Repligen at William Blair Conference: Innovation Drives Growth

On Tuesday, 03 June 2025, Repligen Corporation (NASDAQ:RGEN) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, showcasing its leadership in bioprocessing innovation. The company highlighted its strategic focus on research and development, global manufacturing, and a balanced sales approach. While Repligen reported robust growth and market expansion, it faces challenges in maintaining its competitive edge and managing acquisitions.

Key Takeaways

• Repligen reported a 14% organic growth in Q1 2025, excluding COVID-19 impacts.
• The company aims to double its size in the coming years through organic growth and acquisitions.
• Repligen’s sales are currently split 65% clinical and 35% commercial, with a target of achieving a 50/50 balance.
• The company is enhancing its product portfolio with new launches and acquisitions like NineTech.
• Repligen is focused on margin expansion and improving customer experience.

Financial Results

• Organic non-COVID growth reached 14% in Q1 2025.
• Order intake increased by nearly 20% compared to Q1 2024, with CDMO orders rising over 40%.
• Gross margins improved by 440 basis points, and operating margins by 490 basis points.
• Revenue guidance was adjusted upward by $10 million to incorporate NineTech sales from March to December.

Operational Updates

• Repligen completed the acquisition of NineTech and is focusing on integrating it alongside Tanti.
• New product launches include the SoloVPE plus system for protein concentration and single-use mixers.
• The company plans to introduce two to three new resins in the upcoming quarters.
• A new training facility, the Arctic Center, was opened in Watsang last September.

Future Outlook

• Repligen aims to double its size through organic growth and strategic acquisitions.
• The company targets a 100 to 200 basis point expansion in EBIT for 2025.
• Key focus areas include transforming customer experience, continuous innovation, and M&A integration.

Q&A Highlights

• Repligen aims for a balanced sales split of 50% clinical and 50% commercial within three years.
• The majority of clinical sales are in late-phase products, indicating strong future potential.
• Big pharma is looking internationally for assets due to funding constraints in small U.S. biotech firms.

For a detailed insight into Repligen’s presentation, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Matt Larue, Analyst, William Blair: Everyone. Thank you for joining us for the repligen management presentation. My name is Matt Larue. I cover repligen here at Flair. I’m very pleased to be joined this morning by Olivier Lailleaux.

Before we get to the presentation, I want to mention two things. First, the breakout session is in the Richardson Room on the Second Floor. And then second, I am required to inform you that for a complete list of our disclosures or conflicts of interest, please visit our website, WilliamBlair.com. Again, very pleased to have Repligen here. I will turn it over to Olivier.

Thank you. Thank you

Olivier Lailleaux, Executive/Management, Repligen: so much, Matt. Good afternoon, everybody. Yeah. And he pronounced my name pretty well, is not often the case, so congratulations, Matt. Yeah.

Hey, guys. We’re gonna spend the next twenty five minutes plus talking a bit about Repligen. Before we start, I just want you to have a quick look at the safe harbor statement. And with this, I’m gonna move on and tell you a bit more about who is Repligen. I guess most of you already know the company quite a bit, but in case you don’t, we’re going to spend a few minutes on that first slide.

So we like to call ourselves the innovation leader in bioprocessing. I mean that’s how we differentiate ourselves. We are pretty heavy on R and D, making sure we are launching products on the markets that are really different and enabling our customers to manufacture their drug into a much more efficient manner, higher yield, better cost and enabling them to speed up to markets. We have a pretty global manufacturing footprint. I was a bit surprised when I came down here, but we’ve got quite a lot of site posts in Europe and U.

S. When we talk about tariff later on, that’s obviously something we’re pretty happy about in the current environment. We have about 1,700 employees worldwide. Well, one thing that is pretty specific about Repligen is our sales is split at about 65% clinical, 35% commercial, which is not unusual for a company of our age. We like to call ourselves ten years young company in the bioprocessing industry, so that is pretty normal.

This being said, most of our sales are going into monoclonal antibody. It’s about 80% of our sales in monoclonal and about 18% in new modalities. So why are the 2% missing? That was still COVID last year and obviously is going to be gone this year. So we had a fantastic performance over the years in terms of growth, as you all know.

