Welcome to the Eurofins Scientific Full Year 2022 Results publication. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen mode only, and afterwards there'll be a question and answer session. 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, which are defined in the footnotes of our press release. Actual results may differ materially from objectives discussed. Risks, uncertainties, and that may affect Eurofins' future results include, but are not limited to, those described in the risk factors section of Eurofins' annual reports. Please also read the disclaimer on page two of this presentation, which is subject to this call and Q&A sessions that are made. I will now hand over to Eurofins CEO, Gilles G. Martin.
Please go ahead with your meeting.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining our annual result call. I will start with slide five. Actually, while we go to slide five, we actually have two announcement today. The first announcement is actually maybe more important than our annual results, is that we received the OTC clearance for our at-home test for COVID-19 by the FDA on Friday night. It is an important breakthrough because there are very few such tests available. I think maybe one I heard of mainly. It will enable us to distribute this test very widely. Patients do not need a prescription to buy it. They can just go to a shop or a pharmacy and buy a test and have it at home. Whenever needed, they don't have to go and stand in line or take risk to a testing station.
They can just get tested themselves, they sample themselves, and then send it back by FedEx, and the next day get their results. It's a major breakthrough, and it could be a very important use also in Europe for mass testing, because mass testing is one proven way to really almost eradicate the virus in one city or one region. The biggest bottleneck to testing has always been sampling. Getting people to go to a station where they are sampled and with the possibility of adding self-testing, that gives almost limitless capacity for testing. In the meantime, our labs and other labs have created more than sufficient capacity, and there are modalities to pool samples to even multiply by five or ten the capacity. Those PCR tests are very sensitive.
Our PCR test was actually ranked with the FDA comparator method as the most sensitive of 117 tests that were cleared by the FDA. This is a very useful tool. Of course, I wish it would have been available earlier in the pandemic. It could have helped many countries to significantly reduce the spread of the pandemic. There are still regions of the world where the virus is spreading fast, and number of cases increasing, especially due to the new variants, which are more infective. Therefore, this tool, while it comes late, is a very significant breakthrough in our opinion. We're working to get it approved in as many European countries as possible, where it really would be of significant help. Going back to page five. Yes, Eurofins is really a purpose-led company.
We have been very successful over the last 30 years, and many of us here in the company could have retired long ago, if we're not motivated by the contribution we can make by our working lives to the positively influencing the life, the health of everybody and protecting our environment. We have shown, we're very proud to have shown in 2020 how much our teams could contribute in the context of a pandemic that was severely affecting the lives of so many of us. On page six, we describe the key aspects of the year for us. The first thing is, once again, Eurofins has shown that our choice of markets and our policy of investing for the long term makes our business extremely resilient. As you may recall, in 2009, during the last big global economic crisis, our sales continued to grow.
That was the case again last year for our core business. I'm not talking of COVID test. Outside all the COVID reagents and tests, we still have positive organic growth in 2020. Our core business did not grow the 5% that we would have hoped. Some of its parts were affected, but still other parts performed so well that overall, we had positive organic growth last year of our core business outside of COVID testing and reagents. This shows our resilience, the markets we are serving and the activities of Eurofins are. What we also showed is that the way we set up our company with a network of independent companies rather than a centralistic group, made us extremely agile.
This is this agility, this level of entrepreneurship throughout our organization that enabled us to develop a range of response to COVID that is equal to none. I don't know any company, and some are much bigger than Eurofins, that have developed the same range of solutions to fight COVID-19. Be it on a range of tests for patients or testing the environment, offering solutions to help people return to their factories and to their offices safely. This has been the work of our team in that sector has been truly outstanding last year. You've heard of all our different product introductions last year. The most recent ones with self-testing. Self-testing modalities that can be done in some regions where they are authorized in saliva, on gargling fluids, which are very good for children. It's very difficult to put a swab in a child's nose.
It can be stressful, it can be painful. We have now testing modalities that are well-validated on gargling solutions that people can also do themselves, as I discussed. We have a range of antibodies testing kits, and the latest one are quantitative, so they can be used to verify the effectiveness of vaccine. They can be used to verify if somebody has had the disease before, so we don't maybe they are not given the vaccine right now, or they could have even bigger adverse effects. Over time, they'll be able to tell what's the level of antibodies and help maybe in the timing of booster shots, et cetera. We of course, have the rapid antigen test. We don't think so much of the rapid antigen test because they miss between 1/3 and 50% of the positives. Still, we have developed that. We have that in our portfolio.
Of course, we also have a whole range of tests that will prove very useful when we all start to come back to our offices and our factories and start to travel and go to events. In our SAFER@WORK program, where we have almost 3,000 contracts signed or are about to be signed, to help make sure events are safe, travel is safe, and that's by testing people, but testing also the environment. We have our Eurofins COVID-19 Sentinel program that can be used, for example, on wastewater, to detect recurrence of the virus or new viruses, emergence of new viruses without testing people. A really broad range of capabilities, and each of them will be used in the various phases of the recovery that is going to follow COVID. It's not only about COVID.
We also continue to work very hard throughout 2020 to build out our network, to finalize our five-year plan, to build those large hub-and-spoke laboratory networks in each country to be extremely effective, fast, and cost-effective. We continued our investment to be a fully digital company, which of course, helped us to go through this crisis. It helped us to be some of the first to have apps where patients can order their tests, can get their results in real-time, et cetera. We've done a little bit of M&A last year. Of course, M&A was not the priority, and it was difficult to know what you are buying if you cannot visit the companies, do on-site audits, multiple meetings with people. That's why it was not a priority in 2020, and it will not be this year.
Maybe in 2022, we'll return to our normal target of adding about EUR 200 million from M&A per year. On page seven, you have an overview of our financial indicators. I think the main one to note is that, of course, we've had outstanding growth and very good margins, very good cash flow. The fact that we are vertically integrated, we produce our own reagents, we produce our own kits. It has helped us to, of course, improve our margins. More importantly, we have brought back our leverage to a very modest level, actually to the lower point of the range we like to be. We like to be in the range 1.5-2.5 debt to EBITDA, and we're at 1.6, two years ahead of schedule, which gives us all our strategic freedom.
