Repligen at Stifel Conference: Strong Growth Amid Challenges

On Tuesday, 11 November 2025, Repligen Corporation (NASDAQ:RGEN) presented at the Stifel 2025 Healthcare Conference, showcasing robust third-quarter performance with 18% organic growth. Despite headwinds like reduced COVID-related sales, Repligen remains optimistic, driven by a diversified product portfolio and strategic investments. The company aims to outpace market growth by more than 5%, although short-term profitability is impacted by recent investments.

Key Takeaways

• Repligen achieved 18% organic growth in Q3, with non-COVID growth at 16% year-to-date.
• The company beat earnings expectations by $0.05 per share.
• Significant investments in talent acquisition are expected to drive long-term profitability despite short-term margin impacts.
• The filtration business faces challenges with reduced COVID sales and supply chain delays.
• Repligen is focusing on new modalities like cell therapy and antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs).

Financial Results

• Organic growth reached 18% in Q3, with a 16% increase in non-COVID areas year-to-date.
• Operating margins decreased by 70 basis points to 14.2%.
• Hardware revenue increased by 20%, driven by a differentiated product portfolio.
• The company maintains a target of achieving a 30% EBITDA margin by 2030.

Operational Updates

• Analytics and protein franchises exceeded expectations in Q3.
• The emerging biotech segment showed a rebound, contributing to positive results.
• Delays in fluid management are shifting revenue recognition to early 2026.
• The Chrome franchise performed above expectations, aided by securing big pharma customers.

Future Outlook

• Repligen aims to double its size in the next five years, implying a compound annual growth rate of about 15%.
• Significant rebound in the China business is anticipated in the second half of next year.
• Onshoring initiatives are expected to generate opportunities starting in mid-2026.
• The company is preparing for growth in cell therapy, ADCs, and lipid nanoparticles (LNPs).

Q&A Highlights

• Improved funding for emerging biotech in Q3, though purchase order impacts may take six months to materialize.
• Filtration growth outlook revised to the lower end of 10-12% due to supply delays.
• Strong demand for custom resin solutions in the protein business.
• Equipment revenue is up 20%, with potential for increased consumables revenue in future quarters.

Repligen’s comprehensive strategies and innovative approaches are detailed in the full conference call transcript below.

Full transcript - Stifel 2025 Healthcare Conference:

Daniel Arias, Analyst: Quarter.

I’ve been wrapping up the quarter for a lot of these sessions as a kickoff for Repligen. It was a good quarter. It was 18% organic growth. Each of the key product areas was up double digits. Op margins were 14.2% down 70 basis points. You beat the street by $0.05 on the bottom line. Maybe just talk a little bit about what got you there and what you think about where the various components of the business are right now.

Yeah, no, absolutely Daniel, you’re right. We were obviously very happy about our quarter 3 results. I mean, year to date non Covid organic growth of 16%. So obviously we are delighted about that. What I think is really important is to figuring out we really have that broad and innovative portfolio of products. Sometimes people have a tendency to summarize our business in one single product line, but we are very diverse and quite. Quarter three was a showcase here where really the two franchises that over delivered were analytics and protein, which was not completely expected to be very open here. That was really a good surprise. Again, the breadth of our portfolio is a testimony of how we can grow faster than market.

We’ve always said we want to grow more than 5% above market growth and this year we’re probably going to be significantly above that. In terms of market segment, we know biopharma recovered almost a year and a half ago, CDMO probably about a year ago. What was really the good surprise of quarter three was small biotech where for the first time in a long period of time we had a really nice rebound both in terms of sales, but even more in terms of orders. I just say really I’m delighted by the commercial execution we have. I mean, you know Dan, like inside Jon, I had a lot of focus on the big accounts and our key account management strategy. I mean this is just working beyond our expectations. Yeah, overall very happy about the quarter.

Yeah, the emerging biotech element of the mix was interesting. Can you just expand on that a little bit? Does that involve only pre-revenue biotech companies? How much of that was China and what’s going on over there with their own biotech development trajectory? I’d love to hear just a little bit more about what got you to this more encouraging position that you’re in.