I mean, obviously, there have been a couple of changes between 2019 and 2024. But when you look at the CAGR during the last five years, we had a nineteen percent CAGR. And this came by a lot of disruptive product launches, but also via 15 acquisitions that I’m going to talk about later on. When you look at the product split, the biggest franchise we have within the business is filtration, chrome second and protein that used to be very significant back ten years ago has slowly but surely become a smaller part of our total business. So what markets are we dealing with?

I mean nothing unusual. I mentioned about the split between mAbs and new modalities. If you look at mAbs, it’s about a USD $250,000,000,000 market in 2024. The projected CAGR of that market is about 8% to 10% over the next five to ten years. And then biosimilars is a subdivision of mAb.

The reason why we mentioned it is, again, back to the fact we are ten years young company, we didn’t really have the breadth of the portfolio we have today when some of these first monoclonal antibodies were being launched ten to fifteen years ago. Now with biosimilars, I mean, lot of cars are being redistributed. And for us, it’s a great opportunity now that we’ve got a much broader offering to start to get design into some of these very big molecule. And then finally, new modalities. I know you further was talking a lot about it.

I mean beyond the fact we like this market because it requires a lot of innovation, which you heard we are very strong at. So CAGR, the project at CAGR is significantly higher than for the rest of the businesses, expected 30% growth or so. So the market we’re dealing with, I mean, we know and even though there is a lot of macro noise lately, it’s supposedly going to be a very nice high single digit growing market with a lot of aging population, a lot of region in the world that don’t have a lot of coverage yet with some of these biopharma drugs. And what we all know is development and manufacturing costs are going to be under more and more scrutiny, which is why we love to be innovative and bringing real breakthrough products to the market here to enable our customers to be more efficient here. So what does our portfolio consist in?

Mean we have a really broad portfolio of products. And I tell you coming from another company where I held really building that A2C offering, it was really a great surprise for me when I joined here to realize like we had a lot of the different buckets. In fact, the one we decided to highlight in red is what we don’t have today. And you see three many three different pieces of products, one being bioreactors, the second one being cell culture media and the third one being viral filters. We really have an offering across the board more or less for anything else.

And that’s something obviously we are capitalizing a lot on lately because a lot of big pharma company who didn’t know us a lot five years ago, so now they realize, wow, there is a new company now that is not only much more customer centric than some of the other guys, but now they have a very broad portfolio of innovative products. So that’s something obviously we are very excited about. So how are we different? Why do we think Repugen is really different and why are we winning probably through that differentiation? So it’s a mix of strategy and capabilities, obviously.

And if you look at strategy, we are 100% bioprocessing organization. Yes, we do have a bit of analytic products, but the analytic products we have are mostly here to help developing the bioprocessing portfolio of products. If think about the FlowVPX, line concentration measurement tool we launched about one point years ago. So now it’s really mostly being developed to be able to come with our large scale system for filtration and for chromatography. So it’s really 100% bioprocessing focused.

Disruptive technology, we talked about, the extensive portfolio as well. M and A has been in our DNA. And as you know, we’ve been very heavy, 15 acquisitions over the last several years. We just did another one in quarter one. So this really has enabled us combined to our very unique R and D capabilities to make sure we are ahead of others in terms of technologies.

And in terms of capabilities, I will just mention one because I think this is for me the most important, which is the second bullet point is we are really a nimble, collaborative and transparent company. It may sound like this is a little bit fuzzy and so on. It is so important in that arena. I can tell you the reason why most customers, when we meet with them, tell us we want to do more business with you is because we are just customer centric. We take the time, we listen to our customers, we understand what their needs are.

But back to new modalities, still today, a vast majority of products that people use for new modalities are products that were developed back ten years ago for monoclonal antibodies. New modalities require different products. Now they finally have a partner that is capable to develop those new products, but also develop them at a fast pace to enable them to be efficient as fast as possible. So the results, I mean, we talked quite a bit about it already. We increased our revenue by a factor of 10.

EPS went up from $0.25 to $1.58 What I think is the most important from my point of view is the TAM that that increased by a factor three over the last few years, meaning like the total addressable market we’re dealing with today is about 12,000,000,000 U. S. Dollar. You make the math, I have it, I think, on one of the next slide. We did about USD 600,000,000 of business last year.