We've been listening to critics, and there were a lot of bad faith critics by short sellers over the last two or three years about Eurofins. There was one point where some of our investors, legitimate investors, thought maybe we could take less risk that was on leverage. We thought our leverage was always in the normal range, but at some time, of course, it can go slightly higher, around 3.5. Our intention was always to go back to that range, 1.5-2.5, and we're now already at the bottom of the range. I hope that this will remove the last worry regarding Eurofins' balance sheet that some people might have had. I will not say more about the numbers, but Laurent Lebras, our CFO, will comment on the figures on the next few slides.
Thank you, Gilles. Good afternoon. My pleasure to present to you our 2020 financial results. Starting on page nine, as you can see, we have posted a very strong set of results across most indicators. We had a very strong revenue growth over 19%, both organically and in reported scope, which enabled us to achieve EUR 5.4 billion of revenues. This strong growth in revenues translated into very strong improvement of our EBITDA. We reached an EBITDA margin of 26% on adjusted level, basically equivalent to EUR 1.4 billion of adjusted EBITDA. This also translated down to the net profit level, where for the first time we posted more than EUR 500 million of net profit in reported scope and EUR 700 million of net profit in adjusted scope.
All in all, enabling us to post an adjusted basic earnings per share of EUR 3.63, more than double of what it was last year. Moving to page 10. You can see from our revenue bridge that we did have a negative FX impact of about EUR 60 million last year, and a small contribution from M&A of about EUR 46 million, meaning that our growth last year was exclusively organic. We estimate the net impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to be of about EUR 550 million. What is more important to note is that our organic growth, excluding COVID-19 activities, was positive for the year and back to 5% of organic growth resumed in the last quarter of the year.
Overall, we posted a revenues of EUR 5.4 billion, way above our initial objective of EUR 4 billion set in 2015, or even the one upgraded in 2018 to EUR 5 billion. If we move to page 11, this strong revenue growth also converted into strong cash flow generation. We posted a record of free cash flow to the firm of EUR 873 million, above our last objective of EUR 700 million, thanks to well-controlled networking capital, well-controlled CapEx, and also a strong contribution from our operations. Overall, we finished the year with a very firm liquidity position with about EUR 900 million of cash on our balance sheet. Moving to page 12. If we zoom on net working capital, the net working capital intensity was significantly improved. It decreased to 4.5% of revenues, in line with our latest objectives, thanks to better DSO, which were improved at 52 days.
Despite the fact that we had to increase inventory and we had a slight deterioration of our DPO in relation to our COVID activities, which required the buildup of safety stocks and the advanced payment terms for critical supplies at some times. Moving to page 13. If we zoom on the net CapEx spend, we spent about EUR 350 million last year, slightly above our objective, in relation with basically the rapid COVID capacity buildup. If we look at the ratio to revenues, it was only of 6.4%, a great improvement versus the year before, also in line with the last completion phase of our infrastructure program. If we look at the breakdown of this CapEx spend by nature, we spent about 40% of it on lab buildings and leasehold improvements, about 35% on lab equipment, and 20% on IT spend.
All this translated in a very much improved ROCE, slide 14. Despite this very long infrastructure program that we have started about five years ago, we were able to bring the ROCE back in the mid-teens level. In 2020, we posted a ROCE of 15.9%, way above our internal hurdle rate of 12%. If you look at ROCE excluding goodwill, we are also back in a 50%+ territory level, which should increase and continue to increase in the future years. Moving to slide 15. We have basically been able to deleverage significantly from 3.2 to 1.6 terms of net debt to EBITDA. This is thanks to the record EBITDA, the record cash flow, but also to the equity raise that we did last summer.
Overall, we were able to pay back all our credit lines to pay all our short-term borrowings and also to anticipate the refinancing on some senior debt instruments. Giving us now a very reasonable maturity profile for our debt as we don't have any reimbursements scheduled before 2022. To conclude on page 16, we intend to propose at the next AGM, next month, a dividend payment of EUR 0.60 per share, which would be equivalent to 25% of distribution of our net profit. Thank you for your attention. Now I'll pass back to Gilles for the operational review and the outlook section.
Thank you. I will go to page 18. Of course, you might wonder, how can Eurofins manage to grow an average 30% per annum for 20 years. More than 20 years, actually. We did that also before we were public. To create 29% value every year for 30 years or 20 years. I think the main reason is innovation. Our company has always been focused on innovation. We are seen or compared to other testing companies or CROs. Reality, we are a very innovative life science company, and that applies to all the testing methods that we develop, but also how we work to improve our processes every year to make them fully digital, to use automation, to use artificial intelligence, and always striving to combine those tools to offer new solutions.
If you were to come in one of our COVID-19 testing centers, you'd see how smooth and sleek and digital it is. A patient register online, they come to the test center, it takes them one minute to be tested maximum. Next day, they get their results on their app. This was also done in record time. All our labs were interconnected worldwide. We can switch the samples, send them to many other labs. We have 15 labs in United States. We can load balance. We can do all this because of our investment we did in digitalization, for example. If I move to page 19, we've already talked a lot about our COVID response. I think I'll go back to that on the questions.
Our investments over the year in digitalization and innovation, as well as our entrepreneurial model, is what enabled us to develop so fast this response. On page 20, you will see more examples. I think the breakthrough we had Friday to get OTC clearance for our test in the U.S. is a major breakthrough to get people to test themselves. The COVID Sentinel will also, I think in the years to come, prove very useful in developing solutions together with many governments and partners around the world, to prevent recurrence of either this epidemic with new variants or to prevent new epidemics or see them coming earlier. The variants actually are still a concern and there are discussions in many countries. Nobody really knows how vaccines will behave or people who are vaccinated, when they are confronted with the new variants, how they will react.
We were also the first to develop a solution in Europe to detect very fast those variants by a dedicated real-time PCR solution, as opposed to sequencing. We, of course, are one of the largest suppliers of sequencing services in Europe that are used to identify the variants, but they are too slow. We developed also a very fast method for that. As part of our SAFER@WORK program on page 21, we describe some of the strategies we've been offering to clients to make it cost-effective and efficient to make sure their sites are free of COVID. On page 22, something maybe of more interest for analysts. We try to compare with other players in the clinical diagnostic services industry, how much tests did we do. You might remember that Eurofins is a small clinical diagnostics company.
