Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Merck KGaA's Capital Markets Day 2025. My name is Florian Schraeder. I'm the Head of Investor Relations, and I feel very proud to welcome you here today. It's a wonderful day to see not only many of you here today in the room, but also virtually connected from all around the world. Please be aware that major parts of this presentation today will be recorded audibly and visibly. If you have any concerns, please reach out now to one of our IR team members. We have an exciting day ahead, packed with insights into Merck KGaA's strategy, performance, and also the future direction of the company. Together, we will explore how we are driving growth, innovation, and sustainable value creation.
We kick off the day with a group session led by our CEO, Belén Garijo, and CFO, Helene von Roeder, who will share their perspectives on Merck KGaA's strategic priorities, as well as the financial outlook. This will be followed by a Q&A session, giving our onsite participants the opportunity to engage directly with them and ask their most pressing questions. From there, we will have a spotlight on our business sectors. First, the electronics deep dive, led by Kai Beckmann and his team, showcasing how we are shaping the future of advanced materials and innovation. Following then, life science, with Jean-Charles Wirth and his team, who will lay out the key pillars of our strategy and explain how a customer-centric focus will drive growth, combined also with a process solutions deep dive.
After these sessions, we are thrilled to host a fireside chat with our CEO, Belén Garijo, and our Deputy Chair of the Executive Board, Kai Beckmann. This is a unique opportunity to hear from both leaders on the building blocks for sustained long-term growth and how they both envision the future of the company. At 12:30 P.M., we will pause for lunch before continuing with the healthcare deep dive session at 1:25 P.M., led by Danny Bar-Zohar and his leadership team. They will share how they are shaping the future of healthcare and deliver transformational solutions for patients worldwide. Finally, we will wrap up the day with breakout sessions for those of you onsite. This is an excellent chance to engage directly with our leadership teams. Thank you again for joining us today. We are excited to share with you the journey, and let's get started.
Join me in welcoming Belén and Helene.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Florian, and welcome everyone to our Capital Markets Day 2025. We are delighted to have you here, and I wanted to thank you for attending this session and also thank those connected virtually around the world.
Obviously, super excited to share an update on Merck KGaA's strategy, performance, and future direction. We will focus on how we are driving growth, fostering innovation, and, of course, most importantly, creating sustainable value across the group.
Exactly. Today, we are going to explore the opportunities ahead and the steps that we are taking to ensure that Merck KGaA remains at the forefront of science and technology.
Thank you very much for being here with us today. I'm sure you are as excited as we are. Let's dive right into it.
Thank you, Helene. Let me tell you what this session is going to be about. We will begin at a group level, exploring Merck KGaA's track record, the current portfolio, and our capital allocation priorities, to then share a clear framework for our future direction. From there, we will go deeper into the business sectors, setting the stage for the spotlight sessions that you will have later in the day. Finally, we will zoom back out of the group perspective again, focusing on additional value drivers and providing our midterm guidance. Let's just jump straight into chapter one. To start with this, let me ground us in our strong track record. Over the last 15 years, we have delivered consistent sales growth with very highly attractive margins. That performance, of course, didn't happen by chance.
It's the result, first, of our strategic foresight and relentless focus on day-to-day execution, including very disciplined portfolio management and rigorous capital allocation, both organically and inorganically. As the bubble on the slides shows, we allocate ruthlessly where returns are highest. In the very recent past, only before the summer, we announced the closing of the acquisition of SpringWorks Therapeutics to expand healthcare into rare diseases, a major strategic move for healthcare. We divested Surface Solutions to continuously sharpen the profile of our electronics sectors. We also acted with a lot of precision and discipline on a smaller transaction, on a string of pearls approach, the divestment of the MarketJack side, and targeted bolt-on acquisitions like Myrus Bio in life science and Unity SC in electronics, significantly strengthening our innovation power.
Additionally, hot off the press, the acquisition of JSR's chromatography business just announced yesterday, which also aligns very well with our approach of pursuing innovative technologies in our life science business. The results speak for themselves. Attractive margins across cycles, sustained by rigorous focus on profitable growth and capital discipline. Now, turning into the present, this portfolio view that you have on the slide reflects a rigorous assessment validated by a leading consulting firm. What does it show? First of all, that we have done our homework. Following the divestment of Surface Solutions, there are no obvious evaluate candidates. Having a few businesses in managed forecasts is not only intentional, but it funds future growth and preserves our ability to act very decisively when opportunities are identified. The outcome is compelling. Over 80% of our business operates in attractive markets, and over 80% holds solid competitive positions.
Yet, we are not getting complacent. We will continue a permanent disciplined review of both fit and profitability and continuously adapt our portfolio when this is necessary. The implication of this chart is straightforward. Opportunities to invest are abundant. Resources are finite. Prioritization is essential. How do we prioritize and decide on capital allocation, Helene?
Our prioritization is systematic, grounded in data, and discipline. Of course, this is not a spreadsheet exercise. For example, interdependencies do matter. A business that may look less attractive on this slide is actually fueling a portfolio gem. We consider the role of any portfolio component in the role of the broader system before actually deciding. You can think of many interdependencies. You can think of customers. You can think of technology. On top of it, of course, supply chain. There's another point, because being in the lower right-hand box does not mean automatically invest. Let's take an example. We all know our infamous CDMO swim lanes. We participate across novel modalities in order to gauge potential. We do allocate to the most attractive areas, such as, for example, ADC. In other swim lanes, we are now streamlining our participation.
