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Repligen Corporation (NASDAQ:RGEN) presented a robust strategic overview at the Wells Fargo 20th Annual Healthcare Conference 2025 on Thursday, 04 September 2025. The company reported strong Q2 results with a 17% ex-COVID organic growth and increased full-year guidance. However, challenges such as a slowdown in a specific gene therapy program were also discussed. Repligen remains optimistic about its long-term growth prospects and strategic initiatives.
Key Takeaways
- Repligen reported 17% ex-COVID organic growth in Q2.
- Full-year guidance increased despite a gene therapy program headwind.
- The company plans to double its business size in the next five years.
- Strong focus on organic growth with potential strategic acquisitions.
- Optimism about the growing demand in the China biopharma market.
Financial Results
- Q2 2024 saw a 17% ex-COVID organic growth.
- Mid-teens top-line growth and 20% order growth in H1 2024.
- Full-year guidance increased by 50 basis points despite a 100 basis point headwind.
- New modalities contributed 17% to total sales in H1 2024, with gene therapy accounting for half of that.
Operational Updates
- Gene therapy program slowdown impacted revenue expectations, with minimal revenue anticipated in the second half of the year.
- Increased traction in cell therapy with ATF and PAT technologies.
- ATF technology is used in 50 commercial drugs, with growing adoption.
- Chromatography sales and orders increased by 30% in the first half of 2025.
Future Outlook
- Repligen aims to double its business size within five years, focusing on organic growth.
- The company is developing a specific strategy for the China market, anticipating increased demand by 2026.
- All franchises are expected to grow similarly, with potential for strategic acquisitions.
Q&A Highlights
- Repligen is confident in its ATF technology despite potential future competition.
- The company is actively exploring M&A opportunities with $700 million available for acquisitions.
- Minimal impact from tariffs, with potential volume increases due to IRA and MFN.
Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.
Full transcript - Wells Fargo 20th Annual Healthcare Conference 2025:
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: All right. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. Welcome to the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference. I am Brandon Couillard, cover Life Science Tools and Diagnostics.
Thrilled to have Repligen with us back at the conference this year joining us for this conversation. To my left from the company’s CEO, Olivier Luyeau and CFO, Jason Garland. Thank you both for being here.
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Thanks, Brenda. Thank you.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Olivier, maybe just best place to start would be with the quarter you just reported. I mean, you had 17% ex COVID organic growth, continued to see a nice strong recovery. Just unpack some of the key highlights and positive surprises from your point of view coming out of the quarter.
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. Sure, Brandon. I mean, we’re obviously really delighted about how Q2 played out overall. For us, you mentioned the 17% ex COVID organic growth, which is obviously a great testimony of a very strong rebound. We already had a really strong quarter one.
So this means like for the full first half of the year, we are really growing in the mid teens top line and our orders are growing 20%, which is obviously setting us up for a really nice full year 2025. So what I was particularly happy about is, I mean, we had great performance across the entire portfolio. And this has enabled us to increase our guidance for the full year by about 50 basis points, even though we had to incorporate about 100 basis points of headwind coming from that specific gene therapy program that everybody is well aware about. So we decided to be very transparent about that one, just to show like the greatness of the rest of the portfolio is not only enabling us to compensate for it, but even increase our overall year guidance, which mean like our monoclonal antibody business is doing very well. And then in terms of end markets, we’ve seen really great performance during the first half with both pharmas and CDMOs, but also both on the consumable and on the hardware side, which I know is probably a little bit of a standout for us because not everybody is seeing the same we’re
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: seeing on the hardware side. Within new modalities, it’s obviously getting a lot of attention, especially with Sarepta news. You, I thought, did a good job of kind of quantifying the exposure, you took it out of the framework for the year. First half was 10,000,000 expectations from there was, I think, 7,000,000. But they’re still making elevators, right?