Our revenues in clinical diagnostic services in 2019 were about $1 billion, compared to something like $7 billion for Labcorp and Quest, $3 billion or plus more for Sonic, $2.5 billion for SYNLAB, maybe $1 billion or $1.5 billion for Unilabs. We're a tiny clinical diagnostic player. We try to find out how much tests we all did. It's not easy because it's not exactly published by all companies exactly in the same way. We try to find, and we found some numbers, like Quest and Labcorp probably did something like 30 million tests last year, PCR tests, and SYNLAB about 50 million. You see that on the graph on the X-axis of this page 22, all the volumes.
We did about as many tests as, for example, Sonic and SYNLAB, which are two or three times bigger than we are in clinical diagnostics. It shows that actually our contribution to this is way more than proportional to our revenues in clinical diagnostics. I think it's a bit of an example of our positioning. Some of the decisions we took to not focus on routine testing, but to focus on advanced testing, on esoteric testing, it helped us to develop tests faster. Also our decision to develop our own test internally to vertically integrate, which of course was very dilutive to our profits over the last few years, because it cost us a lot of money to build that infrastructure and have the R&D spend to have the R&D teams that can develop new tests. It enabled us to respond extremely quickly to the pandemic.
We have vertically integrated the production of plastics and reagents, RNA extraction reagents, which enabled us to never have shortages for our laboratories when some of our competitors couldn't provide. I'm happy to see and that we were able to validate it with numbers, that it's just not we were at the right place at the right time. Of course, we had been prepared. Nobody saw it coming, this crisis. We knew that molecular testing would be a very valuable tool to contribute to the health of everybody. We had been focused on the even more complex tests, the genetic tests, where we are a market leader in non-invasive prenatal testing. Of course, if we can do whole genome testing, we can of course do a smaller molecular, a smaller sequence testing for COVID.
That has shown that we could contribute way more than proportionally to our revenues to this fight. On page 23, of course, the more important thing is what happens beyond COVID. We're happy to see that in 2020, after a dip in Q2 for some of our activities, a lot of our activities recovered. In Q4, we were already back at 5% organic growth. Although still in Q4, we had many of our activities that were stopped or severely reduced in their volume due to lockdowns. That means some of our other core activities were growing much faster than 5%. That's a second crisis in a row that we see how resilient our core activities are. It makes us very bullish for the future.
We still hope that in 2022, COVID will be behind us and there will be no COVID revenues, but no COVID disruptions either. When we see how much investment is going in the biopharma sector, and biopharma is about a third of our revenues, there will be massive opportunities for providers like us. I may not have mentioned it before, Eurofins worked for six of the seven producers of vaccines that are either registered or about to be registered. We were materially supportive in helping them to get their registration very fast in carrying out all the testing, developing the tests that were required either for product development or for the clinical trials or now for release. We are working. We are the global release partner of one of the very large vaccine producers.
We worked for three of the companies developing therapeutics like antibodies, for example, to fight COVID. This will go on. This type of activity will go on. The mRNA vaccines are a proof that this technology can be applied safely. There are millions of lots of application in oncology and other sectors. The fundraising by the biotech industry last year was a record. It probably continues. Being the leader in that industry of BioPharma Product Testing positions us very well going forward to long-term growth. While we worked on, some of our teams worked on COVID, if I go on page 24, obviously, other teams were very active in their core business. We continued to innovate in all of our business lines, in biopharma testing services, in our early development sector.
We are the leader globally in early development, and with the acquisition of Beacon, we're getting stronger in integrated drug discovery. A lot of money will go in the early phases of development because of the funding that went to biotech. We continue to invest in, and develop a whole range of testing kits. Our food testing business line is not really dependent on external suppliers. For the key tests that we carry out in our labs, we can now produce most of them ourselves at much lower cost and doing it in a proprietary way, which is offering further differentiation. I won't bore you with every single development, but on page 25, you can see a few more very interesting developments that should fuel growth as the world become a bit more normal beyond the pandemic.
On page 26, a little bit of an update of our investment program. You know we had this five-year investment plan to build our global laboratories network, commensurate with our leadership positions in our market. We're almost done at the end of 2020. Between the cyber attack in 2019 and COVID in 2020, I think we took a year delay for completion of some programs, we should be done at the end of this year. That will set us with a completely incomparable laboratory network, fully digital, that others have not even started to think about or to work towards. To integrate electronically with the same software, hundreds of laboratories around the world is a massive undertaking. For whatever, how much money you want to spend, it takes decades or it takes 10 years to get there, we're very close to doing that.
If you saw in our CapEx too, it costs money. Last year, again, for years, we spent maybe more than EUR 100 million a year just to buy those buildings, buy the land, build those buildings. We concentrated in five or 10 years investments that will last for 30 or 40 years to come. It's not a small investment. We're quite happy actually to be close to the end. We finished our site in Madison for our largest food testing lab in North America to move the Covance business we acquired. After three years, we've completed the full integration of the Covance Food Safety Solutions business into Eurofins network. It was a lot of cost, a lot of moving people from state to state, et cetera.
Now we have a very well set up network of labs to serve the food industry and the feed industry in North America. We'll be adding a few local microbiology labs in the years to come to serve a few geographies where we are underrepresented. The more expensive investments are all behind us. ESG on page 28. Eurofins is, was more or less a baby company or a teenager company so far. We were doing a lot of good things, but maybe we were not putting the right emphasis in describing or explaining what we're doing. This year, for the first time, we've produced a real ESG report that describes a bit more what we are doing. It's a first version. The reports we will do in the following years will be much better.
When we started looking at it systematically, we could see that Eurofins is in line and contributing positively to 16 of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It's not a surprise. As a purpose-led company, we want to do the right thing, and we feel proud that all of our actions have a positive contribution to the lives of everybody and to the health of the planet. You can read it in our ESG report, all the things we are contributing on. Definitely our environmental testing is helping keep the planet in a good state, helping fight pollution that will basically destroy more natural habitats, helping our clients mitigate their impact on the environment. Our certification help them measure their impact.
Of course, all the things we do in food testings can promote the replacement of, for example, red meat with proteins from vegetable sources, from insects, from other sources that have a much lower impact on the CO2 contribution. I think on page 13, you can see Eurofins as a true enabler of ESG actions for our clients. We are looking forward to support them as they also put more emphasis on their ESG impact. We have our own internal roadmap, of course. We don't work for big polluters. We are not a big polluter ourselves. We don't generate a lot of CO2. Something like, I think, 8- 10 tons per employee per year, but we still can improve it. We will work on measuring it better, improving it, reducing it, and compensating more of it.
