Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining Eurofins' half-year 2025 results presentation. Please note that this call is being recorded and will be later available for replay on the Eurofins Investor Relations website. Throughout today's presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touch-tone telephone to register for questions. For operator assistance, please press the star key followed by zero. During this call, Eurofins management may make forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements with respect to outlook and the related assumptions. Management will also discuss alternative performance measures such as organic growth and EBITDA, which are defined in the appendices of our press releases. Actual results may differ materially from objectives discussed.
Risks and uncertainties that may affect Eurofins' future results include, but are not limited to, those described in the risk factor section of the most recent Eurofins annual report. Please also read the disclaimer on page two of this presentation, subject to which this call and Q&A session are made. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Dr. Gilles Martin, Eurofins CEO. Please go ahead.
Hello everybody, and thank you for joining our quarterly and half-year conference call. I am happy to report on good development in this first half-year of 2025. We have achieved the objectives that we're aiming at in terms of growth and in terms of margin improvement, cash flow improvement, and especially on the earnings per share improvement, which is very strong in the first half of this year. We have a little slideshow, and I'm on page five currently. I'll do a short overview, and then Laurent, our CFO, will go a bit more into numbers. Overall, we're happy with all developments in the P&L. Organic growth and growth of margin. We are still in a phase where we make significant investments. We have acquired also some businesses. We have acquired a business, SYNLAB, as you see in the publication of our balance sheet.
We have details there for a fairly low amount, a very small percentage of revenues, but it starts from a loss-making position. With our existing teams in Spain and synergies, we believe we can improve the margin significantly over the next two years. It is, for us, a good opportunity to create value. It's a little bit dilutive short-term, but it should be a good use of cash and provide a good return, in our opinion. We started last year with a very high level of networking capital at the end of 2023, which makes sure maybe a bit less growth of the free cash flow from period to period, but that's due to this one-off effect. Overall, our networking produced in this first half-year, at the end of the first half-year, were lower than last year. Of course, the second half-year, we generate much more networking capital.
We have an improvement, and we generate cash. The first half of the year was good. It's not the half of the year where we generate the most cash traditionally, but it is positive on all aspects. One thing that was decided and maybe not indicated yet is the company will acquire the companies under Analytical BioVentures, my private holding or private family holding. The company holding all the buildings that Eurofins use, or except those that Eurofins doesn't want to use in the future, which will be exited. We thought about stretching that over two or three years, but our cash position is good. Our leverage is not high, and it will be done. We polled our investors. It was a formal vote that clearly stated that investors who really own shares at Eurofins would like this to be done and be over with.
We'll do that in the second half of this year. We can afford it. It won't push our leverage too high. Also, it will save Eurofins EUR 36 million per year in rent. By the end of our 2027. Five-year plan, a significant part of the purchase price, almost EUR 80 million, will have been paid back anyway by rent savings. That is something that the company can afford, and we will put that behind us. With that and the other sites, building or acquisitions that are currently ongoing and we plan to finalize by 2027, we should be done with building an incredibly strong and efficient laboratory infrastructure in almost all the countries where we are active, a very nice hub-and-spoke model that will make us very efficient, provide very good logistics, very fast service to clients, and economies of scale in the large labs.
This is one of the major capital outlays that we are doing in this five-year plan, together with the capital outlay linked to full digitalization of our processes, which is moving ahead, is almost finalized in our biopharma product testing, and is making good progress in our food and environmental testing businesses. Clinical is the last business line where we started those developments. That was a discussion on page six on the real estate. We were fairly neutral on that. The financial conditions have been disclosed in the invitation to the General Assembly, so I will not go back on that, but if there are any questions, we can go there. Obviously, I was not involved in that, nor did my holding vote in this decision. The 95.6% or the positive votes are of non-family investors. On page seven, we are talking a bit again about our site ownership.
We do plan to complete—I already talked about that—but we do plan to complete this building of our hub-and-spoke network by the end of 2027. We will continue to do some in the first half of this year. We will do a few more in the rest of this year. On page eight, you have more details. We will do a few very large sites in the Netherlands, for example, in Kansas, and St. Charles and Mississauga in Canada. All those buildings have been ongoing. They have been drawing cash, and they should give us the benefits of more efficiencies by 2027. We will be pleased to have built a very strong network, very efficient company. Of course, we should get the benefits of all those investments in our efficiency, in our cash flow, in our growth by offering better service to clients, creating capacity, etc.
I think from now, Laurent will give a few comments on our financial aspects or what I can say on the overview on page nine first. We disclose our business. Of course, we provide the total results, and the total result, which is on page nine, the last block, you see a nice improvement. We also provide the result of our core scope or mature scope and the non-mature scope that includes startups and companies that we just acquired and that we are restructuring heavily, like SYNLAB, for example. As you see, year- over- year, our mature scope continues to improve. It is already at a level of margin of 24%, which is our target margin. The dilution from the non-mature scopes becomes smaller and smaller. The SDI also are reducing. We think this is all progressing as we plan.