As you know, we have exited monoclonal antibodies, and we are right now actively reviewing mRNA and also the viral vectors, including their potential financial implications. Overall, we remain and maintain a permanent, disciplined review at board level. What is my role? My role is to hold us to the highest bar so capital actually goes to the best and risk-adjusted returns. Let's look at how our portfolio operating modes and the resource optimization behind them actually work. That's on the next slide. Let me start from the bottom of the slide. As Belén just mentioned, given the Surface Solutions divestiture, we do not have anything in the evaluate box right now. That doesn't mean we continuously assess this. The managed forecast box is totally crucial for us, and it's often overlooked.
Of course, we focus on the growth drivers, but generating strong cash flow for the group is essential to continue funding our investments. Again, an example. Let's look at healthcare. CM&E and fertility provide significant and growing amounts of cash, and we do expect this trend to continue. Accordingly, we will continue to support them with targeted investments. That could be lifecycle management, it could be selective R&D, or it could also be smaller M&A. An example here would be we have just done a small in-licensing in China for thyroid assets, which perfectly fit our CM&E portfolio. In the invest for growth category, where actually most of the near to medium growth will come from, we aim to solidify our already strong market positions. That is thoughtful capacity expansion, top-notch innovation, and in areas like process solutions and semi-materials are probably the prime examples here.
Then there's the invest for leadership category, which is really about the long-term growth of this company through innovation. As you can see, M&A is basically applicable to both of these categories, which will accelerate our growth and innovation journey.
Let me pick it up on the notion of M&A as we move to the next slide. As you know, we haven't pursued any larger M&A in Life Science over the past two years because valuation matters. Our approach has proven right. The acquisition of SpringWorks Therapeutics was executed at the perfect moment, guided by our bottom-up model, focusing on when and at what price to act. To state the obvious, Life Science remains a priority for us. It's a high multiple business for good reasons. Innovation is key, and we are exploring on an ongoing basis opportunities in both private and public markets and across our entire business spectrum, except CDMO. Our M&A guardrails remain totally unchanged. You know that. You know those. Next to a strong strategic rationale, we will apply strict financial criteria, including IRR above WACC and EPS accretion.
With a net debt/EBITDA pre-ratio well below 2, we continue to have significant firepower for potential deals, be it smaller transactions or more transformative acquisitions. We maintain appetite for M&A, have a full deal pipeline, but we will remain absolutely disciplined in our approach. Now, let's switch gears and talk more about the future. I want to introduce you to a simple framework to understand our company from three different dimensions: growth, margin, and cash. Starting with growth, we are addressing attractive industries. Within these industries, we are tackling key secular trends: bioprocessing, orphan diseases, and the strong demand for materials amplified by the integration of artificial intelligence. These are long-lasting trends. With that in mind, we are strongly positioned with our key growth drivers: process solutions, rare diseases, and semiconductor solutions. Together, these three businesses hold the promise of driving up to 88% of Merck KGaA's future growth.
Growth is only one piece of the puzzle. Let's focus on margins. Margins reflect the strength of our portfolio and our ability to deliver profitable growth. I talk about the key growth drivers. On top, we have the core business. The core includes everything that is outside of our key growth drivers. While growth in the core is stable to slightly growing, it plays a critical role, an absolutely critical role in generating the strong cash that will help fund our growth initiatives. Our margins are supported by three major elements. First of all, the resilience of our core business, which is absolutely unique. This is providing the financial foundation for reinvestment. Second, the key growth drivers, which deliver higher margin opportunities. Last but not least, operational discipline, which is absolutely critical to ensure we maximize profitability without compromising on innovation.
Looking ahead, the disproportionate growth of our key growth drivers combined with our relentless focus on cost efficiency in the core business will drive margin expansion in the midterm. Helene, what about cash?
Yeah, so we had growth, we had margins, and of course, profitable growth is a key element of sustainable value creation. Cash is also important. First, looking at our operating cash flow, we expect increasing improvements of our operating cash flow over the medium term. That is supported by the operating margin expansion, as Belén highlighted, and also focused on networking capital management. It is worth noting that in the post-COVID normalization period, we did face a slower-than-expected inventory consumption. On top of that, as you know, we have taken proactive measures to shield our business from geopolitical tensions, such as building inventory to mitigate the impact of tariffs and ensure fast and swift delivery to our clients. Second, as we've already done last year, we reconfirmed that our CAPEX-to-sales ratio will gradually reduce over time.
You may remember, this follows a period of deliberate overinvestment, where we expanded capacity and implemented our in-region, for-region approach. Let's take the two together. Improved operating cash flow and reduced CAPEX-to-sales will drive strong free cash flow. That supports our delivery and serves as a backbone for continued portfolio management. Remember, this is deeply embedded in the Merck DNA.
Now, let's take a closer look at our three business sectors, starting by Life Science. As announced this morning, we are introducing a new business structure, which is designed around how our customers actually buy and use our products. We are centering on three distinct go-to-market approaches. First of all, Process Solutions, tailored solutions embedded in customer processes; Discovery Solutions, a high share of purchases made seamlessly via our digital catalog; and Advanced Solutions, a high-touch model for specialized products and services requiring technical sales and services. Process Solutions is one of the group's key growth drivers. It is our bioprocessing engine, deeply integrated, innovation-led, and built for scale. The other two business units sharpen our execution where it matters. Discovery Solutions elevates speed and convenience for everyday research workflows. Advanced Solutions focus on our expert consultative model, where it creates the most value.
Together, this structure will allow us to prioritize the right accounts, the right channels, and most importantly, improve our customer experience significantly. Let me shift to the market backdrop. The Life Science industry remains attractive, as you very well know. The process product segment, in particular, is unchanged and continues to be the most powerful engine, growing about 9%-1 0%, anchored in upstream and downstream bioprocessing with single-use systems and high-purity materials. At the same time, and similar to some of our peers, we are moderating our view of the total market from 5%- 7% to about 4%- 6%. Let me highlight the key reasons, which I believe are also very well known by all of you. First of all, in the U.S., academic funding is unlikely to rebound quickly. Second, early-stage biotech funding, software, and policies are somehow impacting pharma innovation.