Last year, we compensated 20% of our emissions, and we're looking forward to, by 2025, reduce our emissions significantly and compensate 100% of the remainder to be CO2 neutral. We have set up resources to do that, and we're also contributing more meaningfully through Eurofins Foundation. Since we had a successful year last year, we were able to treble our contribution. We're supporting 75 different projects that are aligned with the United Nations Goals for Sustainability and also are supporting more challenged population. On the government side, we'll be recommending two more board directors. Also, one of our directors will be retiring. We will have five independents, eight members, and four women, which we think now is in line with what the agencies consider as a good target.
Also on page 32, expanded in 2020, our Global Equality Driving Excellence initiative that is staffed by senior leaders of Eurofins to increase the participation of women in top leadership, to develop many actions, to fight any racial bias or other bias in the organization. We are introducing roles for that as we do for environment in the goals of all of our leaders. We're looking forward to be an exemplary company in this sector, and I think we're doing well, but to also develop the tools to quantify it and document it in our annual publications. If we move on page 34 for the conclusions. For many years, I've been meeting some of you or others who said, "Yeah, they are the three big TIC company, and there is a small Eurofins." That has been pretty much all my lifetime, the tone of the discussion.
The three big and stable TIC companies and Eurofins. Well, as you can see, last year, of course, because of the COVID-19 crisis, but not only to see the trend of the curve, Eurofins became the largest TIC company. Not only in terms of revenues, but also profitability. Of course, COVID will fade away, and we will all recover the lost revenues we have had in last year because of COVID. Eurofins might not do so much COVID revenues, but the trends are so strong in the markets we are active in that I am pretty sure the Eurofins curve is going to continue to trend upwards. On page 35, we are summarizing our objectives for this year. It is very hard to know what exactly will happen. The variants of concern are spreading very fast. We are helping many governments with our real-time PCR test to identify variants.
Some governments are doing it, like for example, France and Germany, some regions in Germany, and they are starting to have a good view of where the variants really are. Not all countries are doing it. A lot of countries are still doing only sequencing, which is only sequencing part of the positive and is also a bit delayed in its response. We will see over the next couple of months how the virus continues to spread and what the need for testing is. We still hope that by this summer, there will be a very strong reduction of the COVID cases and hence the COVID testing, but we don't know. We have a range of scenario as to how much testing could be required this year, next year, and the following years.
For simplicity, we decided it's just as well at this stage to not change our objective for 2021 until we know better, and to stick to a plan for 2022 and 2023 with zero COVID testing. This is for simplification, obviously. We gave you rounded numbers to give you an indication of where we think things are and could land. We try to be conservative in what we do. We'd rather surprise you with good news than with bad news. We're trying to set objectives that are achievable, that are not crazy. Yes, it could well be that we exceed those we have set for 2021. We still continue in January and February to do a lot of COVID testing, and it looks like this will continue at least at some level through Q2.
We are still optimistic that after Q2, the level will drop significantly. It's not certain either. Also, there could be a lot of mass testing as the economies start to restart to avoid further spread. The SAFER@WORK impact is also not clear. It's also not clear how the travel sector will restart, what level of testing or events will be required. Those objectives, we think, are realistic and maybe we'll do better. On page 36, to conclude, it's obvious that we've had a very strong year in 2020. It has shown that we have a very resilient business. We have a high growth business. We can very confidently set 5% organic growth targets, and those 5% organic growth targets should not be too much subject to cycles or variations of the economy.
There are not so many sectors and companies that can show this long-term growth pattern. This crisis has shown how fast, innovative, and agile our companies are, and I think there will be many more opportunities in the years to come where we can show what we can do, and that can boost our growth. We have recovered a very strong balance sheet at the end of 2020. We might not use this balance sheet. We don't have the intention to do any major M&A over the next couple of years. We have so many organic opportunities. For example, our development in Asia presents many opportunities, and a lot of them we can do organically within the CapEx objectives we have given that most likely will continue to deleverage over the next couple of years.
Then we'll see what we do if we return the cash to our shareholders or maybe at some point find some proper investment for it. The M&A also, in the few M&A targets we've seen, and that's an interesting thing, by the way. We were lucky in being the first to consolidate our industry. The remaining assets are of very poor quality. They've been often assembled by private equity and then under-invested and are not great assets. Nonetheless, they are traded, they are sold for 16-18x EBITDA. When I see that Eurofins is trading at 12x EBITDA for 2022 on a fairly conservative EBITDA, I think I'd rather keep Eurofins stock than buy many of those assets that are coming around. Yes.
I think we will come out of the pandemic, whenever it stops, hopefully this summer or later, as a very strong company. We will have finished the integration of all the large acquisitions we did in 2017 and 2018. We will have finalized our hub-and-spoke lab network. We will be a fully digital company. Going forward, the focus will be on R&D, of course, making sure we continue to invest in our teams and give them the opportunities to learn, to develop, to get further education. We're investing in our internal training program significantly. We're going to invest massively in R&D. Of course, ESG is a key. We want to be also an exemplary company in this area, not only for growth and profitability. We're very bullish for the midterm and long-term future of the company.
We hope to continue to contribute meaningfully to the fight against COVID-19 in 2021 and help everybody put it behind us. Yes, the future looks very, very exciting, also in terms of technologies. There are many new technologies we developed and we tested and we deployed in our labs this year that we can put to use for many other things that we have ideas on and research programs ongoing on. Sorry for this long introduction. We can run over a bit of the hour if needed, if there are many questions. Now I'd like to turn the microphone to you for questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask an audio question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw from your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. Once again, please press zero one on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask an audio question. There will be a brief pause as we wait for questions to be registered. Our first question comes from Patrick Wood from Bank of America. Please go ahead. The line is now open.
Perfect. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I have two, please. The first would be on the vaccine work within BioPharma Product Testing. Are any of those agreements volume-related, or have you already essentially been paid for the work on the trials up front? How should we think about the revenue development of those as vaccine volumes ramp? That's the first question. On the second side of things, interesting on Beacon and the movement into the CRO space and building up there. What's the thought process and how large would you want to be within the CRO landscape? Is that more about winning development contracts later down the line and supporting the BioPharma Product Testing business, or is this something that in and of itself you would want to see getting to a decent size? Thanks.