It’s still on the market, but you’ve taken it all out of the second half of the year. Any updates that you’ve heard since in the past month now on that front?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. No, I mean, we’ve decided to be totally transparent on this one because we were hearing a little bit too much side noise about what was going on and how much we could be impacted. But in fact, we’ve always been pretty transparent. I mean, we said last year, our biggest new modality business was 3% of our sales. If you make the math, 3% of $635,000,000 was in the range of 18,000,019 million dollars This year, indeed, we had a pretty strong first half.
We assume and assume still de minimis revenue from that specific program for the second half, and we assume no revenue from it next year at this stage, just to be on the safe side. And whatever might happen will be an upside, which is a good position to be at. And again, we’ve got so much goodness, greatness on the rest of the portfolio that including every other new modalities that we are not very, very worried about that at all.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Jason, just remind us the new modalities bucket, captures cell, gene, a couple of things in there. How big is that revenue base? And is there something like 100 various customers that are comprised in there?
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: Yes. So, it’s around just less than 20% of the total business. And so, we yes, we’ve got several customers that have some good scale. So, it’s more than $1,000,000 right, of business. So, it’s not just a lot of small pieces that add up.
And so, there’s a lot of elements in there. I think that’s another piece of the testament of the portfolio, right? You might have gene therapy pressure, but we have cell therapy sort of tailwinds. And so that’s the balance of that.
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Just for first half, so new modalities were about 17% of our total sales in the first half. We deep dive a bit more into the split between what is gene therapy, what is mRNA, what is cell therapy. And we’ve come came to the conclusion probably gene therapy was about 50% of those 17% and then mRNA being about 30%, the rest being in the cell therapy, lentiviruses side. So it’s a bit lower than we thought initially here. And beyond that specific gene therapy program, the rest has been doing very well.
And if you hear about some of the recent news, I mean, couple of companies got really great funding on the gene therapy side and we’re seeing like the rest of gene therapy is still doing really well right now.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: You did, think, say orders were flat in the quarter for new modalities, which would suggest a pretty muted kind of revenue outlook for the back half. Anything particular driving that that you’d want to call out aside from Sarepta?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: No, I mean, obviously, if you just make the math, I mean, when we assume the Minimis revenue from Sarepta in the second half of this year, that’s obviously a headwind. Again, the reason why we increased our guidance is because we are more than compensating for it But for this year, obviously, it will represent a little bit of a slowdown for our new modality business overall. But what we’re really excited about, and Jason alluded to it, we start to see a lot of cell therapy program moving forward. And we have a really strong offering where ATF starts to be implemented quite a bit for some of the most promising cell therapy projects.
But also with the acquisition of nine zero eight, we’ve got a couple of PAT technologies that are focused particularly on the cell therapy side and then fluid management also. So we definitely see a lot of traction on that side of the new modality arena right now.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Instruments were certainly a highlight for me in the quarter. I think you talked about revenues up high teens, orders up over 20%. That’s been a real laggard, right, in terms of the recovery. And that message is different from what we’re hearing at other peers. Is this Repligen specific?
Is it an industry? What is your kind of assessment on the industry outlook for equipment? And yes, maybe start there.
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. No, I mean, if you look at the last four quarters, really the only quarter where we were not very happy about the performance of our hardware business was in Q1. But second half of last year, we already saw pretty nice rebound in Q3, very strong in Q4. Then Q1 was a bit of a disappointment. But the good news is indeed that we had a very strong funnel and a lot of it materialized in quarter two.
And maybe just to ground everybody for us, hardware is ATF hardware on one side, which we all know is really booming has been booming for the last several years. And then we’ve got all of our downstream hardware, which is both TFF and Chrome system. And on that side, we’re definitely gaining market share lately because first of all, our systems are really very high-tech, probably the most high-tech on the market. And as you know, we are combining those downstream system with our PAT technologies, the Flow VPX technology that enables to measure protein concentration live. Now one system out of four we’re selling includes that PAT technology.
And I mean, I like to always compare with the iPhone story where when you bought your first iPhone, you said, why am I buying it? I don’t need a camera on it. I have my own camera. And now you’re just buying the new version because of the camera. I think the same is going to happen with our system and PAT technology where people start to really learn how to use it and they realize this is generating a lot of productivity gain for them.