In China, while we believe the mid and long-term outlook remains very promising, the near term is muted amid macro volatility. Above all, the market remains attractive, with process products as the standout opportunity. That's exactly where our strengths are concentrated. Let's turn into what it means for our outlook. Before I hand to Helene, our ambition is to grow above the market. It remains, as we have said before, to grow above the market, with Process Solutions being the main driver of that growth. Now, the real guidance.
Thank you, Belén. As you can see on the slide, we target a mid to high single-digit organic CAGR. Process solutions remains the key engine, with growth of around 10%. Of course, because we're over-indexed in bioprocessing, we are indeed positioned to outperform the industry backdrop. Now, mid to high single-digit does sound broad. To be transparent on 2026, the near-term drivers Belén just highlighted: we have softer U.S. academic funding, we have early-stage biotech funding, which is quite weak, and we have a muted near-term in China. As an early indication, we expect 2026 to trend around the mid-single digit organically, before re-accelerating as market conditions improve further to the new normal. We're really confident that our customer-centric operating model will help us to capitalize even better in the opportunities ahead.
For Healthcare, the recent acquisition of SpringWorks Therapeutics is clearly front and center. That, combined with the in-licensing of Pimecotinib, has allowed us to establish a rare diseases business as a new strategic pillar. This acquisition also strengthens our midterm outlook. Importantly, our ambition does not stop here. We remain fully committed to accelerating growth even further, targeting mid-single digit growth over the long term. To achieve this, two critical things: one, replenishing our pipeline; two, rebalancing risk-reward that will be absolutely essential in parallel to replenishing our pipeline. Above all, we have a solid foundation to build upon. CM&E and fertility are expected to deliver sustainable mid-single digit growth, helping to broadly offset maturing trends in oncology and NNI. Finally, linking back to our group's key growth drivers, the rare diseases business represents a true differentiator for us.
We are highly confident in our ability to deliver on the current and upcoming launches, driving this pillar forward.
Our long-term aspiration is very important, not only in terms of growth, but also, I can't emphasize it enough, because healthcare remains a strong contributor to our group's cash position. Looking at the midterm, the acquisition of SpringWorks Therapeutics has been a major milestone. I'm pleased to say it enables us to upgrade our midterm guidance to low to mid-single digit organic growth. However, for 2026, we expect to trend around the lower end of the range. Why is that? Number one, SpringWorks Therapeutics will only contribute to organic growth from the second half year onwards. Second, the growth of our blockbuster Erbitux is slowing. Third, as you all very well know, Mavenclad is approaching loss of exclusivity in the U.S., with the base case for the U.S. still being October 2026. Despite these dynamics, we are confident in our ability to further strengthen our CM&E and fertility franchise.
Those continue to provide a solid and resilient base. Remember, unlike many peers who are more exposed to patent lifts, our diversified portfolios protect us from sudden drops and support sustainable performance. Overall, we are very pleased with our performance in the healthcare business. I pass it on to Belén.
Thank you. Let's turn into electronics, because last year, we provided a major update on our Electronics business. The key news this year is the rigorous execution of our portfolio transformation. With the divestment of Surface Solutions now completed, Electronics is even more focused. Almost 80% of the business is now concentrated in Semiconductor Solutions, which is one of the Merck KGaA key growth drivers. With semi-solutions, the semi-material business continues to deliver strong growth. We have seen, as you know, some volatility in DS&S, Delivery Systems and Services. We believe that the most challenging period in this business is behind us. Optronics is also evolving. We are increasing our exposure to key trends in the semiconductor industry, particularly in metrology and inspections. Of course, it's important to keep in mind that this is an industry characterized by cycles. That is simply the nature of the business.
However, the underlying structural growth drivers, especially those linked to AI and advanced computing, remain very much intact.
As you may expect, given everything we've just discussed, we are confirming our midterm guidance for electronics. We expect mid to high single-digit organic sales growth, fully driven by semiconductor solutions. The underlying fab materials market is growing at 5%- 7%, and we are well positioned to outperform, especially as AI and advanced computing continue to accelerate demand. Looking ahead to 2026, we expect growth to trend towards the lower end of our guidance range, as certain market segments, in particular NAND and analog, are still muted. The broader market inflection point is still something to watch. Overall, we remain highly positive around the outlook for electronics, and as always, we will keep you updated as this very fast market continues to evolve.
Thank you. Let's take a look now at the additional value drivers that differentiate Merck KGaA before we move into the midterm guidance. Let's start with ESG and focus on our products first. Sustainability is increasingly embedded across all areas of our business, and our customers are recognizing the value of our strong sustainability profile. We consider this to be a competitive advantage for Merck KGaA, helping us both defend and expand our market positions. In life science, we already offer around 4,000 more sustainable products, with an ambition to reach 10% of our revenues by 2030. In electronics, we are working very closely with our customers to co-develop solutions that support their sustainability targets as well. In healthcare, we are advancing health equity by expanding access to our medicines in underserved communities. Turning to our people, it's all about people.
Keeping our talents and attracting new talent to the company is absolutely crucial for an innovation-driven company like Merck KGaA. As a result of our efforts to develop our people internally, initiatives like MyGrowth, our employee turnover continues to decline. Last but not least, we are making significant progress towards our 2030 emission reduction, targeting minus 50%. This not only benefits the environment but also helps our customers achieve their own sustainability goals, including Scope 3 targets, which are the most difficult to reach. Ultimately, by embedding ESG across people, products, and planet, we are creating long-term value for our customers, our employees, and society overall. Now, let's move into innovation, the lifeblood of our business as a leading science and technology company. Our innovation backbone sits on our patents and scientific services organization.