Yeah, no, absolutely. What we call emerging biotech for us are any biotech companies that do not have a commercial product on the market yet. For example, Sarepta would not be counted as an emerging biotech because they already have a commercial drug. It is any company that does not have any commercial drug yet on the market. Obviously, we are always trying to understand why this market segment did so well for us in quarter three. The easy answer could be, oh, funding has been much better because funding of biotech really went up to about EUR 12 billion in quarter three versus, I think, EUR 8.9 billion in quarter two and EUR 8 billion in quarter one. Great improvement on that side.

This is probably too early to say this is money going directly into those biotech companies that triggered some of the POs because typically there is a six-month lapse of time between the time they get funded and the time they spend the money. We think there are probably a couple of other factors and probably the biggest one is a lot of biotech companies have been acquired in the last six to nine months in the US and we have a specific example of a biotech with whom we’ve been working for several years on a specific custom resin. As soon as they got acquired we got a huge PO coming within the next two weeks or so. I think there is definitely a lot of money entering into those biotech world via acquisition.

Hopefully in the next few quarters we’re going to see some of this better funding also having an impact on further growth. Order intake was very high so we are really pretty excited. We need to get confirmation the next two to three quarters and then we’ll be able to celebrate more. As far as China, I mean it’s not so much really biotech in China that triggered that growth we see on the small biotech side because in China the biggest chunk of our business is really with a more established pharma company down there.

When everybody, when emerging biotech took its downturn and everybody was trying to understand exposure levels, the way that you had framed things was to say that there was, you know, 10-11% of revenues coming from the small biotechs and then you had some additional exposure through CDMOs, probably on the order of 500 basis points. So it kind of got you to a mid teens number. As an emerging biotech exposure level. Is that still the way that you would characterize things?

No, it’s lower than that Dan, for sure. If you just exclude CDMOs for a while, I mean our exposure to the small biotech segment is below 10%. Our sales in quarter three were exactly 9% to that segment. The CDMO bucket is a little bit more difficult to figure out because you do not really know exactly what type of customers those small biotech have, but I would add probably a couple, maybe maximum 3 points of business coming from small CDMOs going into small biotech. If you aggregate the two together, it is less than 15%. I would see it more around the 11-12% range at this stage. Owned.

Okay, maybe just thinking a little bit about some of the business areas or the product areas. Filtration. When I think about where your commentary has consistently sounded good, it’s on ATF for sure. That sounds like a product line that’s doing very well and has done well for you. And the filtration outlook for the year is 10-12% but it actually went from the middle of 10-12%, which is obviously 11%, to closer to the back end of the range. Those two ideas seemingly are moving in opposite directions. Can you just maybe clarify your outlook for filtration this year? I guess the natural next question would be how do you think ATF does going forward and what can filtration grow at going forward?

Yeah. If you allow me, I’ll start by being very positive on saying it’s amazing to see we’ve been able to raise guidance twice with indeed filtration now going more towards the lower end of the range. Meaning like the three other franchises have been doing extremely well for us. Again, the showcase in quarter three was really analytics and protein. Back to filtration and before answering about the 10% instead of 11%, if you think about 2024 where we had still about $11.5 million of COVID sales plus the headwind we are facing right now with that specific gene therapy program, the 10% growth this year on filtration is really more around 15-16%. I think it’s important to ground people with that because the filtration business is doing very well.

Now to the point about why 11 to 10 within the filtration portfolio, we’ve got the fluid management business that is included there, and we’ve had incredible traction this year in terms of order intake. We were hoping probably by mid-summer that we would be able to get more products out of our plants to be delivered in quarter four. Unfortunately, the increase has been so huge, our plants are running a little bit behind, and we had to inform a few of our customers that some of the deliveries that we were planning to do around November, December are going to be happening more towards January, February.

The real only reason why we move from 11 to 10 for filtration is just a delay of supply of some of these orders we got now for the last six months in fluid management that are going to be delivered in the first quarter of 2026.

It is a pretty classic analyst thing to do to pick the one out of four businesses that does not have an increase in cost. Focus on that one. Let’s talk about some of the other ones. Chrome is having a standout year this year. What do you attribute that to? Then when we think about this mix, to our point on filtration, what is the likelihood that Chrome ends up being the faster growing segment between the two?