And now we see like even people who have bought system from competition, they are asking us to consider implementing our PAT technology on the competition system. So we have a lot of traction because of that for sure.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: That certainly sounds like Repligen specific innovation. I mean, I think one view has been, look, during COVID, there was a lot of excess capacity built. We’ve started to absorb that. It’s getting sopped up, and that would be perhaps the catalyst for instrument or equipment growth to normalize. Is that consistent with sort of your macro view of where we are in this cycle?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. I have been in that industry for more than thirty years now, Brandon. So I’ve seen those cycle happening more or less my entire career, where indeed CapEx spending grows more or less for seven years in a row. And then you enter into a three year cycle that might be a little bit more challenging. I strongly believe like when you look at available capacity right now, which starts to be somewhat limited in specific geographies.
And when you look at the upcoming growth from market like Asia, particularly and so on, I think we’re going to enter into that seven years growth cycle for hardware very soon again. So I’m very optimistic about that.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Okay. Maybe switching gears, biopharma revenue and orders up over 20% in the quarter. Anything in particular supporting that either in terms of consumables, instruments or geographically?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Well, I mean, we I said it already, it was really pretty much across the board. I mean, one thing we didn’t talk about here is, as you know, we focus a lot on the key account management strategy back two to three years ago. And I mean, we couldn’t be more delighted about the results we had. I mean, I’m going to celebrate my two year anniversary in the company. When I joined, I want to say, looking at the top 10 pharma, we were typically selling only one of our products.
Now if I look at as an average, we are probably selling three or four of our products to each of these big pharma. And we’re just starting, meaning like if you start selling imagine you’re starting fluid management or you start selling a system to a big pharma company, you can expect really significant growth coming over the next several years. So I mean that key account management strategy has been very good, particularly for a company like us, where it’s all about innovation, you need to get access to the key decision maker like the head of R and D, what we call MSAT, head of manufacturing, because these are the guys who are going to push a button saying we’re going to embed the innovation from Repligen. And I have to say we’ve had so much success with that. We’re really excited see.
I’d to spend
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: a little time on China, which I know is a small part of your business now, but it’s still an important market, right, for you. You can’t leave it, right? I think all the biotech activity is substantially happening there. You made an interesting, I think, comment on the last call where you kind of attributed the China weakness the last few years to government desire to shift from focusing on biosimilars to innovative drugs, which caused an air pocket, which I think different than common belief that it was kind of COVID related. Can you just unpack, what you were trying to express with that comment?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. No, I had the chance to live in the region for about three years, about a decade ago. So I’ve seen the China growing like more than 20% year on year for several years and so on. I think indeed what people or what all of us underestimated was the day the government indeed decided to stop subsidizing company to develop the number eight or number 10 or number 15 biosimilar of Avastin, Herceptin, Rituxan, you call it. I mean, it was a huge turmoil for the industry because those CEOs who were mostly coming from U.
S. West Coast big pharma companies, they knew very well how to develop and then launch biosimilars. They were just not capable to really work on very innovative drugs. So this happened probably about six years ago or so. But what everybody knows is China is very fast at adapting and so on.
So they had to immediately start to develop innovative drugs. So what did they do? Went to what was the closest to what they were doing so well, biosimilars, meaning they looked at antibody drug conjugate, they looked at antibody bispecifics, which was the closest in term of technology. And here we are five, six years later, where you’ve got almost half of the worldwide funnel of antibody bispecific that is sitting in China. And no surprise that now you start to see a lot of U.
S. Company buying this IP from China because with a little bit of a slowdown on small biotech in The U. S, there is so much IP sitting in China. So I think there’s a beauty of what’s happening right now for China is that there is a lot of money being injected in China, and I think that will accelerate further the growth of the pharma market down there.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: I was just going to touch on that. You mentioned that on the last call is billions of dollars that have been injected, licensing deals. There’s a lot of content that’s being bought from China and that, that should support or may support an improvement in demand in 2026. Is that kind of the right way to think about it? And how do you think about China just long term sort of growth profile in bioprocessing?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: No, I think China biopharma market is going to start to grow like probably faster than any other markets, probably at 2026. So what does it mean for bioprocessing like us and then others based in Europe and U. S? It means you need to have a very specific China strategy. And what I’m absolutely convinced is that China strategy cannot be the same we all had before COVID.