We are looking forward to, by 2027, have a very small residual non-mature scope that will provide a very negligible dilution to the overall results. On page 10, we comment a bit on our startups. We are continuing to open labs. It is always an arbitrage. If we buy a company, maybe it will improve. If we do not pay too much, our EPS immediately will be immediately relutive, but we incur a lot of goodwill. The multiples have not gone down significantly for large profitable targets. We always have the option to start a lab. If we are not in one region or one part of one country and we cannot buy something there that we like, we know how a lab looks like. We have the blueprints for a lab. We have good conditions when buying equipment. We can deploy our IT solutions.
Sometimes we are just better off opening a lab. We continue to do that at a more moderate pace compared to the overall size of the company than before. This is our plan to continue over the next two or three years. On page 11, we discuss acquisitions. As you can see, we are frugal in our acquisition policy. We are spending less than we thought we would spend. Not so much that we are going to get less revenues from those acquisitions because we are almost at the target for this year. The revenue multiple is less, and we like that, to buy a company that is maybe not fully at its peak in terms of performance, but we have the means from our teams, synergies, software purchasing to improve performance and create value.
This is usually our target for acquisitions. It is not size per se. It is not having a certain percentage of revenues in this geography or that geography. This is only relevant to us. It is making our businesses stronger, buying sometimes nice technology businesses that complement what we have, or winning new customers. We like to buy businesses where we can really create value by improving the results over the two or three years following the acquisition. Laurent will now comment a bit on the specifics of the financials.
Thank you, Gilles, and good afternoon, everyone. It's my pleasure to walk you through the details of our first half financial results. On slide 13, as you can see, we had a sustained growth of revenues at +5.7% and even stronger growth of our EBITDA at +8%. We also had reduced SDIs, leading to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 22.4% and an increase of 30 basis points year- on- year. Overall, generating a significant year-on-year increase of net profit, +12%. And of earning per share at +18%. On slide 14, you can find our revenue bridge for the first half. We had a negative FX impact of -0.7%, mostly linked to the USD/EUR evolution in Q2. We had a solid organic growth of 3.9% and a good contribution from our M&As, EUR 49 million in H1, representing full-year revenues of EUR 210 million.
On slide 15, you can see the breakdown of our organic growth by activity. The life activities were growing at +5.7%. This remains a very strong growth, both on food and environment in all regions. Biopharma at +0.8% remains soft, and I'll share with you more details on this on the next slide. Diagnostics at +1.3% was impacted by the tariff cuts in France from September 2024 and the acquisition and integration of the diagnostic activities from SYNLAB in Spain. While consumers and technologies at +1.5% were mostly affected by strong comps in North America and trade tensions in Asia. On slide 16, you can see a semester-by-semester evolution of biopharma activities. Around three buckets. We have what we call biopharma product testing, which is the largest bucket, discovery and genomics, and ancillary activities.
First of all, you can see that last year, we had a decline of ancillary and discovery and genomics activities in H2, while the BPT activities. Growth remained very solid, but overall leading to a negative growth of 0.9% in H2 last year. While in H1 this year, we were able to renew with growth at +0.8% with a strong BPT growth, while discovery and genomics and ancillaries remained in negative territory. So overall, our main activity, BPT, is growing well. It's hard to predict what it will be in H2, but at least we should be able to enjoy better comps going forward. On slide 17, you can find a breakdown of our margins by region.
Europe incurred a slight decrease by 20 basis points of margins due to the French clinical tariff cuts in September 2024 and the integration of SYNLAB Spain in Q2, which remains dilutive to our margins. North America continued to increase its margins by 140 basis points to 28.5%. While the rest of the world also continued to increase its margin by 140 basis points to 24.8%. On slide 18, you can see the details about our H1 cash generation. Despite a strong improvement of net working capital intensity by 80 basis points, we incurred a negative net working capital change due to the exceptional improvement of net working capital position between December 2023 and December 2024. Our total CapEx spend remained disciplined and flat, leading to a stable free cash flow to the firm of EUR 276 million for the period.
On slide 19, looking at our first- half CapEx spend in detail, we reduced our intensity by 50 basis points to 6.9% of revenues, and we allocated the CapEx at 69% to what we call operating CapEx and 31% to investments in owned sites. On slide 20, you can see that our net working capital intensity improved significantly by 80 basis points to 5.5% of revenues, thanks to a reduction of DSOs by three days and stable inventories at 2.1%. To conclude, on slide 21, we have refinanced in the first half our 2025 Schuldschein and hybrid bonds. We have increased our leverage by 0.2 to 2.1 turns following the share buybacks, but remain well within our target of 1.5-2.5 turns. We continue to have access to ample RCFs and enjoy well-spread maturities of our debt and hybrid instruments for the future.