With over 30,000 registered patents, this team is helping us maximize the value of our innovation, both internally and externally. Over the past three years, we have generated around $100 million in revenues from licensing and divestment of patents just for external use. Internally, of course, this team helps protect and enforce our IP, ensuring that we extract the full value from our R&D efforts. Let me highlight only two examples that illustrate our approach to innovation, one internal and one external. On the in-house innovation, our ADC platform is an industry-leading technology, addressing the limitation of the first-generation ADCs. We are seeing strong progress here with our most advanced assets, our MTCam5 ADC, recently delivering good data, I would say excellent data, at the ASCO meeting. This is a clear proof point of our ability to drive breakthrough innovation internally.
At the same time, we will not survive without recognizing the importance of external innovation. A great example is the acquisition of Myrus Bio, when within less than a year, we have successfully integrated their technology, and we are launching new products to market already. This clearly demonstrates our ability to rapidly leverage external capabilities and accelerate our innovation pipeline. In summary, combining best-in-class in-house R&D with targeted external innovation and fully leveraging our patents and scientific expertise, we continue to increase Merck KGaA's leadership in science and technology. Now, turning finally to artificial intelligence, what you have on the slide is giving you an idea of the way we are integrating AI at Merck KGaA. When leveraging AI for business value, we are adopting a strategic approach. At the base is everyday AI, providing cost-efficient, secure, and compliant Gen AI assistance to all Merck KGaA employees.
You see the number of users on the slide. This is fostering trust, is creating standardized workflows, and is driving importantly productivity gains. Next, we focus on operational AI, embedding tailored solutions into workflows across manufacturing, quality, supply, labs, and commercial sectors. This integration leads to shorter cycle times, improved yields, and reduced working capital. Our smart manufacturing playbook exemplifies this, resulting in up to two times faster time to market and a 20% reduction in energy use. At the pinnacle is advanced AI, where cutting-edge technologies drive differentiated product offering. In our intermolecular business, for example, we utilize a closed-loop lab-to-fab approach powered by materials intelligence, significantly reducing material development time by 50% and streamlining processes. Our philosophy is clear: build responsibly from the ground up and scale for impact.
Let's take all of this together and look at our outlook. For H2, the message is simple: we are on track. We expect improving organic growth in H2 and a margin of around 29% for the full year, as implied by the midpoint of our unchanged guidance. We're confident for a couple of reasons: a strong order book and sales growth of around 10% in process solutions, improving trends in science and lab solutions, continued strong trends and momentum in semi-materials, and solid trends in healthcare, with SpringWorks Therapeutics coming on top as a portfolio effect. Keep in mind that SpringWorks Therapeutics will be earnings dilutive in H2, partially offset by the sale of a priority review voucher, which actually closed in Q3. I would also like to flag a technical term here.
As part of my ongoing agenda to streamline and simplify the Merck KGaA backbone, we are optimizing our legal entity structure. In Q4, this will likely result in a positive, exceptional effect of around €100 million. This is clearly not included in the operating performance, but it does reflect our ongoing focus on profitability and EPS pre. With that, turning to 2026, it is actually still early, but we want to give you as much transparency as possible. We expect markets in life science and electronics to continue improving. While the healthcare business will temporarily moderate, if you look at margins, we see a stable outlook overall. We expect better utilization in life science to provide some upside. This is offset by tariff-related uncertainties. In addition, SpringWorks Therapeutics will still be margin dilutive in 2026, but it will turn EPS pre-accretive in 2027 as planned.
Now, let me wrap it up with our midterm outlook. We are not only on track, but we are very positive about Merck KGaA's future trajectory. The structural growth drivers that we have presented this morning across all our sectors are intact. We are focused on the right trends with our key growth drivers: process solutions, rare diseases, and semiconductor solutions, which we expect to deliver low double-digit growth combined. This momentum comes on top of a resilient core business, which we expect will grow slightly. When you put it together as a group, we are committed to delivering mid-single digit organic growth over the midterm. A new element in our outlook that we are presenting for the first time is the margin improvement.
We are targeting an increase of about 100 basis points over the midterm, driven by higher capacity utilization in life science, continued efficiency gains in electronics, and the ramp-up of our rare diseases business in healthcare. This will be partially offset by life cycle challenges for some of our key brands in healthcare, like Mavenclad, loss of exclusivity. All in all, we are committed to profitable growth and margin expansions over the midterm. Looking further ahead, our ambition is to further accelerate as we approach 2030 and beyond. To bring this discussion together, we have a very clear set of priorities that capture how we will drive sustainable value generation. First, we are concentrating resources fully and ruthlessly behind our key growth drivers: process solutions, rare diseases, semiconductor solutions, each and every one of them anchored in durable secular trends.
Second, we will drive up margins and cash generation. We expect a positive mix effect from growing contributions of our key growth drivers, coupled with cost discipline in the core business. The core is our cash engine. Additional levers that we have are improved capacity utilization, tighter net working capital, and reduced CapEx intensity.
Third, our investment opportunity set is rich, and we will stay highly selective. We redirect capital to where returns are highest. Within our unchanged guardrails, we retain a discipline of opportunity-driven M&A appetite with significant headroom. Last but not least, customer centricity and innovation are the flywheel. In Life Science, we are aligning our go-to-market approach around how customers buy to sharpen execution and capital efficiency. In Healthcare, rare diseases are our new strategic pillar, and launch execution will be the key catalyst. We have a clear plan to replenish the pipeline that you will be exposed to later on in the day. In Electronics, we are scaling in priority areas like advanced materials in semiconductor solutions.
Disciplined growth, expanded margins, rising free cash flow will give us the capacity and confidence to keep compounding value.
We are ready for the next wave of growth, grounded in execution today and positioned to win in the markets that matter the most. With this, thank you very much. Florian, over to you for the Q&A.