So it’s about 5% market share we have in the total market. So we’ve got a huge amount of opportunity to grow, obviously, over the next five years. And that’s why our goal is to really double our size within the next few years, and then that’s going to be really with a lot of organic double digit growth and probably some smaller acquisition to add on in the next few years here. So that’s our goal. And why do we grow faster than others?

So we love to call it the algorithm for consistent growth above the market. And would refocus on the first two probably more than number three at this stage. So first one is we are really creating new market segments. We think like about 80% of our portfolio is really differentiating, meaning we don’t really have competitors. And why is that?

It’s just because we created something that didn’t exist before. So think about ATF, which is one of our flagship franchise so called process intensification. Up to a few years ago or so, you were running your manufacturing in batches. You were typically needing your two weeks and then you would stop your upstream process. You would get whatever yield you would get and then you have to clean everything and you have to restart a second batch and so on.

Now with process intensification, you are capable to keep on going and manufacturing upstream for another couple of weeks, if not sometime even more than that. So with exactly the same footprint, you can almost double the manufacturing volume you’re capable to manufacture with the ATF technology. That’s a big game changer, especially if you are CapEx constrained as a company, you don’t want to build sites everywhere around the world, are capable to implement process intensification. That’s really something we created a brand new solution that people didn’t have access to. Let me pick up another one, the FlowVPX in line concentration measurement.

We brought that technology as well to market about a year, year and a half ago. So people realized like instead to have to take sample every six hours, ten hours, twelve hours, never being sure about whether the process is running as efficiently as they expected and so on, they can now see it live, meaning they can just stop their processes exactly at the right time at the highest amount of products they’ve been manufacturing and so on. So these are the type of solution we are creating new market for and we are really differentiating ourselves to create a bigger bioprocessing market overall. Then number two, it’s really about gaining shares. I mean, you make some math.

I mean, we’ve got 80% of our product line, which is differentiating, it means like about 20% of it today, we are really fighting to gain market share. And that’s what we are doing in certain part of our portfolio, flat sheet cassettes, fluid management. But here, again, we are making sure we’re differentiating ourselves. So flat sheet cassette, we launched a new version, which is a self contained version that is perfect for ADC. So anybody who is now involved into antibody drug conjugates is willing to use this type of flat sheet cassette solution that is much more convenient to manufacture those type of drugs.

And in terms of fluid management, we decided to be more or less fully back integrated. During COVID, it was impossible to find tubes, clamps, whatever of this commodity. We said we are going to enter into fluid management being fully back integrated. We had a lot of win recently and one of the reasons is because we feel like with a company like Repugen, we know they are completely back up integrated here. And the last one is the mix.

I mean, yes, I mentioned about the 80% MAB, 18% new modality, whereas the vast majority is still on mAb. I mean we like to be about 18% of our business in new modalities because we know this is the fastest in the next five to ten years. So of course, there is a lot of noise those days. Just first of all to mention those noise are in The U. S.

And nowhere else. I can guarantee you new modalities are still on top of the list for every single region in the world, including Asia. But on top of it, even a country like The U. S, all of those big pharma companies are still very heavy on it. I would say probably close to 50% of the funnel of big pharma companies today, including in The U.

S, is on new modalities. So we are definitely very focused on that as well here. Talking about TAM, as I mentioned earlier, it went up from 4,000,000,000 to $12,000,000,000 in the last four to five years. I love that. I love to have the chance to grow my business and gain market share with our new solutions and gaining market share on where we’re competing with each other.

So big change, obviously, as you can see here, is filtration has become obviously a big market potential for us because now that we’ve got the plane to fluid management, which is a massive market, we are capable to tackle a lot of those opportunities we were not capable to tackle a few years ago before we made the acquisition. So 5% market share I already mentioned, so I’ll skip that. M and A, so we have indeed 15 acquisitions in the last ten to eleven years. Quite a lot were coming on the filtration side. So I’m just going to mention a few because I think they are important.

Refine is really where we put our first fit into the ATF technology. Believe it or not, this didn’t happen yesterday. I mean we acquired that company more than ten years ago. So just to say like we are in businesses where things take time, I mean, and where ATF now is really, really growing very fast and so on. I mean, it has taken a bit of time to get the seats, to get people willing to embed these type of new technologies and then be in the situation where we are today.