Thank you very much. Yes, we did all kinds of work for vaccines. We worked in the very early R&D stages, also on those oligonucleotides. We have also one of the largest in the world in producing oligos. We work in the product development cycle with BPT, BioPharma Product Testing, and we are involved in the release testing of some of those vaccines. Indeed, release testing is proportional to volume. We've been ramping up as fast as we could capacity, and the release testing is starting this year, it wasn't last year, to help companies produce as many doses as possible while we continue to work with the vaccine company to measure the cost for the surveillance of post-registration and also for the work around the booster shots and the work around potentially altering the targeting to cover mutants or variants.
Beacon, yeah, in discovery, it's a tiny market, very fragmented, many small players, all highly scientific. I think from what we can see, we are the leader in this early discovery work. We are not doing, however, animal testing. We are not like Charles River. Charles River is very big because they do a lot of animal testing in early development. We don't do that, but we do even before that, all the testing on cells and testing of thousands of compounds against different tools and testing platforms to detect are they going to work? Are they going to be toxic? Indeed, the future for those companies is to be faster. Everybody wants to be faster in markets, that's why we are putting emphasis on this integrated discovery, because we have all the capabilities. We have the chemistry capabilities to produce, generate new molecules.
We have the CDMO capabilities that can produce also the clinical trial batches. We have the BPT capabilities to test all those clinical trial batches and then the ability to have product management, project management to cycle very fast based on the effect of the first screening assays to tweak the molecule a bit, and if we can do it all in one organization, it is much faster for clients. We'll be investing significantly on that. We don't want to become a CMO, we don't want to do commercial production. That's a different market. All those work around integrated discovery is an area where we want to strengthen our leadership.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Andy Grobler from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. The line's now open.
Hi. Good afternoon. Your target for organic growth in the longer term is still 5%. I just wondered if you could talk through some of what has been kind of lost and gained for your end markets through the pandemic. You sort of mentioned earlier that those targets might prove conservative given what you were saying. Do you feel that they may be overly conservative at this stage? Secondly, just from a different angle, the hybrid first calls are next year. Do you think longer term that is still going to be the right financing structure for you given where your leverage now is? Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Andy. Yes, it's very hard to make predictions, especially about the future. The 5% organic growth is a target we set maybe five or 10 years ago, and we haven't revised since, and we tend to exceed it every year. I think there are good reasons to believe that in the world post-COVID, we could grow faster than that based on our positioning. Of course, we still have an embarked routine clinical diagnostic that is going to drive the growth a little bit. It's not all that much, and our clinical diagnostic labs are becoming more and more innovative, so that could counterbalance that. They are still part of the world where this can grow organically. Yes, I hope you are right, and I hope that in 2022, 2023, 2024, we can deliver significantly more than 5%.
It's very hard to know. We'd prefer to stick with our secular objective. If you put in your DCF 5%, and I think that could last for a very long time, I think you'll get pretty explosive results. Yeah, hybrid. It's a good point. We might not need hybrid anymore because it's a matter of cost. At every given time, whenever we have a refinancing, we'll consider the different cost opportunities of the various instruments. I know, sometimes we are criticized for having instruments like Schuldschein and hybrid and so on, but they all mix. Hybrid is a very low-risk financing. We still could be hit with further economy crisis. The Western world is going to be challenged with the emergence of Asia. There might be sociopolitical challenges in many parts of the world. Having an instrument like the hybrid is not necessarily bad.
We've of course, no obligation to repay anything anytime if the situation were very serious, which we're very far from, and it's hard to conceive how we could be in a situation where we would benefit from the hybrid. We'll review that fairly soon. I think 2022 is the first time when we'll have to redefine what we do on that.
Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Just as a quick reminder, if you wish to ask an audio question, you may do so by pressing zero one on your telephone keypad. Once again, please press zero one on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask an audio question. Our next question comes from Edward Stanley from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. The line is now open to you.
Afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. I've got three, please. First one, I'm curious about the other press release you put out this morning. What is your production capacity for those at-home empowerDX kits in the U.S., and when do you envisage that that might be available as a product in any kind of European countries? Second question, perhaps relating to that maybe for Laurent, I see your inventory's up, which is obvious, but your inventory allowance is substantially up. Does that relate to mainly rapid antigen testing, where sales will be more disappointing or something else where you're foreseeing worsening trends, perhaps? Finally, on the 26 deals you did, you disclosed GeneTech, SunDream, and I know M&A is not a focus this year or last year or even next year, but which verticals were you targeting or are you targeting?
As you've shown in that chart, that you've overtaken all the other TIC companies in terms of revenue, but those competitors are finding it obviously, evidently more challenging to find bolt-ons that move the needle for them. How do you have such high confidence that the medium-term pipeline for M&A is as attractive as they evidently don't?
Thanks a lot, Edward. Production capacity is pretty big. Also, we got clearance by the FDA to use any of our U.S. labs, and we can deploy this test in each of our 50 labs in the country. We're working with partners right now on the launch at various large chains in the U.S., and the associated marketing. Based on that, we can adapt capacity. Our capacity in the U.S. is more than 100,000 tests a day, if need be. It can be ramped up significantly should there be demand. Of course, we will see how the market reacts. Those products are not only good for direct-to-consumer, but they would be extremely good for employers.
If, let's say, big banks in New York want to bring everybody back to the office, what would be really easy is to have boxes of those tests at the entrance. Get everybody to spit in a tube or do a very shallow nasal swab, then put the tube backs in a box. Then during the night, we can test the result, and everybody would know by the next morning before they decide if they go to work or not, if they are positive or negative, or if a floor is to be isolated. That could be really easy to do. It can apply to events. We can ship those kits to people who want to go to a show, for example. When they register for a festival, they order their tickets. Three or four days before the festival, they get a kit at home.
They return it. The day before the festival, they get their results. We can all make it very fast, and that's much more reliable than the antigen kits. We're going to have to see how it is used and reason has not always prevailed in the fight against pandemic, unfortunately. Actually, we've been lobbying to launch this test for almost a year now. It was ready in our labs in many countries, and it's still not allowed in some European countries for at least six months. We think this is the thing to do, because the real bottleneck are the sampling stations. If people could test themselves, we could have a much higher throughput of testing in many European countries, too. On the inventory, I think I can answer that question. Of course, we built a lot of inventory to not be dependent from suppliers.
