you know, just overall inflation. You got to make up for that with pricing, which I think we do a good job there. With the growth and the supercharging, you know, sort of mix of what’s going to grow faster over the next several years, I think we’re going to see a little bit of mix lift, if you will, from that. We got to generate productivity in our factories. That’s the day-to-day operating efficiencies, and that could be optimization of the network and looking at our overall sort of footprint.
That kind of helps get you to that growth on the gross margin side. It’s probably $100 million, maybe to $200 million on the range kind of annually over the next few years. To drive the operating margin or the EBIT level of margin, it’s managing OpEx, right? You know, we ultimately need to grow our OpEx at a rate lower than our sales growth. We got to do that while we’re also just balancing the investments we need to make to be what we call fit for growth. What we needed in our people, our processes, our infrastructure systems, what we needed to go from $100 million to $700 million, $800 million is very different than to be able to double in the next five years. We need to strengthen that in a lot of ways.
That’s where we’re going to be focused on driving some of those investments, again, managing it in a way where we still get that volume leverage, if you will.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: Maybe you can talk about price as a lever. Where is price for you now in fiscal year 2025, and just sort of any opportunities to crack that a little bit more?
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: Yeah, we typically get kind of low single digit price. We’ll go out with announcements higher than that and then work with our customer base and land kind of in that low single digit. We’ll see that again this year. I think what’s interesting is, again, with the differentiated portfolio we have, we often get challenged, oh, don’t you have more pricing power? I think we’re just very balanced in how, you know, the best way to create new competition is to overprice your customers or them to feel that you’re being too aggressive there. We find the right balance in that equation and we’ll continue to do that.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: All right. Just got a couple of minutes left. We’ll go to our usual closing question. Olivier, Jason, what do you feel is most underappreciated or misunderstood about Repligen or maybe if there’s any selling points you want us to keep in mind going ahead to 2026 or sort of what’s top of mind for you?
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: I would really repeat something I’ve mentioned a couple of times already. We have a very broad portfolio of products. Don’t think we are just one product or the other. I was myself really impressed when I joined the company two years ago to see the breadth of the portfolio we have. I think we’ve done an amazing job to train our sales organization to be able to resell the entire portfolio, which is why we were maybe selling one single product to all of these big pharma two years ago. Now we’re selling three or four to those guys, and it’s just the beginning of the story. We’ve got much more than three or four products, but also people are just starting to understand the capabilities we have. That’s going to be a huge, huge headwind.
Our business is very de-risked compared to what it was 10 years ago, of course, where we were mostly dependent on two businesses. Now it’s across multiple products, multiple customer bases, and so on. That’s really the key message here. We’re very confident, fantastic start of the year. We’re very excited. Yeah.
Mike Riskin, Bank of America Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team, Bank of America: All right. Sounds good. Thanks so much. Thank you, everyone.
Olivier Loeillot, CEO, Repligen: Thank you.
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