Thank you very much, Belén. Thank you very much, Helene. We are getting the stage prepared, as you see behind me, because we are now kicking it off with a Q&A session. We kindly request the audience in the room to get ready to ask questions. You have a microphone in front of you, also with a button to click. You just raise your hand, and then we will go by the order. I think we could already take a seat.
Very good.
Let's kick it off with the first question from Richard Fosse from JP Morgan, please.
Thanks very much, Richard Fosse of JP Morgan. Two questions, please. First question, you alluded to a contribution from inorganic competition from SpringWorks in 2026. Is this about a point on growth? Just some color there in terms of the addition to growth for 2026. Second question, process solutions, a reduction in the midterm outlook, I think, maybe by a couple of points or so. I can understand weakness maybe in academic and biotech funding around maybe the old SLS business, and maybe LSS is a bit weaker. In the midterm, what's actually changing to affect the midterm outlook there as well? Thanks.
Let's look at SpringWorks first. Of course, you have sort of like the analysts' estimates. At the moment, I'm not detailing out the exact growth rates that we see for SpringWorks, but we do expect a significant contribution for SpringWorks in 2026, according and in line with the launch projections that we had given earlier.
Both for Healthcare and for the group. On Process Solutions, our midterm expectation has not changed.
Sorry, if I said process solutions, I meant Life Science overall. Sorry, apologies.
Sorry?
Life Science overall, not Process Solutions, but Life Science, the market overall, what we showed.
I think the market growth has been moderated slightly, as we have seen from other peers. We believe we have to wait and see what happens in the U.S. in 2026 and how fast China will reaccelerate to be able to be more optimistic. I think this is a very credible base, and it's not that far away from what we have said before.
We will take the next question from Florent Cespedes from Bernstein.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Two quick ones on healthcare, please. First, regarding M&A following the SpringWorks Therapeutics acquisition, is it fair to assume that now you have the right profile to grow in the coming years and not necessarily need further acquisition for this division? My second question, still on healthcare, following the focus on rare diseases, what about the in-house ADC platform technology? How does this fit with your new strategy? You will, in theory, need significant R&D investment behind this project. How could we?
Thank you, Florian. I mean, for rare diseases, clearly, this is a nucleus that we intend to build up through in-licensing of additional products. I gave the example of Pimecotinib, but, for example, we are developing Clodribinib and Myasthenia gravis, which will also qualify within this business pillar. I think your question on the MTCam5 is a very good question. This is part of our annual strategic evaluation of pipeline prioritization. So far, it will stay in-house. Whenever this changes, we will definitely communicate that publicly if it ever changes. Danny and his team will take you through more details later in the afternoon.
The next question is from Sachin Jain, Bank of America.
Thanks for the question, Sachin Jain, Bank of America. My question is a multiple on margins, which is the first time you've given the midterm. The 100 basis points looks, depending on your consensus, also a little bit below consensus. I wonder if you could just give a bit of divisional color for each one. For Life Science, are you still targeting your prior expectations of between pre and post-COVID, or is it lower given the lower market growth? For Electronics, I think consensus is in the high 20s. Is that fair, or are you a little bit lower on Electronics? For Healthcare, I wonder if you could dovetail the question into 2026. How do you think about the shape of margin pressure short term versus SpringWorks coming through midterm? Do you at least commit to flattish Healthcare margins short term? Thank you.
Let's take this apart. One thing you need to, if you zoom out, what is happening is we're looking at businesses that are running well and very much in line with what we're expecting. We are seeing a number of geopolitical impacts. One of them, as you all know, is tariffs. The second one, which is also a significant headwind, and I think we discussed yesterday evening, is the whole question around FX. Interestingly enough, being Merck KGaA, being a very strongly rooted company in the U.S., it is actually less the U.S. dollar that is hurting us. It's very much around cost, the Asian currencies, which are providing us with quite a bit of headwind. That's the overall picture from where we're coming from.
As said, in Life Science, we continue to be committed around the previous announcement we had made to be in between COVID and pre-COVID margin take. Electronics, I think the margin outlook has not really changed. We do need the base market to kick back in to really actually get into full capacity utilization. We should be back into where Electronics margins should be. Again, remember, this is a very cyclical business. This will be a margin that will fluctuate over time because you will have varying capacity utilization. Healthcare, as you know, and we already said, is 2026 a year of many moving pieces. Number one, our base case continues to be MarvinCloud LOE in October 2026. As you all know, there's a ruling coming up. We don't know what it's going to be.
Having said that, I'm quite relaxed about it because it is three quarters of a year where we may be using MarvinCloud sales in the U.S. I'm looking to the back there to Danny. Hi, Danny. I know we have written plans of the actions we will take if and when it happens. It's just a question of if and when. You've known, we've known, everybody has known that the MarvinCloud LOE is coming up. Frankly, we've been managing LOEs forever. Of course, you got the SpringWorks Therapeutics take up. As you know, it's not going to be organic growth in the first half of the year. It's going to be in the second half of the year. There's the whole trajectory of preventio, which ultimately is declining as a result of competitive pressure.
The next thing we are throwing in the mix around the Healthcare margin is the fact that we are increasing our R&D to sales ratio to 20%. That one is already now coming back, as you know, also because SpringWorks is there. That means that, and it's something we've always said, this margin that we're seeing right now in Healthcare is not sustainable. It's as simple as that. It will drop. To be honest, we have so many moving pieces around that margin that it's pretty hard to predict right now exactly to where it drops. I can tell you around our ability to mitigate these impacts, our knowledge about these impacts coming our way, we're spot on.
We go to the next question from Falko Friedrich, Deutsche Bank.