This year has been beyond our expectation on Chrome. Let’s take a step back. Last year was probably, if I had one franchise I was not very happy about last year, it was Chrome. We made quite a couple of changes in terms of organization there, both from a commercial and from a product management point of view as well. Now we have a team that is really focused on grabbing more of these big pharma customers. Historically, we’ve had a lot of traction with CDMOs, but it has been more complex to convince big pharma companies to switch to pre-packed columns. This year we managed to convince two of these big pharma companies to switch. That’s great news.

The less positive news is very often when we start entering into a new relationship on a pre-packed column, we have to take care of buying the resin for a certain period of time, typically one to two years. This has some dilutive effect from a margin point of view. Where our sweet spot, if you look at the entire Chrome business, is to be anywhere between 20-25% of our sales on naked resin. This year we are more towards the upper end of that range, where last year we were below the lower end of that range. That is an investment we are making and we are so glad because now we have converted two big pharma companies and typically this is for the long term and we are going to be working with these guys for the next several years here.

In terms of future growth, when we went through our strategy in July, we came with very similar growth across the four different franchises. There is literally only 2% difference between the lowest growth CAGR we have for the next five and the highest we have. It is really very cohesive across the entire portfolio.

Keeping it moving to proteins. That was an upside segment for the quarter. To what extent was the surprise for you related to just market demand versus maybe some of the things that you’re doing with the new ligands that you’re developing, the new resins that you’ve been developing, customers like Tanti, Purelite, etc.

Yeah, no, I like people to really understand, like we had to change our business model on protein almost 180 degrees over the last three, four years. Big credit to Tony and the team here. We started that exercise already a few years ago or so. We really had to move from being a pure OEM partner to two or three companies to now having our own destiny in our own hands. It all started with the acquisition of Avitide a few years ago where it gave us access to developing custom or catalog ligands. With the acquisition of Tanti last year, now we’ve got the ability to develop full resin solution for customers. I mean, there was a need on the market.

I mean, a lot of companies have been really waiting for a company like us to come and offer them those customization resin opportunities. And we’ve been really bombarded by demand on custom on one side. At the same time we’re also developing our own catalog resin. We launched a double stranded RNA resin a year ago. We’re going to launch two or three new resins by the end of this year, beginning of next year. Between catalog resins and custom program, we’ve had really a lot of great traction over the last several quarters. If you look back this year, both quarter one and quarter three, we had some really good surprises of customers to whom we indeed develop custom resins.

One in quarter one, one in quarter three, where they came and say, hey, I want to order you a significant amount of that resin you develop for us and we’re going to, you are going to use it right away. I think it’s still going to be lumpy probably for the next few quarters because we are just starting to have some of these custom resin projects happening. We’ve done so many seeding over the last several quarters now that I’m really optimistic. It’s going to be a very nice growing business for us.

Do you think that could be a double-digit growing business for you more often than not?

Yeah, no, absolutely. That’s what we’re aiming for. I mean, think about the big picture of Repligen. We said we want to double the size of the company in the next five years. That means a CAGR of about 15% across the board. As I mentioned, every single franchise is going to be growing almost similarly. It means yes, it’s going to be one of them double digit for sure.

Maybe we’ll talk about new modalities. In my humble opinion, the first six months of the year and the conversation around Repligen were very much tied to just concerns over this class of drugs. Pfizer, Intellia, Biogen, Vertex, exiting the AAV space. Sarepta had the issues that it did or does. Yet when we talk to you about the things that are going on in the business, your point is that X Sarepta things sound, X the one gene therapy customer, I should say, things sound pretty good. Can you just sort of lay out the way that you see emerging modality demand today, excluding the very obvious partners for whom we’ve accounted for in the guide, et cetera?

You know, you’re absolutely right, Dan. I mean we got beaten up quite a bit about new modalities at least during the first half of the year. Now when I look back, I almost think it was a blessing for us in a way because we’ve been talking about that very diverse portfolio of product and us being across multiple modalities and the fact that even though we had some headwinds this year, we managed to increase our guidance twice, both in quarter two and quarter three means indeed we have that very diversified portfolio of customer and different type of application we’re dealing with. That’s how we’ve been succeeding in the past, that’s how we are going to succeed in the future as well. I mean we are not depending from one program and only one. I mean we’re across a huge amount of different programs.