Spectrum artisan is really what has enabled us to enter into the system arena, which we love a lot because the more system you sell, the more recurrent sales you’re going to generate of consumable after. And I like to call the artist in business the little brother of ATF because where we started to seed a lot of ATF system back three to five years ago, and now we are collecting the fruits on the consumable side. We are doing exactly the same now with our TFF and Cone system where we are positioning a lot of system to start with, and we’re going to start to see a huge flow of consumable coming over the next three to five years. Chrome, you’re very familiar. That’s one of the historical part of the portfolio, which is the prepacked column, which we are really still the single true broad supplier of prepacked column in the industry.

Proteins, I mean, we came from being a pure OEM ligand supplier to Saitiva and Mipo to now have most of our destiny in our hands, and I can’t tell you how excited I am. I mean, I know that business particularly well. It’s very high margin. And now that we’ve demonstrated the ability to develop new ligand and new resins within six to nine months, which is almost three to four times faster than any of our direct competitors, we’re starting to get a lot of traction on our own resins. And one of the reasons why we beat Consensus in quarter one is because one of these resins we developed specifically for one big pharma company, they started now to decide to use it for one commercial drug and the pickup is very nice, so to be replicated with other projects in the next few quarters.

And then finally, analytics. I talked a bit about it already. Beyond having this beautiful product like the SoloVPA plus for protein concentration measurement, beyond the acquisition of nine zero eight for the different product line, RoBelle and then Maven and Maverick. The real reason why we acquire those technologies is to be able to combine them with our systems so that we make sure like our customers are capable to run their manufacturing into a much more intelligent manner in the next few years than they are today. Story, and I think you heard me saying that a few times already, is even people who bought our competitor system in the last few years now, they are coming to us to ask whether we would be willing to put our PAT technology into our competitor system.

So we had a couple of discussions internally. We decided to support them here, thinking that’s going to reconvene them in the future to buy systems directly from us. So that’s really the discipline, M and A. I mean, you heard me saying earlier, we’ve got a lot of products in our hands already to generate this double digit growth over the next several years. We’re always looking at all the potential breakthrough technology acquisition and we are making sure like if we move forward with an acquisition, there is a strategic relevance for us.

We just made two, so we are still in the integration mode for both Tanti for 09/2008, so that’s what we are focusing on for the timing on the M and A side. Good. What about the next five to ten years? That’s what you want to hear, right? Before I talk really about the next five to ten, I thought it was important to show you a little bit how our business has evolved over the last ten years because I’m not sure you all realize that.

Ten years ago or so, 81% of our business was in the hands of 10 customers. That’s not something you like. That’s not something you want. I mean, it’s too dangerous. Today, you look at the blue part, it’s only one third of our sales that’s going to our top 10 customers.

We were even more specific during the last earning call. I mean, our biggest customer across the board is 6% of our sales. Our biggest new modality customer is 3% of our sales. So we have a very well diversified business across a lot of different customers. But look at the segment as well.

We’ve had a lot of changes. I mean, back in 2015, ’70 percent of our business was in protein. Now it’s only 12% now. I want it bigger, by the way, because I love the margin on protein, so that’s why we are so focused right now to increase our business on the resin side. But the portfolio has changed quite a lot.

Then the modality, we talked already quite a bit. So a lot of changes over the last ten years. One thing we’re absolutely convinced about is the future is going to be through digitization, and that’s why you’re seeing us being so heavy on PAT and so on is the way our pharma customers are going to be running their operations, not only in manufacturing but also in process development, is going to be totally different in the next five to ten years and that’s going to definitely be capitalizing on all of these digitization tools that are being developed. It all started with process automation. When you look at manufacturing plant today, fair to say like probably 70%, seventy five % of manufacturing plant are using automation.

But what has not happened yet really is the pickup of PAT, which is enabling you to collect all of these critical data, both on the process development side and on the manufacturing side to enable you to be much more efficient. We are leading the pack. We’ve got six PAT technologies in our hands, which is more than anybody else in the industry. And then the ultimate goal, if you go around the circle, is to really be able to collect that data and then analyzing it and then using digital twin and artificial intelligence motor is to figuring out how your process is really running. So instead of having to wait two full weeks before you realize a batch is not going to work out, you want to pick that up after two hours.