Now giving back the mic to Gilles to conclude this presentation.
Thank you, Laurent.
To conclude, we have on 23 a slide where we, as in the press release, reiterate our objectives for this year and 2027. What you see with Eurofins is we have a lot to do internally. We are still building the house, building the company, building the infrastructure, and integrating some of the companies we acquired recently. Even if the top line has been a bit lower in the last couple of years, especially in biopharma than what we were aiming for, and of course, we cannot control what our clients spend, there is a lot we can do to improve profitability. Some of the spend we have that goes in OpEx on, for example, IT, development of new solutions, reorganizations, all of those things are also finite in timelines. We are confident that we will be able to continue to improve our performance towards 2027.
We are also confident that there will be a pickup in biopharma. The industry, of course, is reevaluating its priority, which classes of drug they fund, but we have very positive dialogues with our clients, which are mostly big pharma. We are positive that biopharma will be bottom in some of our activities like agro science and genomics that have been hit by new or different changes. It will also clean up those markets. A lot of the smaller companies in those markets will be very struggling. Some are disappearing. Some are going bankrupt or being sold for very little. We think we should be able to emerge with very, very strong market positions in all our verticals by next year or 2027, which we should show in our sales growth, in our pricing, of course, and our productivity.
We are quite positive that we are executing according to plan, that opportunities will become more significant. Also, all this CapEx that we are spending, when we have a building, we do not have to pay the rent anymore. That applies to the related party buildings, but all those other buildings that we are constructing at the moment and will move in and occupy over the next two years. The ones we did already, they replace rented buildings that cost cash. It may be a bit less visible in the IFRS statements because of the way the rent is being treated. We are optimistic not only on improvement for the next couple of years, but also cash flow generation.
This is also one reason why we pulled forward the purchase of the related party buildings, because we are very confident on the cash flow future of Eurofins and cash flow trend improvements. Past this large investment program in buildings and in digitalization, we have infrastructure rebuilding of our business around more resilient, more segregated environments for each of our regional business lines. It is a lot of house building that we have been doing for a long time, of course. We are slowly now, we are halfway through this program, but we are also slowly nearing the end of it. We are confident we will harvest the benefits of all those investments. At the same time, we do not see our competitors doing anything of that magnitude. There are many owned by private equity with relatively short horizons, want to exit after three to five years.
They are starting to struggle because many private equity companies overpaid for assets in our space, and they will be struggling when refinancing time. They are not collapsing, but they are not increasing either, which is starting to make exits very challenging, which means even less CapEx, even less investment for those businesses, even more squeeze on the teams that can lead to worse performance, client dissatisfaction. On that end, that is good. Our corporate competitors, they are all too diversified. They cannot make, and it does not make sense for them to make the type of investments we are doing to offer better service to clients. We are overall strategically and midterm very positive about our outlook. That is it for our introduction, and we can answer questions if there are some.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin our question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on their touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. If you are using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selections. Anyone who has a question may press star one at this time. Thank you. Our first question is coming from James Rowland Clark with Barclays Bank. Your line is live.
Hi, good afternoon. I've got three, please. My first is on consumer, where your organic growth went from 3.5% in the first quarter to a small decline in Q2, which you've put down to the AI-related comps. Could you outline what the drag was from AI-related comps and whether there's anything else at play driving that deceleration? How would you outline the outlook in consumer from here as a result of that? My second's in biopharma. You've provided a bit of a breakdown of the organic in the first half across a group of verticals there. In discovery and genomics, it's declined to 4%, declined from 2% in the second half of last year. Is it fair to say that the discovery element of that has gotten worse in terms of the outlook in the second quarter?
I guess maybe can you help us with the exit rate of discovery and genomics within that 4%? Finally, you're facing an FX headwind this year, particularly steep in the second half. Do you think you can deliver second-half margins that are sequentially ahead of the first half? Maybe could you help us think a little bit about how the FX headwind looks for the full year? Can you deliver margin growth, do you think? Consensus has a small decline. Thank you.
Thank you. Consumers contains a number of things. It contains soft line and hard lines. It contains electrical and electronic product testing. It contains significant material science testing. Material science is on medical devices, but it is also on electronic products and semiconductors. There had been a very strong boost in the first half of 2024 due to a lot of huge CapEx investments in AI data centers and so on, which has been a bit lumpy. This business is always a bit going with not all the cycles of semiconductors, but some of it, depending on working on memory. We work a lot on tools companies, providing tools for semiconductors. Maybe China had put forward at the time some purchases of a lot of equipment to manufacture semiconductors. This can be a bit lumpy, this business. The impact on consumer is mostly from that material science business.