That's also why we could produce way more tests as a proportion of our revenues than others, because we never had shortages of reagents. At the end of the year, in view of our prudence about the outlook and the visibility of how much we would be testing in 2021, we wrote off some of that inventory. I think that explains the second part of the question on the allowance. We'll see if we end up using it in the end. The risk is that there is an abrupt stop, and if there is an abrupt stop of testing in one country, we move the inventory to another country, but we might be left at the last country with some stock. That's why we were prudent. On M&A, we don't do a lot of M&A. We only added EUR 100 million last year. EUR 200 million is very modest.
It's a lot of small companies, and we are present in 50 countries, so we look at many things. We are often also the acquirer of choice. Many entrepreneur-led companies that are focused on high quality, on science, not only on financial metrics, will prefer to be acquired by Eurofins. They also know that our model will leave a lot of independence to their teams and to themselves as they continue. For a fairly modest objective of maybe in 2022 or 2023 adding EUR 200 million, I don't find a challenge. Of course, we will do very few deals because the prices are crazy at the moment. The last was GBA last week, I think, was sold for something like four times revenues and 20 or 18 times EBITDA, when Eurofins is trading at 12. GBA is a bunch of underinvested labs of fairly poor quality.
Sorry, I hope I won't be sued for saying that. The same for what SGS bought. They paid a very high price for a bunch of assets that definitely are underperforming compared to all labs in the same region. They also paid wherever on the really good DA, maybe 16 or 18 times. Obviously, we will not be fighting for every deal. In many situations, it's even worse. If you look at the valuation on the market in the U.S. of companies like Natera, Invitae, CareDx, which are trading at 10 times revenues for companies that are making zero profits and sometimes substantial losses, while we have similar assets within Eurofins. It's clear that acquisitions is not always the way to go now. It's much better to build things organically, hire the right scientists, and go forward and wait for the nonsense to stop.
Eventually, the nonsense always stops. We never know when, but I've been long enough in this testing world to see many bubbles burst, and at some point, this will also probably happen when interest rates start to pick up, maybe. That we will see.
Fair enough. Can I ask one more, please? On the tax, you've had substantially lower cash tax than P&L tax for a couple of years, but it was particularly acute in 2020. Will that continue, that divergence of cash and P&L tax? Can you give some guidance on both sides of the equation, please?
Laurent, do you want to answer this one, please?
Yes, I will. Yes, indeed. You know that in the past, we have accumulated a lot of tax loss carry-forward. You have two effects. You need to first recognize them when your profitability is in line. That's what's happening today. This enables us to lower our tax rate on a booked perspective, if you want, and also to use them when we have a profit. This is when you have your tax paid, which is lower.
We do have still stock, a significant stock of tax loss carry forward. As long as we are generating high profits like we did this year, we will be able to enjoy them. This year was a special year. We should see a bit more usage of this tax loss carry forward on both fronts, the booking and the payment.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from [Jean-Francois from ZES]. Please go ahead. Your line is now open for question. [Jean], please go ahead.
You might be on mute.
Okay, we'll move on to the next question. Our next question comes from Neil Tyler from Redburn. Please go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Thank you. Good afternoon. Can you hear me okay?
Yes, Neil, fine.
Yeah. Good. A couple of questions, please. Firstly, on the SAFER@WORK offering generally, can you provide a little bit of detail around the cadence of those contracts and those revenues that have already been booked, so that we can understand whether the majority were sort of booked in that business, but came in as lockdowns were eased. Or has that been building into the end of the year? The second question is more sort of longer term and around the services that you provide supporting gene therapy products. Are you deriving any meaningful revenues from those services currently? I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your medium to longer term expectations around that. Finally, similarly, I suppose on the topic of, that's relevant today, the direct consumer revenues.
I know that's something that hasn't been a material part of the business, but potentially could become one. Can you talk a little bit about the ambitions and expectations there more broadly, please?
Yes. Thank you very much, Neil. SAFER@WORK, we've signed a lot of contracts, but we have not booked a lot of revenues yet because as you inferred or maybe indirectly pointed, a lot of those contracts will start when people go back to their offices or to their factories or to their workplaces, or they will start traveling again, or they will start going to events again. We've been supporting the Formula One events in many, many countries. We've been supporting the golf tournaments, the women golf tournament. We've been supporting many other high-profile organization in soccer and so on. It's still very few people because we're testing mostly the athletes and the support staff. We're not testing massive spectators or public because they are closed doors events so far.
The real volume will come when those events restart, when cruises restart, when flights restart, and we're gearing up for that. We won a contract in Spain to cover pretty much all of the airports or 80% of Spanish airports with testing and in anticipation of the restart of travel this summer. We of course will see how that pans out, but the bulk of the realization of those contracts would start when the lockdowns stop. Of course, also the clinical testing family, during lockdown, there is less testing because the lockdowns work and people get fewer contaminations. When the countries reopen, that's usually when the clinical testing picks up. ATMP generally, so gene therapy, antibodies, et cetera.
It is still a smaller part of a BioPharma Product Testing business, but we've been investing significantly both in our CDMO and our BPT labs to cater for ATMP and gene therapy. We're going to be continuing to make significant investments. This we feel will grow because gene therapy, there are ups and downs in the clinical outcomes, but the whole area of biologics and ATMP is very promising, we find. DTC, we haven't talked much about DTC because I'd rather talk about things when we have already had some successes and significant volume. We were working on some DTC startups for clinical. We have DTC already for some paternity testing and other areas, our radon testing, our environment testing, and water testing in some countries. Still very disparate and not built as a significant business. We feel long term, many things will become more patient-centric.
We believe in prevention, and we believe in patient centricity. While the reimbursement system is not geared towards that at the moment, longer term, people are taking more and more their health in their hand, both in terms of what they eat, the prevention, the advice on what they eat, and in terms of finding out if they are sick, what they have. There are countries like Italy where half of the healthcare is self-pay. We do a lot of, for example, the non-invasive prenatal testing we are selling is very much direct- to- consumer. Of course, it has to be prescribed by a doctor. There are three parties involved, but it's very often patient-driven.
We believe this could, maybe not in a one or two years horizon, but on a 5-10 years horizon, this could present a very significant opportunity for Eurofins. As a direct-to-consumer arm and branch, and it could be not only clinical. There again, we benefited a lot during the pandemic of not being only a clinical company. The fact that we had food testing companies, environmental testing companies, kits producers, helped us to be the first with solutions to have much broader depth of product range, et cetera. I think, again, in the DTC sector, the fact that we are very good at testing food, very good at testing the environment, very much we do everything that matters for consumer. As we get rich and often we have enough food, we want to live longer and healthier.