Because before COVID, you had maybe one local actor for each of the key franchises. Now you probably have three or four. And then where before COVID probably a new molecule developed in China would have 80% content from the European U. S. Bioprocessing company and 20 local, now it has almost flipped the other way around where it’s probably about 65 local and 35 U.
S, European. So we are absolutely convinced the way forward is to have a play in China for China and certainly considering collaborating with local company down there. But we very active on that side. I mean, brought two brand new leaders in the organization that I know from my past life and so on. And we’re working on a very aggressive strategy in China and outside of China as well.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Last one on China. What’s your assessment of the local competition, local competitive market? And what product categories is that most does that most proliferate? And any one or two things you’d like to call out as far as the kind of changes you made to your China organization or strategy last six months?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. No, as I mentioned earlier, Brandon, I mean, there are now quite a lot of well established company. There is one big one on the filtration side. There is a pretty big one on the equipment side. There are a couple on the chromatography resin side.
But beyond those leaders in each of the different submarket, you’ve got two or three companies behind. So I think really for a company like ours right now is to make sure we identify the right partner. I know people always ask what about IP here. If you pick up the right partner, and I had the chance to do that a couple of time in my previous slides and so on, I mean they can be absolutely very loyal to you. And at the end of the day, you’ve got two choices.
You don’t try anything in China, then you’re going to miss what’s going to probably become one of the fastest growing markets or you take limited calculated risk. And I think it can be a very, very strong positive story here.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Maybe switching gears over to the product categories within filtration, you talked about ATF being a positive story. There’s been some rumors about the potential competitive product this year in release. Do you care to comment kind of on that investor debate?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: No, absolutely, Brandon. So I’ve been hearing those rumors for the last two years. And all I can tell you is we probably have the strongest position we ever had on that side. And the reason is the following. I mean most pharma company and most CDMO have switched to use ATF today.
And the one that are not using it are using TFF, which we also have in our portfolio. And when I joined two years ago, I say, hey, when you deal with a very convicted, convinced head of R and D who says I prefer TFF from ATF, just agree with it and just make sure we sell the TFF solution to those companies. And that’s what exactly happened. I mean, we three pharma company right now, so the top 15 that are still more focused on TFF, we sold those guys, process intensification technology in the last two years. One of them we are about to convince to move to ATF.
So I’m absolutely very comfortable what’s going on. I’m not saying there will never be a competition. I mean, I’m surprised there is none, to be honest with you. I think there might be one day. This business we’re dealing with is a long time of development type of business where we started putting some of our ATS small scale equipment in 2014, so eleven years ago.
So yes, there will probably be somebody coming one day. It took us eleven years to go from zero to where we are today. So I’m reasonably confident like we are going to
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: be in fantastic shape for the next several years, yes. I think it was in the second half of last year, you alluded to a couple large blockbuster programs that you’ve been involved in. Do you still expect the large blockbuster equipment revenues to begin in the second half of this year? And any color on the cadence of how you expect that to fall, maybe, Jason, from 3Q, 4Q?
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: Yes. No. So it starts to roll in somewhat in 3Q and 4Q. Not much in third quarter. It’s really in the fourth quarter.
We’ll see the first piece. I mean third quarter is just about over at this point now. So and then that will then certainly continue into next year. But I mean we’re in 50 commercial drugs with ATF. And so it’s we highlight some of the blockbusters, but again, it’s that entire portfolio that really drives the growth.
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Maybe just to add a couple of piece of really good news. I mean, initially when we launched ATF, most people were using it at the end phase, which means directly link to the bioreactor. And then in the last few years, people moved toward using it more at the N minus one. And I think the main reason is because from a regulatory point of view, it’s easier when you have a launch product or Phase III product to implement ATF because from a regulatory point of view, don’t need to make a lot of changes in your filing. People are so delighted with the result they have at the N minus one level that we start to see a lot of companies saying we’re going to do both N minus one and N.