We think the other comps at some point will normalize. At some point, that should turn positive. On discovery and genomics, we are a bit affected in the U.S. in the genomics business. We do not work a lot for academia. We just have this small genomics business, which is producing oligonucleotide for testing, DNA testing, and for research and providing also custom sequencing services. The research and academic is up to 40% of that business, depending on the companies. In America, it is doing very badly. There have been significant cuts in the academics budgets. Universities are struggling, and NIH is spending less. That genomics business has been hit this year, and it probably will continue to be hit for the next couple of quarters. Next year, I think it has hit bottom in the meantime, but that is a bigger impact.
Discovery is not dynamic, but the situation for discovery has not changed materially as I can remember. The FX headwind, I will let Laurent comment a little bit on this one. Of course, we do not know where anything will be. It is not only the dollar, but there are many currencies moving. What we have, we have our costs where we have our revenues. All of that is translational. Of course, if you reconvert our overall P&L in dollars, it will look better in dollar terms. This is all a matter of from which perspective you are looking at it. Laurent can comment.
Yeah. I mean, on H1, we know what is certain already. I mean, we had an FX impact on the revenue of 0.7%. We had no FX impact on the EBITDA margin. If we do a simple calculation, which is to simulate the rest of the year with the dollar as it is today, we would have potentially an impact on the top line of 1.7%. Still no effect on the EBITDA margin. We would have potentially a small impact on the free cash flow to the firm, but not to the level that it would be forcing us to revise our objective at this stage.
Very helpful.
Anyway, our objectives are made at a given FX mix, and we don't know what it will be in advance. Nobody can know that. We've been surprised more than once. It will be what it will be. We're not talking huge amounts when I look at the Excel sheet, but it could be that the dollar plunges 50% or euro has big problems because Europe is not in the best shape either. We cannot change objectives every month depending on whatever we think the dollar might be, whether we're right or wrong. That's why we make objectives at constant currencies.
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Suhasini Varanasi with Goldman Sachs. Your line is live.
Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. Just a couple for me, please. Can you maybe discuss how you see the drag from SYNLAB Spain in the second-half margins compared to the drag that you saw in first half? How should we think about potential improvement? The second question is on the medium-term target, where you've reiterated your guide for 6.5% organic growth by 2027. It kind of implies pretty strong acceleration in 2026 and 2027. Given the slower growth that you saw this year and last year, can you maybe help us understand what gives you the confidence that will drive faster growth? I think you had mentioned larger contract wins in maybe biopharma ancillary services, ancillary activities. Is there anything else that we should be keeping in mind? Thank you.
Yes, thank you very much. We had only one quarter of SYNLAB in. The first half. We do not think SYNLAB will be significant reorganization measures. I can let Laurent comment on it specifically because he has looked at it more.
I mean, the impact on the first quarter of integration on our result for H1 was about 20 basis points of dilution of our margins. Going forward and taking into account the restructuring that we need to perform, we will have an impact in the area of 60 basis points for the full year.
Thank you.
Of course, all those costs and reorganization, they will have a positive impact once we have removed the costs that are due to duplication of labs, sampling points, blood collection points, etc. In the medium term, we have a number of businesses right now that are not in positive territory. If you remove that, at some point, they will at least hit bottom, flatten out, and start growing. If you remove the minuses, that has a very significant positive impact. We've had a very significant cut of revenue in clinical in France that was a big one-off this year that has affected the fourth quarter of last year and will affect the first three quarters of this year. As I already commented, we do feel biopharma will pick up. Actually, parts of our biopharma are very healthy.
Then we have all the benefits we expect from the end of all our reorganizations and IT deployments. When we deploy new IT systems, it is extremely disruptive for the business. Things are not working as expected. You have outages. You have systems that you have users that are not so used with a new system. Our service to clients is usually degraded every time we deploy a new system for one year or six months, six months to one year. We have a decrease of productivity and quality of service to clients. Once this is all bedded in, we get significant improvement of service to clients. Also, our competitive position is going to improve significantly once we're done. We think there are a number of reasons why growth could continue to accelerate. Now, of course, there is an element that is unknown, which is what inflation is.
The 6.5% includes some element of inflation increase compared to when we had a 5% target objective. 1% inflation, 1%-2% inflation. 6.5% assumes more like a 3% inflation or something like that. It is a secular target over a number of years. When we get back to normalcy. When normalcy will be with all the elements in the world and global aspect is hard to know. What is clear is we do things that are recurring and stable. Whether things are produced in one part of the world or another part of the world, they have to be tested. There might be some transitional issues. People are waiting. There's a lot of waiting at the moment in many areas. People are waiting to see what the situation will be before they invest, before they decide anything. This at some point will normalize.
We're confident in the growth potential of our sectors.
Thank you.