Thank you. Good morning. My first question on electronics, what's your latest thinking on when the end markets might inflect a little bit more significantly? Is that something we could see in 2026? Can you be a little more precise in terms of the anticipated tariff headwind on the margin in 2026? Thank you.
You want to take tariffs?
No.
You know.
Can we just move on?
I think we have made assumptions, obviously, on the basis of what has been announced. I think it's still premature to speculate about the impact because it's a moving target. We believe that the impact of tariffs in electronics is going to be very low. We have prepared very active mitigation plans for healthcare products. In life science, we will manage, as we have done before, if time comes with potential surcharges and other mitigation strategies. We have an assumption, and I have the number in my head, nothing that you should be, for the moment, considering massive impact.
The teams are working extremely hard to mitigate any future tariff impacts that we're seeing. As you all know, and as you all read in the press, this is a continuously moving target still. Electronics turnaround, I'm looking at Kai. I don't think you want me to commit to anything. It will come one day, when unclear. To some extent, this is the way we look at electronics. If we look at our customer expectations, which is probably the best possible indicator around when the market should turn around, as you may remember, we've always said it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. It will come one day, when we don't know.
I think on the fab side, we will still have uncertainty, and it will highly depend on the ability of some of our companies to accelerate their projects. I mean, be it Intel, be it Samsung, or materials, we continue to overtake the market. That's the most important thing, that you know as soon as the market is accelerating, and it will happen, we are ready to continue to outperform. Is that a fair answer, Kai?
Great. We go to the next question, Charles Pitman-King, Barclays.
Thank you very much. Just a couple of questions on life sciences. Just in terms of M&A, you kind of highlighted the weaker near-term outlook outside of the Process Solutions division. Given this and the weaker academia in China outlook, can you confirm that that's an area that you see kind of more favorable valuations and therefore more of a focus for potential M&A within the life science space? Secondly, you kind of mentioned in your presentation just now that nothing remains in your evaluate box for your growth drivers, but you are actively reviewing the mRNA and viral vector CDMO activity. Maybe if you could just detail what the kind of process is for potentially moving something from review into evaluate. Thank you.
The process is very simple. We analyze on the basis of different KPIs, and in particular, where is the value contribution of specific businesses, right? Contribution to growth, contribution to margin or erosion of margin, and contribution to cash. On the basis of that, we cluster the businesses into the different buckets that Helene presented. We will definitely evaluate viral vectors.
mRNA.
mRNA, sorry. On the basis of different assumptions that may have changed. If you take the perspectives that were expected from mRNA during or around the pandemic, clearly, it's going to take a little bit more time, and oncology is not the traction of the pandemic. It's only fair that we evaluate those businesses. What was the second part of the question or the first part of the question? Sorry.
It was just in relation to whether or not you see more opportunity for Life Science.
The life science valuation has come down, obviously, in the last year and a half, very significantly. The problem is that the sellers' expectations have not changed. I'm being very honest. People believe that sooner or later, this will come back. Meanwhile, we continue conversations and identifying private and public targets in order to be able to progress as much as we can on this. The real limitation that we have is not lacking targets, it's valuation expectations.
We go to Peter Dannenbaum, BNP Paribas Exane.
Yeah, thanks, Pete Wordelt, BNP AXAN. I want to come back to two questions from earlier in the Q&A. Firstly, on this pivot to rare disease in oncology. When I think about CCAM5 and the DNA damage repair assets and what you've said last night and this morning, it doesn't really fit into that strategy. I just want to clarify, Belén, I know there's a healthcare session later, but is it full steam ahead for these assets, or should we really be more, should expectations be further lowered? Coming back to the margin question, we're not here to talk about every single scenario, but it's fair to point out that consensus has almost a 300 basis point margin expansion built in over the next five years. Can I ask qualitatively, in your scenario planning, is that sort of level of margin expansion on the table?
I know what you've commented about, around 100, but I just wanted to push you on scenario planning and whether that's even feasible, that high-end expectation. Thank you.
You mean on Healthcare or for the group?
On group, Belén.
On?
On the group.
First question on Healthcare, second question on group margins.
OK. Look, on healthcare, we have been operating at very high margins in recent years, obviously for different reasons. One of the most important is that our R&D costs had declined significantly in relation to some of the pipeline failures. Each and every program that is now funded can be a candidate to be partnered, depending on the strategic evaluation that we may do of the pipeline in the coming months and years. David is entering right now, as we speak, the new Head of R&D for Global Healthcare. He will definitely clarify a bit further the vision and the plans. Healthcare will continue to operate on very reasonable margins, as you can expect that. On the group, I don't think I can add too much to what you have said already, Helene.
Look, I would put it like this, Peter. I mean, we have for purpose and the reason indicated 100 basis points. If you think scenario planning as an outline, we do see quite a bit of volatility around currencies, around tariffs. We're super aware of it. There will definitely be an upside scenario and a downside scenario. If I were you, I would look at the 100 that we have talked about now.
If I maybe add, right, because Peter, I think you compared the margin expansion on consensus for the long term, right? We gave a midterm outlook on the 100 basis points. That might be further out because in the midterm, I did not see in the consensus 300 basis points deviation.
Yeah.
Good. We go to the next question from James Quigley, Goldman Sachs.
Great. Thank you for taking my questions. James Greene from Goldman Sachs. Two, please. One on Life Science for next year and one sort of more big picture. When we look at Life Science for next year, you're towards the bottom end of what you'd see as a normal growth year. As you sort of split out between Process Solutions next year and then the new Discovery and Advanced segments, should we be thinking that for Process Solutions, we should be more normal next year, or it's a step through to sort of normality in that 10% midterm growth rate? For the Advanced and Discovery, they're still seeing the headwinds. Picking up on the points you made with respect to headwinds, it seems to be more Discovery and Advanced weighted rather than Process Solutions. The second question, how future-proofed are your three divisions as it stands today?