And N in principle is much larger volume than N minus one because you can put four controllers on an N bioreactor where you can put two on an N minus one. So that’s a fantastic development. And then most of the company customers we have today, they use ZTEF for one product. We start to see company telling us we’re going to implement it in the second one. And even one company told us we’re going to implement it in any Phase III and commercial drugs we have.
So we are obviously extremely excited about the ATF portfolio right now.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: It really seems to be hitting an inflection. I mean, do you think about the consumables pull through from that in ’twenty six? And we just think where this can go next three years, what would be like a blue sky scenario for uptake?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. I mean, maybe just to take a global picture, we mentioned like we are going to double the size of our business in the midterm. So obviously, people ask us what is midterm. We said, hey, for us, the strap plan is five years. So you would call it probably anywhere in that range time range.
So every single franchise that we have in our portfolio are going to grow almost similarly, yes. So some might grow a little bit faster, but it’s not like we only have ATF and nothing else. I mean, of our franchises are going to grow almost at the same growth level during the next five years. So ETF, obviously, is a very important one. And we mentioned, I think, about two to three quarters ago, like for the first time, consumable sales became higher than hardware, which is the normal development.
And we expect that to keep on going and that consumable obviously are going to become bigger and bigger. What I love within the filtration franchise is we have the little sister, as I call it, of our ATS business, which is our downstream system, where we’re probably about four, five years behind where we’re on ATS, but we are starting to position a lot of our downstream hardware equipment, and we’re going to generate a lot of consumables there over the next five to ten years. So what is happening right now in the ATS side, which will continue to grow really very strongly, the same will happen for us in the next several years on the downstream hardware side. Very excited about the entire filtration franchise. Chromatography was another highlight in the quarter, it’s
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: up over 40%. Any themes that you want to call out there that are kind of supporting that growth and maybe talk about sustainability balance of the year?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. I mean, of you might remember last year where we started to have a pretty good rebound across the board. The only franchise where we were not extremely happy last year was really chromatography, yes. So to see like after six months in 2025, we’ve got both sales and orders growing in the range of 30% is something we’re obviously very delighted about. For Chrome, which is mostly the opus column business, we’ve been historically doing extremely well with CDMOs.
We realized about a year ago like we needed to focus more on big pharmas. And one of the reason why we’re doing so well this year is we’ve convinced two big pharmas to switch to OPUS in 2025, and that’s one of the reason why we’ve seen a huge both sales and order increases so far this year and which normally when you start convincing a company to use pre packed column, you are in the very long term type of relationship with those guys.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Maybe switching gears over to Process Analytics, also pretty solid quarter with support from the mass business. I think the bulk of this business is C Tech. I think most of it’s late stage or commercial products. Where are you seeing the most interest for this? And are you ever able to get specked into a process that’s already been FDA approved?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. So you’re right. If you look at the analytical business, Anton, the majority of it is still C Tech. You’re absolutely right. Like we call us what you call MAZ-nine zero eight March year.
This year, we are planning on about €10,000,000 sales from that specific business. So if I may be now look at what you’re talking about, C Tech has got one commercial product, which is a solo VPA plus So this is a product that is being used mostly at line to measure protein concentration in PD, in research lab and so on. But then with the addition of nine zero eight, now we added four commercial products, namely Maverick, Maven, DeepChip and RoBelle. So we now have with five commercial analytical, small scale benchtop equipment that we are selling to any type of pharma company and so on. And then what I think you’re referring to commercial products in terms of end markets.
So we capitalize on the accretion of C Tech to launch the FlowVPX, which is that in line protein concentration measurement that is now being implemented in 25% of the system we are selling. So that is really where we get a lot of traction because this is mostly going into manufacturing and then for products that are being commercial in many cases here.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Got You alluded earlier to the key account strategy. It’s not necessarily kind of a new program, but where are you in this journey, let’s say? And any examples you can share where cross selling has made a meaningful contribution, which parts of the portfolio is it contributing most to growth?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. No, great question. I mean, mentioned earlier, we are really delighted about the program. I’ve not added more headcount on that side, finally, so far this year because we’ve seen so much growth with the 20 accounts we are focused on right now. I didn’t feel it was the right time to have even more for the timing.