Yes, we had some real one-offs at the back end of last year that ended. That will normalize in terms of comps in the.
Understood.
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Carl Raynsford with Berenberg. Your line is live.
Hi, yeah, good afternoon, everyone. I have three questions, if I may. The first is just going through the growth commentary. There's no mention of diagnostics in the U.S. or rest of the world from what I could tell. You call out diagnostics as broadly flat in Europe, but I calculate the organic growth to be around 2.5% in Q2, and you adjust for the working days there. That implies the U.S. and rest of the world at a high single-digit rate. I just wanted to know if that's a fair way to be thinking about it and what the drivers are really through the first half. The second question is just really a follow-up on consumer. Have you seen any sort of material impact on the soft line, hard line volumes because of tariff uncertainty?
The last question, I know you're very confident on cash flow, but would you think about another share buyback if market valuation was soft, but it meant that leverage wouldn't hit the sort of 1.5 x by 2027? I'm just wondering what the main priority is in terms of cash really there. Thank you.
Thank you. I'm not sure I fully understood your calculation on diagnostics, but Laurent can answer. I think he understood your question.
Yeah, yeah, thank you. I mean, our growth, I mean, in North America for what we call diagnostics was closer to about 3%-4% organic growth in the first half. I think because I saw your email to Bernard in the meantime, I think you had a bit of weights between the regions on that segment not totally correct, but Bernard will follow up with you.
On consumer, we do not see so much of the tariff impact on soft lines and hard line. It is a small business for us, so it can depend on one client, two clients. We are winning share. We are winning new nominations by clients. We are a small player, but a small global player, one of the few global players. We should have a nice runway to grow our consumer because the clients want alternatives to the semi-oligopoly that exists. On share buyback, we try to always make the best decisions for our shareholder. I cannot say what our decision will be in six months or 12 months or three months. We know the value of our assets. Europe has different verticals, has a number of assets, and we know what they are worth, all those assets.
We see that we are still today, after our share rerated a little bit, very much discounted compared to the market and to private transactions. We have a very significant discount to peers in the market in EBITDA multiple, and an even bigger discount to value when we look at the value of our different assets on private markets for full transactions. We are very safe when we do buybacks at the valuations that we have because we know if we ever need cash, we can always sell an asset and do even more buybacks. Now, when the gap will close, we will see. The markets are volatile, and we have been hit by a number of factors since the war in Ukraine and the softness in biopharma. We will consider buybacks.
Indeed, this is something that is an option, but we also do not want to exceed our 2.5 x leverage. Also, as I mentioned earlier, we think we will come in a phase where our cash flow will increase significantly, and especially in 2027. Once we are done with all this CapEx and there is much less cash flowing out, we have very significant levels of EBITDA. It is not that we do not generate cash, but we invest that cash to build a house, to build a business. At some point, the house is built, and we use much less cash to do that. It is a bit of an answer. I cannot give you an answer because it depends on a number of parameters at any given time: our share price, our acquisition options, or our opportunities, different opportunities.
We are a steward of our shareholders' money, and we try to make the right decisions. If you look at the buybacks we did in the last 12 months, we could buy back our shares, I think, on average around EUR 50, and we think it is really good value. It is a very good investment for our shareholders.
Yeah, perfect. Understood. Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Now, the factor, if I may add, because people look at different numbers. They look at EBITDA multiple, EBIT multiple, and EPS multiples. It's all very interesting. One thing, if you compare Eurofins' depreciation schedules with other listed companies, we also depreciate very fast. We are conservative in our accounting. If we were depreciating at the same speed as others, our EBIT would be even higher. We think EBITDA is a better proxy. That's the cash we generate. We know why we do CapEx. We know what our maintenance CapEx is, which is fairly low at about 2%. That's why we know when we buy businesses how they are valued. If you look at our EBITDA multiple, we are still trading probably at 30% discount to the market, which we don't really see any long-term justification for.
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Rémi Grenu with Morgan Stanley. Your line is live.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my questions. Just two remaining on my side. On the M&A. I think you referred to the fact that it was quite an active environment in the first half of the year, almost doing a little bit more than EUR 200 million of revenues acquired there. Should we assume a quiet H2, or you're still very much willing to engage at the same pace and get the opportunities you're seeing there? That would be the first one.
The second one, on the central lab activity and the comments you were making on some of the programs already contracted and likely to start in the second half of this year or 2026, if you can elaborate a little bit on that and the discussions with customers and what kind of visibility you've got and what it means for the recovery of that part of the business.
Thank you. We do not provide guidances. We share our objectives. That is the objective that our teams have, both in terms of organic growth, profits, etc. The reality is whatever markets, clients, and so on decide. In terms of acquisitions, M&A, this is even more true. We do not know what we will buy. We know that most likely, adding EUR 250 million revenues each year from acquisition is achievable while being very disciplined on valuation and acquiring assets that can create value. Maybe we will do a bit more than EUR 250 million this year. Our teams are active. We look at many small bolt-ons that are valued at levels where we think we can generate very good return. We have a hurdle rate of 16% in year three when we buy a company, and that is a high bar.