If your question is more specific about new modality, we are still absolutely very bullish about new modality. I mean I’m absolutely convinced new modality are going to be doing very well over the next five to ten years. I mean just look at the funnel of most big pharma company today. I mean they still have almost 50% of their product in their funnel that are one of these new modality products and then they realize like from a therapeutical point of view they’ve got incredible potential and so on. Will there be some headwinds sometime? Yes, probably, which is why again we need to be broader.

Where we were mostly focused on AAV and, sorry, gene therapy and mRNA in the past, I mean this year we have been much more focused on other new modalities like cell therapy with a lot of wins in the last six to twelve months. Also antibody drug conjugate, which I know we are not counting yet as a new modality, but in a way it is a new modality and we have a really A to Z workflow of solution for antibody drug conjugates. We are just making sure we are playing across the board and whatever our customer needs from us, we are capable to turn around very fast innovation for those specific product line and so on.

Yeah, we’re still very optimistic and maybe demand is muted for us in the second half, might be muted partly next year because of the headwind we have on Sarepta. But considering the breadth of the portfolio we have, I mean, we are very confident about our future opportunity to grow.

Can you talk a little bit about cell therapy? It’s the smaller portion of the CNG mix for you, but it does sound like you have appropriate products there and it sounds like you’re investing there. How do you feel like that portfolio could evolve for you?

No, I mean when you look at the funnel within new modalities, I mean the richest funnel across the board right now is really on cell therapy. And what’s funny, having been in that industry for so many years now and so on, is I’ve always mentioned about the two waves. I mean, back what, five years, ten years ago, suddenly people started to say, oh, cell therapy will never make it, and so on. But now we are really entering into the second phase. Like the same happened with peptides, the same happened with antibody drug conjugate, and now gene therapy is monitoring into the hangover period where probably the second phase will start again in a couple of years.

For us specifically on cell therapy, we’ve had incredible traction on the ATF side because obviously cell therapy is all about having the highest amount of cells in your bioreactor and ATF is the best technology for that. Also, with the acquisition of 908, we acquired really what is the best PAT technology today to track cell therapy manufacturing with a product called Maven. We also have a lot of traction on that side. Beyond those two product lines, we are absolutely looking at how to bring a broader portfolio of products offering on that side in the next few quarters for sure.

Okay. Maybe just to, I wasn’t planning on getting too in the weeds on the technology, but lipid nanoparticles are something that when you read about where the field is increasingly going, you land on that. There are products, I think, in your portfolio that address the needs for those customers. Can you just sort of like make us feel okay about the idea that should product demand increase there, you will have the solutions that are necessary in order to keep doing what you want to do.

Yes, thanks for bringing that one because I forgot to mention it earlier. Indeed, Dan. What we love about lipid nanoparticle, beyond the fact the technology itself is absolutely brilliant, is lipid nanoparticle can be used both in gene therapy, but also in mRNA technology as well, and even in a couple of others as well. The application of LNP can be pretty broad and LNP require quite a broad range of bioprocessing components from filters, but also purification technologies and obviously potentially some of the single-use component as well. We were getting more and more asked to support customers specifically with workflow solution for the LNP network. That is also another area where we think there is a lot of potential as well.

The products that are appropriate for those customers are the same ones that.

Very similar. Yes, but same one in terms of the big bucket filters, purification, consumable and then single use component. They might require specific innovation because the needs might be slightly different. It is the same categories, but innovation will probably be of essence here because people will have specific, specific needs here.

Okay, maybe thinking about onshoring and some of the things that are being talked about certainly in the life sciences space. I think that’s the reason that our group has a pulse right now. You’ve been one of the management teams to be willing to talk about 2026 being a year where you think some things could happen. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to dramatically change the picture for you now next year, but there should be some bubbling activity. What do you have as far as expectations go for some of these sites being moved onshore, Greenfield or brownfield activity leading to additional product demand.