I just want to make sure we are harvesting a lot of the leads that we’ve gotten out of those 20 accounts we’re covering today here. It’s about sixteen, seventeen pharma and then three to four CDMOs right now. And these are the usual suspects, obviously. So product lines that are benefiting from it mostly probably those all of the product line we have outside of ATF and OPUS, because ATF and OPUS were really our flagship products. But a lot of these companies didn’t know about our systems offering, didn’t know about our PAT offering, didn’t know about our fluid management offering and so on, Placica said and so on.
So I have to say, and we don’t mention it very often, but one of the business that has been growing really nicely for us lately is fluid management, because as you know, we made several acquisition over the last five years, but people really didn’t know about the breadth of the offering with that key account management program now, a lot of big pharma company who are really desperately looking for a new supplier because they’ve not been very happy about what they got from the other suppliers are just opening a store. So we’ve won quite a lot of RFPs on the fleet management over the last twelve months and that’s another big tailwind for us.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Innovation has kind of always been table stakes for Repligen. Anything on the new product front that you’re excited about that you we should keep on the radar next
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: year or two?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: No, no, you’re absolutely right. And before I talk about what’s coming and so on is when we went through our strat plan, I mean, and we all were convinced about it, but it was even more obvious when we went through our strat plan like each of the BU leaders were coming with very, very optimistic growth for the next five years. And I realize like a lot of it is linked to all of this innovation we’ve launched during the last five years. So I want to really make sure we take advantage of those incredible innovation we’ve launched in the last five years. This year, as you all know, we added the single use mixes that we launched towards the ’1.
We are going through a lot of customer demos right now, and people are very excited because it’s based on the MeteNova mixing technologies that a lot of people have been using for a long time, wherever they were buying stainless steel mixes. So we see a lot of traction. And then on the protein side, we launched a double stranded RNA end of last year. We’re launching three new resins in the next two quarters, and we already have a lot of customers who are willing almost to buy us out because these are really very innovative resins that are going to really fix problems that people had, partly on the new modality side. And then finally, nine zero eight, we talked a little bit about it.
We’re having a lot of features on MAVERICK right now, because we want MAVERICK to really become the reference for all PAT for upstream. We are testing MAVERICK on ATF. We should know by the end of this year whether it’s possible to combine Raman on ATF. If not, we might consider having a bigger play on the bio reactor side later on.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Jason, maybe just switching gears, it be great to just get an update on tariffs from a gross and net impact perspective this year and how that evolves in ’twenty six?
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: Yes. So, things have played out, right, we’ve had a lot of what’s coming, then you hear the news and then it changes the next day. So, we’ve been trying to be agile about that. And I mean, really, it’s a minimal impact. It’s a couple of million dollars really of top line, a little bit of dilution because you get that really at a pass through, if you will, or same you’re just passing on the surcharge.
So, it’s that $2,000,000 of zero margin. And then we also if there are other impacts coming through the supply chain side, we’ve incorporated into that in our pricing strategy as well, an indirect impact, if you will, from tariffs. But the immediate from a sales is a couple of million dollars. Okay.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Maybe staying with you, I mean, margins have obviously gone through a lot of volatility, let’s say, past couple of years. It seemed to have stabilized and then moving up again. I think you’re around 19% EBITDA margin this year. You talked about a 30% bogey in the out years. If Repligen is growing low double digits on top line, what kind of incremental should the business drop?
And are there other variables we should be thinking about beyond just operating leverage in terms
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: of that pathway toward Yes. Close to the So, we talked about that 30. We have also shared that it’s probably one to two points of margin improvement each year. I think to your point, whether it’s one or two or slightly above, but averages over that period could be certainly what your growth rate is for that period. We’ll get steady price increase.