We pass on many assets, but we look also at many assets. As I mentioned, there has not been a collapse in valuation of the larger, more profitable assets. On the other hand, there are also very few transactions, and many transactions get aborted. People think they are going to get a deal, and then the buyers are not closing or not signing. It is a bit of a wait and see. A lot of PE have trouble exiting their investments. Some of them will have to do either bankruptcies or the lenders will take over, or they will be negotiating with the lenders. There are some of those things happening at the moment. We are quite happy that nothing happens because, frankly, now we are focusing on putting the house in order. That is not the moment where we want to do a lot of M&A.
By 2027, we will be very efficient, lean and mean, and we will have better IT tools to deploy in acquired companies to extract more value. That is a question, and it is an answer on M&A. Central labs, yes, we have good discussions with clients on that. Of course, when exactly their programs start is—in central lab, if you look at Covance, or Covance now is part of Labcorp, it is very hard to time exactly when studies start. That is what we wrote is what we believe at the moment for some of the larger programs.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Neil Tyler with Rothschild & Co. Your line is live.
Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you. Hopefully, you can hear me. It's a bit crackly on my end. I wanted to ask a question sort of about the medium-term margin objective, Gilles and Laurent. If you were to sort of bucket the components of margin improvement that you envisaged back in 2022 that would get you to the 24%. I'm thinking of things of, I suppose, cost savings, operating leverage from volume growth, efficiency gains from the digital investments, and any other you want to add to that list. Can you perhaps talk a little bit around those, how they have materialized so far compared to what you expected? I suspect operating leverage has been less, but some of the others are probably on track. What's left in the locker in terms of the contribution from each? Hopefully, that question makes sense. Thank you.
Yeah, I think we still have a long way to go in Europe, especially. You see, in the U.S., the benefit of putting your house in order. We have put the right footprint in place in the U.S., hub-and-spoke. We have the right locations. We can still add more. We do not cover the full territory of the United States, but we cover a large part of the United States. It is easier to have the same software, the same processes, etc., and get the scale. In Europe, we are still doing that. Europe is burdened by very significant IT investment and still some size rationalization. We still also have a number of situations where our local leader may not be doing a very good job, and we still carry some realization, loss-making companies.
We do believe this, the streamlining of our network in Europe and the finalization of deployment of more standard and more modern IT solutions, will go a long way to bring the margins in Europe much closer to what they are in America. America still has potential to improve, but is already at a very good level. On top of that, of course, once this is all done, you are going to have operating leverage. You are going to have the benefits of more organic growth. We are still not great at selling. This is also, we focus more on operational excellence because we provide quality. Our operations and the quality of the result we provide is the most important. The timeliness of the result we provide is the most important. That is why we put so much CapEx in our labs, in our IT, in our digital.
There is a big improvement potential in how we go to market, how we approach clients, how we market, how we win share. We first want to have excellent performance everywhere before we unleash even more commercial activities to win and convince new clients. You still have the significant business that is not outsourced by clients. One thing that could happen is if our clients get squeezed and the squeeze continues, they might consider more outsourcing. There is still a significant amount of work that is in-house at our clients that should be economically and for many other reasons outsourced. That is some of the thoughts we have about future margin improvements. We are already very close. If we just got our non-mature scope in order, and that will happen over time, we are already where we want to be in terms of margin.
Thank you. Just perhaps by way of follow-up and picking up on some of those comments about the commercial approach. You have mentioned in the past year or two the increased emphasis on pricing and how, obviously, a couple of years ago, the inflation created a bit of a squeeze. Are you—I do not want to use the word satisfied, but are you sort of happier now that the pricing approach is more sort of embedded in the commercial approach to customers than it was back then? Is there sort of further room to grow there?
Yes, we have made progress. It's not perfect, and we also had very long contracts in some cases, but it is much more accepted by clients that we raise prices every year and potentially mid-year with indexing and so on. We're not where we want to be, and we certainly do not push our pricing at the moment. As I said, our philosophy is first. Get our house in order, provide the best performance possible, finalize the digitalization, which might mean for some clients some adaptation to new systems and so on. That's not the time where you maximize pricing. Price has to basically be the recognition of savings for our clients, efficiency for our clients, and the fact that maybe if we interconnect our systems better with their systems, they're going to save a lot of money on their side.