As you're looking at new technologies that are coming through that you need to have exposure to, and maybe sort of thinking more Life Sciences and Electronics here, where are the gaps? Where are the sort of new technologies that you're looking to push into that you need to have exposure to? Obviously, within Process Solutions, you did the Myrus Bio acquisition, which is one step forward. Where else are you thinking about in terms of that future proofing for the next few years?
I will start with the second question. I have repeatedly said that our most important focus for the next Life Science acquisition is rejuvenating the portfolio and entering new technologies. I mean, giving an example, technologies like special biology, expanding our offer in proteomics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. ADCs, in which we already have a very competitive offer, are another topic, right? Connected with my comment on valuation before, searching for targets that bring innovation is getting us closer to the string of pearls approach than to a transformative move, right? We can more selectively address those potential gaps or anticipate the presence, as we have done to date. You will have a session on innovation in Life Science, and Karen can take you more specifically through that. I gave you a few examples. We have a strategic lens that is actually based on technology, right?
This is basically what is guiding our decision-making. The first question.
For Life Science, I mean, Process Solutions very much feels on track in the business we love.
Yeah.
Productions are rising, the use of biotech is rising, the market in healthcare is rising. That one, I would say, is like, OK, that's clear. Where are we seeing the impact around academic? Clearly, very early in the discovery journey. That is predominantly impacting then our SLS business. You are seeing it coming back because to some extent, also large pharma is starting to do early discovery again. We are also seeing that globally, you have people going back into early discovery. Those are the markets that are really muted. I was really happy to hear that biotech funding was great in October and September. We know that there's a certain time lag, but maybe that one is already helping us in 2026. Let's see.
Taking into consideration that we are confirming fully our 2025 guidance, which is telling you that we will grow faster in the second half than in the first half.
Simon Baker, please, Redburn.
Thanks very much. Yeah, Simon Baker from Redburn. Two questions, please. Firstly, sticking on the question of margins, qualitatively within healthcare, would you expect the pivot towards rare disease to have much of a positive impact on the healthcare margin? I would assume it would. Some thoughts on that would be helpful. Going back to M&A opportunities within life science, Belén, you said you were looking at all aspects and all areas where you operate, and you called out except CDMOs. I wonder if you could just remind us why the CDMO space is not appealing to Merck KGaA.
OK. Let me first go to your question on rare diseases. As I mentioned during the presentation, our key value drivers operate at higher margins. The answer is yes. Your second question, very good question.
The way I would look at it.
CDMO.
Yeah, CDMO.
CDMO. I wanted to center that. We have already operated CDMO as we've
had tremendous focus on novel modalities. Some modalities, like ADCs, are moving extremely well. We have high demand. We have great capabilities and differentiation. I already spoke about mRNA. mRNA had a tremendous surge during the pandemic. Obviously, the expectations for mRNA have significantly changed in view of the COVID vaccination not being regularly applied and oncology not being a kind of short-term value driver, value generator, better said. That's one reason. Strategically, our focus on novel modalities has been revisited. Second, traditionally, CDMO is highly CapEx intense. I mean, we have discussed very many, many times. Plus, the margins of CDMO, and this is the reason why we have actually kept it small, are lower than any other business in life science. It could eventually become dilutive. CDMO is a highly fragmented market, super highly fragmented.
The major scale is concentrated in three companies: the Lonzas and is mainly CMO, right? Samsung, et cetera. We have let our appetite for CDMO has decreased over time for those reasons.
Let's come to Otto, please.
Yeah. Good morning. It's Oliver Metzger from Otto Bergerich. Two questions. We talked a lot about mRNA, but just from the other side, how to think about divestments? With the Surface Solutions, we saw a great example of a divestment. Divestments can also be a means to improve a growth profile and also the margin profile. In particular, we just talked about the CDMOs, but also we saw a lot of volatility in that business and it still can be described as subscale. It would be great to have some of your thoughts on divestments overall, but also in the focus of CDMO activities. On Process Solutions, my second question, it's about you described China as a temporary headwind. What happens if this temporary headwind becomes more structural?
What you hear left and right from different comments suggests that potentially weakness in China is a little bit more severe than we thought one, two years ago. Also, in the context of the whole geopolitical tensions, is it potentially worth to say, "Okay, for bioprocessing, China won't come back as a kind of growth contributor in the future"?
Let me, I think it's a, you know, your question on divestitures is spot on. I think over the years, we have focused quite a lot on acquisitions, but we have also divested plenty of businesses, which is, to me, divestitures are a very critical part of Merck KGaA. I agree with your statement. Yes, I mean, and the best example is Surface Solutions. We don't anticipate what the options would be for a business that we are evaluating because obviously, this has consequences and a decision hasn't been made, right? When we evaluate the business or when we cluster a business on evaluate, definitely one of the options that we look at is potential looking for a different home, right? It's a scenario.
This is not where we are with CDMO, but we will definitely evaluate at least those two areas in which Helene von Roeder mentioned during the presentation.
Yeah. Remember this bubble slide where we had this bucket of invest? I don't know whether you saw it, but there were definitely arrows as in, "We can actually sell these." Why? Because it's simple. We have, and it's a CFO's dream come true in a way. We have many, many businesses into which we can invest. We also have capital. Of course, we can't put capital into all of them. That means that when we look at our portfolio, we clearly can decide, "Okay, here are the ones which are in the most attractive markets where we have the highest right to win and where we can get the best risk-adjusted returns." That means some of the business we will need to assess whether they actually should maybe leave the Merck KGaA family because there will be better owners. That's the way we're debating it.
I think what is nice is that we sort of now have a very clear view around what is the sphere and area where we can actually pivot towards.
Good. We have time for one last question from Rajesh Kumar, please, HSBC.