If we are sick, we go to our doctors. As the world become more aware of the impact of food to the environment, people will want to know where do their food come from. Is it a long chain, short chain? We can provide the information. In the long term with blockchain and all those things, almost in everything you buy at a supermarket, you'll be able to find out where it comes from, what are the ingredients, are they organic, not organic? Consumers will have many questions, and we are gearing up as a 10-year plan. It's a bit like your Asia investment. It took us eight years to become market leader in North America in all of our markets, three core markets of food, biopharma, and environmental testing and BioPharma Product Testing.
Same thing, it's going to take us 10 years to make a substantial mark in Asia. Maybe not in every Asian country, but in most, I hope. This is gearing towards prevention and patient-centric care. Also might take 10 years, but it could be quite powerful in the end.
Okay. Thank you very much. Just to perhaps just pick up on one of the comments you made around food testing. Do you think the alternative protein market is a significant incremental opportunity, or more likely to simply replace the testing that takes place for those proteins that are being replaced?
That's an interesting one. The more complex a product, the more testing is required generally. We see it for biopharma. The level of testing for biologics is 5- 10 times higher than for small molecules. We test a lot of ingredients. Nutraceuticals is also another interesting aspect. Herbs and plants and botanicals, as they are called in North America. We're the leader in that segment. It requires much more testing because of the diversity of products. People have been eating potatoes forever, so nobody's too worried about potatoes. If you start to make proteins out of mushroom, out of insect, out of cellular, let's say even fermentation and biological processes, there are more unknowns, more questions. In the product development, it requires much more testing, and then probably the quality assurance of those more complex products will be set higher. Again, we're very early days.
The regulators haven't necessarily thought it through as to what requirements there will be on some of those products for quality control. It's just early days. We will see. General rule has been, in my experience, the more complex a product and the more away it is from what we are used to, the more testing is required.
Thank you. Very interesting.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Will Kirkness from Jefferies. Please go ahead with your question.
Thanks. I've got three, please. Just firstly on the organic growth, if we add back what I say was lost this year to lockdowns, then I think we're probably at an organic number of closer to 6%-7%. I wonder if you could perhaps just give a bit more color on the outlook in that context, and particularly which markets might be at extreme very good growth or perhaps weaker growth. Secondly, just interested in the comments on leverage capital allocation, M&A, I guess. I think before you said emerging markets don't have so many big assets. You've done a lot of the bigger stuff in your established regions. Should we really be penciling in some kind of shareholder returns given where leverage sits? Lastly, just a numbers one. Accrued income looks like it went up quite a lot.
I just wonder if that's related to the very high levels of growth seen in the fourth quarter, and what particularly that relates to. Thanks.
Thank you very much. Yes. What have we lost to lockdown? Well, although we returned to organic growth last year in fourth quarter and overall throughout last year, we've had a positive organic growth of our core business. We still suffer in many areas. Our environmental testing businesses, which require sampling, are still not back to where they were in 2019. They're still down in many markets. Our clinical trials business, both for our Central Lab and for cosmetics, are down. All the work we do for food service, restaurants, is down significantly. The little work we do for the travel industry is almost at zero. Some of the work we do in consumer testing and textiles, for example, is also severely hurt. That's why we have a missing bunch of growth. It's not like we have negative organic growth last year.
It is positive, but it would have been much higher. We don't see why those revenues wouldn't come back after COVID, because people will want to go back eating restaurants, and restaurant food will have to be tested again. Cosmetics clinical trials will restart, and the patients will go back to hospitals, so the clinical trials of normal drugs can restart. Still in Q1 we had a strong Q1, at least January, February in 2020. I think this impact will still be in Q1 of 2021. Of course, in Q1 of 2021, we're still doing a lot of COVID testing, so in the end, we'll still come up way ahead. Yes, at some point this will normalize. I'm not sure that was exactly your question, but that's how I understood it.
Okay. Yeah. I think it's just more whether, going back to this 5% number that is, we see peers talking about high single digit in some of these areas. I just wonder whether, looking on a more medium-term view, the drivers are there to support that kind of 6%, 7%+ .
Oh, yes, I understand. Yeah, we're not looking there yet, but if you look at 2023, yes, potentially. Of course, all those objectives are simplifications. Also, odd questions that the lost growth, those lost revenues we're still missing now, our environment, clinical, et cetera, and restaurant testing, they might start coming back in the second half of 2021. We might not see it all in 2022 from January 1st all of a sudden. We think that by 2022, if the pandemic is brought under control, we should see all of it. Then we start again from a normal base. From a normal base, yes, it's true, because if those things start growing again, and we have parts that are definitely growing double digits in our core business, maybe the mix could land above 5%. We first should deliver what we have in our objectives.
Once we have delivered what's in our objective, we can think of over-delivering. When it is certain enough, we will point it out to the market. Yeah, you're right. If this year, if we end up doing a lot of COVID testing again in 2021, our leverage will go down quite drastically again, or significantly. Then we really should question if we have too much cash, which would be an interesting position to be in. We still have some buildings that are not owned by Eurofins that maybe Eurofins should repurchase to put to bed the last objection on the governance, which I don't think is a real worry, but can be perceived as one by some. Yeah, I don't think massive M&A and large M&A are on the program.
First, there are very few quality companies around I'd like to buy, and second, most of the ones that are to buy or large scope are too expensive, I'd rather wait for the interest rates to normalize, inflations to kick in a bit, and come to a much better world to maybe 2024, 2025, or wherever to look at that. We might do more distributions, potentially. That we might distribute more than 25% of our net profits if we don't see very many other ways to distribute. Let's do step by step. I'd rather first deliver and then talk about what we do with the cash if we have too much cash. Yeah, accrued income, I think it's about, we had a lot of unbilled revenues probably at the end of the year with all the COVID testing we're doing.
I think that's probably the main thing, but Laurent can comment on that one.
Yeah, there is a bit of accrued income related to COVID testing, but overall it remains quite small compared to the size of the group.
One thing related to the last question about new markets. They are not only alternative protein. There is also a huge market that's going to come with the legalization of certain what was considered drug, marijuana, CBD. It's becoming normalized in many countries. We are not active in the U.S. in that area because it's still considered a federal criminal activity, although it's allowed in some states. That could become a major market. Psilocybin and others are going to be probably also legalized in many markets. There are around food, cosmetics, healthcare generally, a lot of innovative areas that will require very significant testing. There are many ancillary markets that will open from innovation at our clients and changing regulation.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Nicolas Tabor from Stifel. Please go ahead and ask your question. The line's now open.