Maybe we can insource some of their labs and make them save a lot of money. It is all a complex thing, but we are getting much more mature at that. One of our goals by 2027 is also to be able to exactly measure how much price we gain every year, which is eminently complex when you sell projects that are not comparable from year to year. If you tackle the matter directly from the quotation time, there is a way to do it that we are piloting at the moment, also in our project-based businesses. There are a very large number of initiatives that are costly and disruptive that we are carrying out at the moment to improve our measurement of pricing and profitability by client, by contract, by project, etc. We're not great, but we are better.
I think also there, we're going to achieve things that no other player will achieve, especially at that scale, but it takes a long time.
That's helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Arthur Truslove with Citibank. Your line is live.
Good afternoon. Thank you very much. Three from me, if I may. First one, just on the biopharma situation. Thanks very much for providing the situation around the comps. I guess, is it reasonable to think based on what you've provided that if things sort of broadly stay as they are in the second half, biopharma could grow 3%-4%? I guess, is that plausible? Do you see any kind of market recovery in that biopharma segment? If not, when do you think it will happen? Second question, slightly technical. If I go to your definition of organic growth in, it's number 13 in your release, there's an additional sentence which says, "All revenues from discontinued activities/disposals in both the previous financial year and year Y are excluded from the calculation." Are you able to just confirm that there's been no change to the organic growth calculation? Final question.
There was some commentary that maybe there'd been some sort of cyber attack on your business in the Netherlands. I just wondered, is that situation completely resolved? Were there any financial implications? Just wondered if you could comment on that, please. Thank you.
Thank you. We're not in the business of making predictions business by business for the second half. We do think we'll have a better base, better comps for the ancillary activities and the part of biopharma and agro-science that are the most challenged. Whether it's going to be 2%, 3%, 4%, I don't know. If you look at other, I think you could look at other peers that are in biopharma that are even more like Thermo Fisher just published today, and they seem to have also a little bit of a pickup. Of course, the pickup will be in the impact. The core of our biopharma is doing well, is growing double digit, not double digit, but above mid-single digit. It's mostly ancillary activities that are a bit lower. First, the comps will help, and then if we in clinical gain new large contracts, this will be helpful too.
No, we have not changed anything in calculation of organic growth, and discontinued is completely marginal. We haven't discontinued anything huge recently. Yes, unfortunately, sometimes the businesses that we acquire, recently acquired businesses, until they have been put to our standards, can be victims, full victim of some cyber attacks, but we haven't seen anything that could be material at this stage.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Allen Wells with Jefferies. Your line is live.
Hey, good afternoon, Gilles, good afternoon, Laurent. Three for me, please, if that's okay. Firstly, just started with a kind of CapEx investment question. I noted in the slides you flagged you added 30,000 sq m of lab space in the first half. I think the guidance in that slide suggests there's 157,000 sq ft to add out through to 2026. If you average that out, it's about 50,000+ sq ft every half year. It's quite a meaningful step up in lab investment over the next three half years. I just wondered what we need to read into that in terms of the overall outlook for CapEx. Just mindful of the CapEx number in the first half is down year on year. Is that CapEx investment going to need to ramp a little bit to hit that 157,000 sq ft target? That's the first question.
Secondly, just to kind of follow up on a question that I think Arthur flagged just around that changing definition of organic growth, which I think was actually changed at the full year where you exclude the discontinued disposals. It looks like that was about a 30 basis point benefit to organic growth in the first half. Could you maybe just talk about what the rationale for adding that slight changing definition now is? Is there any reason we need to think about the appetite for discontinuing or disposing lower growth assets moving forward? Finally, just a clarification question just on SYNLAB. Laurent, I think you said it was a 60 basis point dilution to margin in the first half. My understanding from an accounting perspective is that SYNLAB goes into the group at 0% margin at break-even and that the losses are accounted for below the line.
EUR 140-ish million of revenues at 0%, it's about a 40 basis point dilution or 30 basis points for the nine months for this year. Am I misunderstanding that? I just want to try to understand what the dilution is and how we should think about the shape of that headwind through the second half as well. Thank you.
Thank you. I do not think I follow all your calculations, and I think Laurent already answered for SYNLAB, but I will give the answer back to Laurent on that. On the buildings, this is what is planned. When it gets completed and the timing, that could run over to 2027. It is always a little bit difficult to find the timeline of buildings. If you look at previous publication on that one, we always have a lot more planned than what we actually can deliver in the timeline. I am not sure it is going to be a matter of pickup of how many we add per half year. Could be a little bit. That is why we have the budget of EUR 200 million. We are until now quite EUR 200 million per annum spend on additional own buildings. I do not see something super.
Now on your two, I do not understand the question on organic growth because nothing has changed at all. Laurent, I let Laurent answer that and SYNLAB.