That always comes through. I think we’ve done a really good job of kind of creating the productivity engine in the factories, and that’s coming through. But we may take bigger swings on whether it’s footprint optimization, what’s the right lay of the land with acquisitions. We constantly need to understand how do we optimize around that so that if you roll one of those projects through, you might see a higher bump come through. So, think of it as that one to two per year.
And mix as well could be something that could be, I’ll say, more of a tailwind for us. I don’t see it. It’s part of the piece. It won’t change it from one to two, but it will be more of a tailwind where we have seen a bit of a headwind over the last two years. So, what would be the positive mix?
So, it’s as we get proteins back to growth, right, because that certainly wasn’t the case last year, so that was a bit of a drag. We talked a lot about ATF. ATF is an accretive margin rate for us as well, above average, right? And then you might see some of the offset of that fluid management we’ve talked about is below average, right? And so that’s why these things sort of will balance out.
I don’t see it as a huge driver, but it’s going to be in the right direction.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Real quick, I’d love to get your State of the Union on what’s pharma MFN, what pharma tariffs kind
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: of mean to you? I mean,
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: I met with a company yesterday that thinks, hey, if prices come down, volumes go up. That’s reality of this industry and that’s a good thing for So, what is the nature of your conversations with customers on those two issues right now?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. No, I mean, you said something that resonates a lot because and it’s not MFN or it’s not it’s IRA. In that case, I mean, we just negotiated our first deal with one of our biggest account or one of our biggest product line recently because the product the lead products using our product is part of the IRA list. And it has been a fantastic win win for both company where indeed they told us exactly what you said. Volume is going to increase much faster than we thought initially here, but we had to just sell them a little bit from a pricing point of view.
And when they were just readjust a little bit, so I think it’s going be really accretive for both companies. So I think the might the same might apply for whatever might happen on the MFN side. Maybe to ground everybody, I mean, if you look at drug on the market today, imagine drug is sold at $100 I mean, cost of goods coming from bioprocessing is probably around $7 or $8 out of the $100 So it’s not like the majority of the cost or the price of the drug. So the majority is coming from commercialization, marketing, R and D development and so on. So I think I’m not saying there wouldn’t be some pressure on pricing.
There might be some, but I mean it’s probably not going to be top priority number one for pharma company. And for a company like ours, I’m almost thinking this could be a good opportunity because as you all know, we didn’t have the breadth of the portfolio we have today five, ten years ago. So meaning if for whatever reason, some of these pharma company would consider changing their processes and so on, it might enable us now to have a seat at the table for a new generation process and then could be a really good opportunity for us like for biosimilars today. That’s how we look at it.
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: Well, and the other thing is I’d say most of our products help create better yields or higher efficiency, right, reduce costs. So, again, it’s going to be a positive contributor to helping them to reduce the margin squeeze on price.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Lastly, balance sheet is in great shape, did the 09/2008 deal not that long ago. How does the M and A pipeline look right now, evaluations, size of assets in any areas of the business you’d like to prioritize that have more of an M and A wallet right now?
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Yes. No, I mean, we are always active and looking what’s existing. Obviously, with the current market condition, there are assets that might be at a more affordable price than before and so on. But again, that’s really what was coming out of our strat plan. We’ve got so much opportunity organically to really grow, and that’s why we said during earnings call Q2 that like we will double the business with potentially limited acquisition required, which doesn’t mean we are not going to make acquisition, but we can focus on the organic growth and then making sure we keep on looking at assets that are bringing us very differentiating technology.
If possible, technologies that are adding up to the workflow we have already in our hand and with the right financials. I mean, we have US700 million dollars of dry powder today. I mean, you make the math, I mean, doubling the size of the business, moving from 20% EBITDA to 30%, we’ll have a lot of cash available in the next five years. So we’re going to keep on looking what might be a good fit for us with no time pressure. That is really the messaging.
Jason Garland, CFO, Repligen: And lots of targets in the pipeline, a lot of activity.
Brandon Couillard, Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst, Wells Fargo: Super. Well, we’re out of time, so I have to leave it there. Guys, thanks so much for being here. Everybody, have a great day.
Olivier Luyeau, CEO, Repligen: Thank you.
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