Good afternoon. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Can you hear me very well?
Yes.
Great. The first question would be on the risk of decreasing reimbursement prices for COVID testing. Could you share some of the insight you have from your discussions with government, with whom you are close at the moment? Is there a real risk that in July, suddenly the price reimbursement price halves as people get vaccinated and so on, and how should we think about that? Still on the profitability of the COVID testing, I understand it's very high, and as you are slowing OpEx and CapEx investment in that field, as maybe we have reached the peak, do you see the profitability improving? Even though I understand it's difficult to separate it from the rest of the clinical diagnostic. On the tax rate. You answered the question on the deferred tax, the loss carried forward and so on.
Can you give us some indication of the effective tax rate we should expect for 2021, for this year, given what you said before?
Thank you. Yes, we haven't seen very massive COVID PCR reimbursement drops, although I would wish it to happen. Frankly, I would wish for a fully liberalized market. We are testing wherever, anywhere between around 100,000 a day, let's put it. We could test a million a day. We are vertically integrated. The reimbursements are probably fairly high in the U.S., still at $100. I think that should come down, and in Europe, they're a bit more modest, between EUR 30 and EUR 60 maybe. We have very large contracts at lower prices already for some time. For population testing, I had an interview in the biggest newspaper in Germany where I said we could be doing millions of tests a day at EUR 10 per test and still be having sufficient margin, and that would really help in fighting the pandemic.
I think we should move to a place where this test is seen as a medical test, to a test that's seen as an industrial test that can be highly industrialized, and we have a way to do it. We could multiply our capacity by 10 or 50 relatively quickly and provide those tests at much lower prices. I think that would be a much healthier situation, and it would contribute to a much faster eradication of the disease, as is done in China. That's not for me to decide. Yes, going forward, also one thing is, initially, we still were buying some reagents because although we had our own reagents, we didn't have the government's approval for our own reagents everywhere. Little by little, we're getting the government approval to use our own reagents everywhere.
The proportion of things we buy outside is decreasing. The CapEx is pretty much gone. Unless we see a shift to massive population testing, we don't need more equipment. We have taken, as usual, very conservative policies for depreciation. I mean, very fast depreciation of our equipment. Yeah, we're not worried about the evolution of margin. Anyway, COVID, we do that to contribute, and we're really happy to have had this level of contribution last year and to have this huge toolkit to help companies and airlines and other sectors of the economy restart. Whatever governments decide will be the proper testing measures, we have the tools.
We have, for example, a new PCR kit that can be industrialized in thousands of samples per day in a container next to a stadium, next to an airport, and we can do the test in 30 minutes. It is a very sensitive test. We really have all the tools to help, and if we make money with it, that's good. If we don't, it really wouldn't matter because the main thing we want is to help the world return to a more normal situation so we can focus on things that are much more exciting. Like helping the world develop and have better food, a safer environment, and develop even better drugs. Tax effective, I don't know if Laurent can tell us. I don't know if we know, frankly, because it will again depend where the profits are falling, in which countries and so on.
Frankly, we could do better in this planning. I know some companies invest much more in forward planning of their tax rates, and we focused our teams on maybe more urgent priorities. Obviously, we pay our taxes when we have to, where we have to. As Laurent said, we still have quite a lot of tax carry-forward we should be able to utilize as our startups, which were losing money, starts to make money. That's going to be the main determinant, because we still have many areas where we have profits and others where we have losses, but we can't always offset the losses against the profits of other parts of the group. When we will make money everywhere, then we will use everywhere the tax carry-forward.
Yeah, maybe just one small precision. Our ETR was 22% this year. It was 28% the year before, and it was 23% the year before again. It's very dependent on the geography where we make the profit and also on tax reforms. Two years ago, there was a Trump tax reform which enabled us to recognize a lot of deferred tax assets. There might be a different tax reform under the Biden administration, so it's very hard to predict. We are dependent not only on our own profitability, but also on the tax reform in this geography.
Great. Thank you very much.
Okay.
All right. I guess we're going to have to take the last question or close here.
We'll take the last question, and then we will close. Our next question comes from Suhasini Varanasi from Goldman Sachs . Please go ahead with your question.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. Just two from me, please. Can you comment on the January from February trends on COVID testing and on the underlying organic revenues? Especially on the COVID testing, would you say that it's similar to the Q4 levels or maybe higher? The second one is on your pharma, bio pharma business. Have you seen any early signs that the clinical trials and the drug research that were suspended during the COVID crisis have been or will be restarted anytime soon in 2021? Thank you.
Thank you very much. The level in February is a bit lower than Q4. Q4 was different from month to month. December was lower than November and October, which it can vary. It depends on country to country, lockdown to no lockdown, government programs. I wouldn't extrapolate anything. We will see what happens. We still test substantially. Yes, we've seen some clinical trials restart, but not all of them. Depends on the country, again, and even of the state, where the level of the pandemic is improving in many areas, but it's getting worse in other areas. Hospitals are still very busy in some countries, and so they can't accommodate trials. Again, we hope that from the summer, things will normalize a bit.
Thank you.
All right. Well, thank you very much, everybody, for joining our call. For those of you who have been patient investors, I think we are coming in a phase where you will see the real potential of a company like Eurofins. The way we responded to the crisis bodes well for our ability to innovate on more traditional areas and create a lot of growth for the foreseeable future, for many years and many decades. We are fortunate to be in extremely exciting areas where our clients carry out a lot of innovation, which calls for a lot of testing. We are working on many R&D programs. We haven't talked about transplant testing programs. We haven't talked of many other exciting things that we have been continuing to work on during the pandemic that should show their real potential in 2022 and beyond.
A lot of exciting stuff ahead. In 2021, we will do our best to contribute to pandemic. We've launched those direct-to-consumer tests, even in Europe, in London, you can get our kits and get tested. We're going to work on improving the logistics of returning it to the lab, so we'll get faster results. We are working on many other things, and I'm looking forward to meeting you in person in the second half of the year. I hope the in-person meetings can resume in the fall, and we can discuss all those exciting things with more time and no defocus by the COVID pandemic soon. Thank you very much, and best wishes.