Especially if you are CDMO, that’s going to be a total game changer here. And then finally, fit for growth. I can’t tell how much time I’ve been spending with the team over the last one year, if not one point years, to making sure we are ready indeed to achieve that goal of doubling the size of the company. So it’s a mix of people, operational excellence and business processes. So we’ve been pretty heavy.

I have to say we have had the luxury, at least since I joined one point years ago, to attract more or less any talent we wanted. I mean the name Repugen resonates quite a bit in the industry right now. We’re back to what I was thinking about the culture, about the customer centricity and so on. We’ve managed to attract really a lot of great talent. The bench width we have today is absolutely great, and I think we’re doing fantastic on that side.

On the operational excellence side, we have to keep on going, optimizing our global footprint. We have still too many sites, so it means a bit of rooftop consolidation and then making sure we deliver world class quality and services. And finally, on the business processes, I mean, we’ve been using the so called Repligen Performance System now for several years, which we are very happy about. It’s a very concrete version of lean manufacturing where every year we identify about our top five projects to regenerate productivity gains or margin gain or cost saving and so on, and we focus on those five projects. We’ve got a very specific number to hit, which last year we were about 20% higher than the targets we have.

So every year we have that and that’s how we are running the company. And then making sure we start to use tools that are enabling us to scale up, giving you an example. We are just implementing a tool called Workday for our human resource management, which for a company of our size now makes total sense here. So to wrap up, we had a really strong quarter one. I mean, we were very happy about it.

I mean, as you know, there are a lot of growth numbers reported because we still had a restatement in the first half of last year. Quarter ’2 will be the last quarter where we have to talk about a specific bunch of three different numbers because of the restatement, but we grew 14% in quarter one organic non COVID, which we are very happy about. But even more than revenue, what I was really excited about was the order intake, where our order intake was up close to 20% versus quarter one of twenty twenty four. And within the four different franchises, all of them grew double digit, which is something we are very happy. Last year, the prepacked column business was a bit behind in quarter one.

It’s really performed extremely well. So across the board, we had a good performance. And then our opportunity funnel, which is the second bucket where we are looking at beyond order intake because it’s showing you what’s coming around the corner for the next quarter was also up more than 30%. In terms of margin, obviously, the volume and with a nice product mix in quarter one, our gross margin was up four forty basis points and our operating margin was up four ninety basis points. And in terms of business highlight, you know like both pharma and consumer have been doing very well for us for the last several quarters.

What was really important for us in quarter one is the order intake at CDMO was really high. I mean, it went up more than 40% versus quarter one of twenty twenty four. We closed the acquisition of nine zero eight and we launched a solo PPA plus system. So for the full year, the only thing we changed in our guidance April versus the prior one is the inclusion of the nine zero eight sales. That’s why you’re seeing a bump of $10,000,000 because we’re consolidating nine zero eight from March until the December.

So we assume $10,000,000 sales coming from that. We didn’t include anything else than that in our guidance for 2025. No impact from tariff or no impact from FX, at least in the guidance we gave because there are so many moving pieces. We came to the conclusion that if we start to put a new number, we’re going to have to change the number every other day. So we said, hey, we stick to what we had earlier and we are going to see during the year how things move both from a tariff point of view and both from an FX point of view.

I’m sure we’re going to talk about that during the discussion later on. Okay, so five minutes left, twenty twenty five priorities. So we want to keep on accelerating growth, of course, but beyond just accelerating growth, I really want to make sure are transforming our customer experience. I mean for those of you who might have seen me in a different life and life, I’ve always been extremely customer focused because I’ve always said if you take care of your customer and your people, I mean 80% of the job is done. I mean, we have to make sure we improve the customer experience.

Now typically where they were dealing with us on one product line maybe three years ago or so, now they deal with us on three, four, five different product lines. We want to make sure like we delight them every time we deal with them, whatever the number of products. We have to expand our margins. I mean, so we said we are targeting 100 to 200 basis point EBIT expansion in 2025. We had a very good start.