Yeah. We did not change any calculation or definition on organic growth. I mean, the small change in the wording is just some clarity required by the auditors, but there is no change to the calculation. We can follow up offline if you want to see what is making this impact that you just mentioned. On SYNLAB, what I said is that on the first half, we only consolidated one quarter, and the dilution to the first half results of the group was about 20 basis points. On the full year, we foresee about 60 basis points. It is not going to go below the line because most of this dilution is coming from restructuring cost, severance cost, or basically poor performance, which goes above the line. This is what we have. This is indeed 60 basis points for the full year. You are right on one thing.
This is only nine months, three quarters, because the first quarter, it did not belong to us.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We will take our final question today from Delphine Le Louët with Bernstein. Your line is live.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Gilles. I got some questions for you and probably more into the midterm and obviously well done on the margin acceleration. When you think about the shareholder return and the breakup and the policy we should have in mind in between the buybacks, the dividend, and the growth, what should be the priority tomorrow versus what has been the priority in 2025 or probably in 2024 also? The second question would deal with the CapEx and how we should think about the CapEx. Two-thirds roughly is dedicated to the OpEx and a third to the footprint expansion. We are coming to an end in Europe. What's this going to look like in two years? Should we think about this replication in other regions? Is it about thinking how should we think about that envelope?
Finally, the question regarding the biopharma, and because we had a very interesting day yesterday on the CRO space. It's taking a bit of time to see, and we do understand it's not easy to get long contract and big contract with the pharma business. How should we think about going into new agencies and switch a bit out from the genomic business to probably more regular business when it comes to the biopharma?
Thank you very much. In terms of shareholder return and how we allocate cash, we are very simple on that, and we have not invented anything. I think a long time ago, Warren Buffett said, "Good businesses are businesses where you can deploy large amounts of capital at high rates of return." That is basically our driving thing. If we see areas where we can deploy a lot of capital at good rates of return, we think a 16% hurdle rate is good. Organically, we are more at 30%-40% return on the organic capital we deploy. M&A, it is hard to do much more than 16% because multiples are high, especially only within three years. This will drive our decisions regarding dividends, buyback, etc., what are the opportunities for growth. If there are enough opportunities to deploy a lot of capital, we will favor internal investment, organic, or M&A.
If we think the returns on especially M&A are not good, we might use our cash more to return it to investors, whether it is dividend or buyback. On CapEx, yes, indeed, when we are done with adding those buildings, we think we will be done, not only in Europe. By the end of 2027, this is the program for the business as we see it today. We might still do a little bit incrementally when we do M&A, and they have sites. We will also try to put them into own sites over time, at least for the big labs, but it will not be the same order of magnitude that we plan now for EUR 200 million per year. The biopharma, genomics is a small business. It is, I do not know, EUR 60 million-EUR 80 million. They have a number of verticals.
The academic part is a very small part, and indeed, we are moving out of the academic part. We are keeping what we have, but we do not expand that very much. The bulk of our business in genomics is pivoting more towards diagnostics, so providing and also sequencing, providing the probes and the kits for all those diagnostic applications and sequencing applications. Also, there is a need for biopharma, for mRNA, and other things. We have a number of applications for end markets, for example, for environmental, for food testing. There are a number of adjacencies where we are already active. Indeed, our genomics, which is small, is going more industrial. Biopharma, we are not really like other CROs in the phase three and the large clinical trials. We have a small central lab. It is also sub EUR 100 million.
This is a bit more volatile, that thing, because of the size of the studies, especially if you are small. The bulk of our biopharma is very recurring. It is biopharma product testing, and we see that continuing to grow well. I hope I answered your questions.
Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. This is all the time we have for today's question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Dr. Gilles Martin for closing remarks.
Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone, for your questions. I hope we could answer adequately. You're welcome to follow up with Bernard or with Laurent if you have some calculations questions. Nothing is changing in the way we produce our numbers. We account, we try to be very conservative on all aspects. Over the years, we've added more disclosures. We give you now information by area of activity in addition to full segment. Remains the biggest difference. We are open to any suggestions you may have. With the sale of the real estate to the company, one thing that was a nuisance point for some of you is going to go away at the end of this year. We think we will deliver a very strong company at the end of this year on all aspects, including we've even added a board member.
Any aspect that was considered nuisance value by some observers. We are quite happy about what we are doing, how things are going, considering the world is still a little bit shaky and uncertain in many areas. We're happy to be in sectors that are not really affected by tariffs and all those things that are very resilient also in case there would be a recession. We're very optimistic that biopharma will pick up. As you see, the core of it in our business is already doing very well. We're continuing to build a house, and we're getting close to the end of the program. 2026 will be the year before last. In 2026, we should start to see some of all those benefits, and even more importantly, in 2027. I will meet some of you tomorrow in London. I'm looking forward to that.
For those of you that I won't meet, I wish you a nice summer break. I'm looking forward to talk to you in the fall when we will come back. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the call is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone lines. We thank you for joining and hope you have a pleasant day.