Yeah. I’ll take just a quick step back because I think maybe during our earnings call I mentioned something that was maybe slightly confusing. We’ve gotten a lot of RFPs in the last three months, meaning a seat at the table to answer some of these very big RFPs, which we never saw before. The reason is because our key account strategy has now enabled our big accounts to understand the breadth of the offering we have in terms of hardware offering and so on. None of these three or four big RFPs we received in the last three months were linked to onshoring. Now, talking about onshoring. Yeah, we do.

We do start to have some discussion with some of these companies who have got plans for onshoring in the US and what we think is going to happen is probably the big onshoring RSPs to be issued towards mid year 2026, maybe quarter three of 2026, and then depending on one company on the other end, whether they’ve got an existing site or not, they might put some people out as early as end of next year and to be delivered as early as beginning mid of 2027 or later if they have to build a brand new site. What I think is important, and we talked a little bit about it recently, is the numbers that are being announced are probably a bit too high, too inflated.

Even if it’s not $500 billion that have been announced overall, even if it’s only $50 billion-$100 billion of investment, this is going to be a huge opportunity for bioprocessing companies because you can imagine that typically about 10%-20% of those amounts are going to go into equipment and that’s going to be a gigantic opportunity for a bioprocessing company. We are very excited because again we have now a seat at the table that we didn’t have a couple of years ago and we’re starting to be involved in all of these RFPs. It’s an exciting time for sure.

Which product segment do you think ends up being the beneficiary of that first?

If you look at hardware today, it’s really from ATF to mixers which we’ve just launched beginning of this year and we’ve got a lot of traction from a technology point of view with a lot of big accounts right now. It is going down to all of the downstream hardware from filtration TFF system, including chromatography system as well. It is a pretty broad portfolio of product for us right now.

Maybe talking about hardware, which we didn’t sort of touch on explicitly, that revenue bucket was up 20% for you. Can you maybe just elaborate on what you’re seeing out of that customer base and then how you think the equipment funnel develops into the end of the year, beginning of next year?

No, absolutely. We’re seeing that segment definitely from a different angle than others. For the reason I just mentioned, we are still kind of a newcomer. When you are a newcomer everything is kind of incremental and we are still small. Obviously for us it’s easier to show greatness and show growth when you’re coming with much lower share than the other guy have. This being said, I mean I think we’ve got a very differentiated portfolio of product. As you know, we are pairing our downstream system with our PAT technologies which have got huge traction. So much traction that customers who have bought equipment from competitors are now asking us to install our PAT technologies on third party equipment. This is another reason why we are so confident about our ability to win a lot of market share.

It is fair to say the market overall has not gone back yet to full speed procurement of hardware. We hope these onshoring projects will be a real booster to see that market back to normal here.

In prior periods when you see spikes or just increases in demand for hardware, are you able to see the consumables revenue increase a couple of quarters down the road and sort of point to that? Is that a dynamic that you feel is clear to you and is that something that you would think we should expect going forward?

Yeah, in that particular consumable bucket, it can be even faster than that where there is a lapse of time for the consumable like cell culture, maybe media, resin, filters. For specific consumable related to the equipment you’re selling, you typically get orders very soon after you get the order for the equipment because people can’t buy, can’t operate the plant without having the consumable. I mean, imagine you buy a razor, you’re going to buy at least two sets of razor blades right away, otherwise you just can’t use it. It is very similar in terms of single-use consumable flow pass flow kits. Very often people send you orders at the same time they send orders for the hardware as well here.

Okay, let’s talk a little bit about margins. Jason’s not here to defend himself, but I’m sure you’ll be fine. The outlook for the company on an annual basis has been for 100-200 basis points of op margin expansion per year. That was the way that the conversation took place in January. It does not feel like we will get there this year barring some dramatic fourth quarter performance. The question is how? There are obvious reasons for that, right? I mean you have to invest in this business. You’re up against four very large competitors. The portfolio is expanding. When you and Jason think about op margin as an expansion, as a philosophy, how much is it?