Again, mix was favorable in quarter one. I mean, we had a lot of protein sales in quarter one, so probably we’ll see a little drop Q2, Q3 in terms of gross margin back to higher in quarter four. But definitely targeting the 100 to 200 basis point EBIT expansion for the entire year. Innovation, we launched Solo. We launched our single use mixers.

We are going to launch two to three new resin over the next one or two quarters and a few more products. Keep on integrating our M and A. So we’ve already done one deal, as you know, with nine zero eight and then getting Fit for Growth, we talked about already. So why? Why Repugen?

Why is Repugen such an attractive company? Again, is really in our DNA. I’ve been bluffed by the capabilities we have, not only thinking out of the box about what customer needs, but also the speed at which we are capable to develop and launch those products. And we know we are influencing really the future of bioprocessing. We opened our Arctic Center training center in Watsang back in September of last year.

This week, we’ve got five customers, one every day coming to the center. And three of them are big pharma company. One was there yesterday, 20 people. Today, a second one, they’ve got their entire MSAT team and then another one, I think, Thursday of this week. So we are really getting those people coming to understand exactly about the breadth of the portfolio we have.

The industry expertise, we’ve enriched it further by adding some of this talent I was talking about. One thing maybe for you, if you’re not familiar with our management team, most of us are coming from one of the four big guys. More or less every other meeting we have together, we remind to ourselves we don’t want to become one of these guys in terms of the way we were the reason why we left some of this company was because of the lack of flexibility and so on. We are really willing to take advantage of the expertise we have on one side, but at the same time making sure we keep the flexibility and the customer centricity we want to keep. And then finally, you heard about the algorithm to continue to grow above market.

So if we manage to fit for growth at the same time, then everything should be running really fine. So thank you for listening today, and very happy to go to the next session.

Matt Larue, Analyst, William Blair: Yeah. Think we have time for maybe one or two questions. If it’s right, maybe I’ll I’ll start off. The bioprocess end end market finally, you know, is maybe the safer, more durable place within the broader life sciences category this year, but but much of that I think is because it supports commercial therapeutics and the destocking has worked out. Of course, your business, as you alluded to, is not seventythirty commercial clinical like the other guys, thirtyseventy.

So maybe talk about that 30% of your business, what the composition of is it in terms of various stages of clinical work and how much visibility you have there versus the commercial side.

Olivier Lailleaux, Executive/Management, Repligen: Yes. No, absolutely. So first of all, we are in the journey to move toward more commercial. And in fact, indeed, we landed end of last year exactly at the same speed, 65, 30 five as a year ago. But as some of you might remember, last year, we lost about $30,000,000 of sales to protein going to Saitiva and to Millipore, And we assume these were part of commercial drug because those guys mostly into commercial.

So if we wouldn’t have lost those $30,000,000 the split at the end of last year would have been sixty-forty. So I think we’re in a journey where probably every year we’re going to move about 5% more towards commercial, meaning if and it’s not going to happen exactly this way, but I would imagine it’s very likely that in three years from now, we should be almost fifty-fifty. The second piece of answer is like most of our clinical business is into the later phase products, obviously, because this is where volume is taking place. And we’re about ten years a young company, meaning we started designing in a lot of our products already five, ten years ago. So the majority of our clinical business is really more towards Phase II and Phase III, meaning a lot of these products you need are going to be moving.

And if you’re a pharma company today, the last thing you’re going to do is to slow down your late phase products because you know like you’re struggling to find earlier phase product because small biotech in U. S. Don’t have a lot of funding. But you know that on the other side, you’ve got all of these generic biosimilar companies that are waiting to get the product off patent too. So we’ve seen absolutely zero slowdown from our customer, I have to say, big pharma in terms of moving the needle with innovation.

What obviously is happening right now is like instead of maybe sourcing a lot of these early phase projects from small biotech in The U. S, they start to look outside of The U. S. And you’ve seen multiple deal happening in the last few months buying assets from China. I mean, just bought one for USD 1,200,000,000.0, I think, a week ago or so.

So that’s probably going to start to happen more and more. And for whatever innovation doesn’t pick up faster here in The US, it’s probably gonna be coming from Europe and from Asia.

Matt Larue, Analyst, William Blair: Yep. That’ll make sense. Alright. Well, thank you very much for joining us. And, again, we’ll be upstairs for the breakout if you wanna us up there.

Thank you. Thank you.

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