Is it opportunities for op margin expansion if they sound the right way, or we will deliver op margin expansion in a particular year, and is there the chance that that evolves over the next year or two?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, no, it’s fair to say we’ve invested a lot in our business this year and we’ve invested particularly in high level talents because we needed it. I mean, we realized like in order to scale the company and be able to run a double sized company in the next few years, we needed to bring a little bit more horsepower, more expense, people who have had decades of expense in the industry and so on. So we’ve invested definitely quite a bit this year. If you really look from a pure organic OpEx growth this year, our organic OpEx growth is 14% where our organic non-Covid growth is 16%. We’re still growing OpEx lower than organic, OpEx lower than we grow. Top line next year is going to be down.

We are aiming for probably 70% to maybe 75% of our top line growth in OpEx growth. I mean it’s fair to say like from 2027 onwards this is going to drop significantly, maybe to the 50% level or so. That’s what we’re aiming for, where we’re going to start. I mean it’s fair to say like we probably have about 80% to 90% of the leaders we need. And when I say leaders, I’m not even talking about my direct report, but the level below. We still have a little bit of homework to do, but we’ve done a big chunk of it, which is why next year we still believe it’s going to be around 70% of top line growth and then it will drop to 50% the year after most probably.

Okay, so the point is that from an investment perspective in personnel and just hiring, you should have crossed the Rubicon on some, most of the important folks that you need to hire and that tend to be expensive.

Exactly. That’s exactly it. Because whenever you are onboarding somebody with more expense, the price is a little bit higher. Also, you have to take care of the people leaving at the same time. That’s absolutely fair. Also remember our target is really to be at 30% EBITDA by 2030 and we’ve got a good roadmap to be there, probably with an acceleration towards the latter part of the five year cycle, but definitely on the way to the 30% EBITDA margin. In terms of gross margin, I mean, for the mid-50s in the next few years as well. We’ve got a good plan here for sure and we’re very focused on it. Be sure about that. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Rounding out the conversation as we get down to the last couple of minutes, I need to touch on China because it was a bit of an interesting situation in the quarter. Just in the sense that, you know, we started the conversation with the drivers in the biotech space and orders and generally speaking, the China biotech environment feels pretty good. But orders slowed for you a little bit in the quarter. Can you just maybe put that in context of comps and then just what you think the trajectory for China looks like going forward based on what you’re seeing?

Yeah, no, absolutely. We had a very strong order intake in China in quarter two and we did mention at our earnings in Q2 that we thought there was one region where there might have been a little bit of inventory building, that was China. No big surprise that order went down in quarter three. Obviously sales went up in quarter three. I really expect a significant rebound of China business for us in the second half of next year. I think we’ve almost now come to the point where we stabilize the business for us there and I think we’re going to start to see nice growth in the second half. We are very focused on implementing what I think is going to be a very unique strategy in China for China. Yeah, we are very optimistic to be back to growth.

I think this market is going to be one of the fastest biopharmaceutical markets from probably the second half of 2026 onwards. I want to make sure we have a play down there because it is going to be a huge opportunity for the industry for sure.

Maybe with our last question, Olivier, I’ll take it back to something that you mentioned with one of your first comments, which is that the difference between you and peers in terms of growth rates is changing, the spread is widening in a way that it really hasn’t in the past. What would you attribute that to?

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I mean, I still believe we are aiming for 5% above market growth in the midterm. So you’re right. This year we’re probably a bit above. We will see how it plays out in the next few years. Obviously we all know we’ve got that 200 basis point of headwind from that gene therapy program next year. But I think five points is an ambitious target enough and we’re going to keep on delivering that with our innovation and the fact 80% of our portfolio we don’t really have a competitor. But also keep in mind we have a huge tailwind because of our clinical exposure as well. I mean, we started the year with only 35% of our business being commercial.

Probably we’re going to land somewhere around 40% at the end of this year, but versus the big guys, who are typically 75%. Even sometime more commercial. I mean, being in clinical gives you a huge tailwind because every time a project moves from one phase to the other, you see almost a doubling of demand. That is the reason why we still feel like the 5% market growth is a very achievable target for us.

Okay, I’m going to leave it there. Olivier, I appreciate you spending the time with us. Thank you.

Pleasure. Thanks, Dan. Thank you.

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