Oh, China. China. China.
Oh, sorry.
China. China. Let me take China. As you know, China is our second largest market at this time, and we continue to be, we have a very significant presence in the country. We believe that one of the unexploited opportunities is in life science and the explosion of biotech and local pharma companies that may, with the aspiration to become global, will keep the market attractiveness rather in the high. Obviously, what we are not ready to do is to compete on pricing with local competitors. Those are not yet so developed in life science, but we continue to see China as an attractive growth opportunity for the future.
Good. Let's move to Rajesh, please, from HSBC.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I'm going to follow up on process solutions guidance, which you explained earlier, that others have also trimmed, not process solutions, the Life Science solutions guidance trim, that others have also trimmed. You have trimmed. You've also taken a cautious stance on China. There's a hope for it to come back. If I look at last time's guidance, you brought 7- 10 down to 7- 9. When I look now, it's almost going 5 to 8 or something like that. It's a big move at the bottom end. China probably is 100 bps of that. I would imagine there are other factors which are not entirely clear. What assumptions are you making about pull forward comp effect? I'm assuming you're making none at the moment. If that was there, would this range be lower?
What are the other factors which are driving that total range down? Would be very helpful to understand. Second is on that bubble strategy consulting chart with no access labels. Very helpful. There is a large.
It does have labels, no?
Yes, but none that makes sense. The middle bubble.
Okay. We have a one-on-one.
The middle bubbles are the largest ones, which are a competitive position, size of the market. You have the largest cluster of bubbles there. What is your plan with those businesses?
I can probably reveal the middle bubbles. It's basically CM&E and fertility, which are the huge cash cows, which don't have significant growth. We have a great market position. Ultimately, as we said, it's like we keep feeding them. We need to feed our cows to give good milk. It's not really easy to sort of pivot them one way or another. The rest, we will discuss the access. That doesn't work.
The first question on the life science growth guidance. Look, I mean, there is no hidden agenda. The reasons that we see influencing our outlook is not something that you haven't heard before. It's not something that you haven't heard from our competitors, right? To me, the most important commitment we are making is the confidence behind bioprocessing and time and time again confirming our confidence to grow around 10%, which we have confirmed today. It's more the part of academia. It's not so much. I mean, I personally believe that China is going to be a significant opportunity for our life science business. I have discussed this extensively with Jean-Charles. I think that the view on academic funding is something that is keeping us a bit more prudent when we look at the market growth in the near term. While, I mean, we are absolutely convinced that the U.S.
biotech funding will rebound. As Helene said, we already see some movement there. Based on the assumptions that we have today, these are the reasons that are driving the moderation or the slight moderation of the guidance for the markets.
Thank you so much, Belén. Thank you so much, Helene. We are now transitioning over to the next part of the session today. Thanks again to the audience here for the excellent questions.
Thank you.
We will continue now with the business and sector spotlight sessions. In order to illustrate how the corporate strategy is not just unconnected to what we are doing in the sectors, we would like to show you a short video, get the stage clear, and then we kick it off with electronics. Action, please, for the video.
The size of things, it's a matter of perspective, like the biggest step in the history of humanity. It was a size 8. What seems small can turn out to be huge. Small things can trigger powerful changes in the world. That's not a vague statement. It's what we believe in. Here at Merck KGaA, we don't measure things by their size. We measure them by the impact they have on millions and even billions of lives every day. By daring to dream big, by starting to act big, we turn the tiny into the tremendous, the micro into the extraordinary, and the minuscule into the remarkable. In other words, at Merck KGaA, there's nothing small in what we do. What the human eye can barely glimpse through a microscope can have the power to elevate the life of millions. What size do you think this needle is?
It's big enough to help bring over 5 million babies to this world. We helped to create this atomic-sized marvel, the fabric of our future, paving the way for artificial intelligence that could change the course of mankind more than any other thing ever did. At Merck KGaA, every idea begins with a joint vision fueled by hours and hours of hard work and dedication and sometimes too much coffee. With every idea, every improvement, every innovation, we turn the microscopic into the awesome. We turn the small into the big. At Merck KGaA, we spark discoveries to elevate humanity. Together, we can shape the future. Let's collaborate to take bold steps that will drive transformative change, making a lasting impact for generations to come. Merck KGaA, sparking discovery, elevating humanity.
This is the perfect starting point for electronics. On popular demand, this time, you will see a more educational session because there were a lot of requests, and we took it really serious and really up to say, "What is it that we are really driving in the business?" We are shaping the industry with the materials we are providing, with the advanced materials we are providing. That's an item today where we will look also on the production processes and having customers in mind. That brings me to Kai. Kai will join us today as the CEO of Electronics, the Deputy Chair of the Executive Board, and the Future Group CEO. Welcome, Kai, on stage, please.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. This is now we're talking about high tech and about electronics. That's why I have a stack of cards to entertain you over the next couple of minutes. I'm not a teacher since I think you made the point that you want to go more into explaining some of the details. I have strong support for that. I will talk about that later. I want to give an intro first before we really dive deep. First time electronics is opening the show. This is the first time. The first ever. How exciting is that? I'm bearing, as Florian already indicated, different hats today. This one, now the 35 minutes are a firm focus on electronics and the progress we made there.
I think there's some exceptional work that has been done by the team in the past years in order to kind of shift gears into a very different direction. As usual in the spotlight sessions at the Capital Market Day, we want to show a bit the bench strengths we have in the organization and introduce new members of the team like we did in every year to give you an idea of how strong our bench of excellent people is. The intent is to give us an idea about the integral part that Merck KGaA Electronics plays in enabling next-generation semiconductors and how we have been positioned now as a critical enabler for semiconductor and optoelectronics in two industries that are rapidly converging. Our customers indicate great interest in that.
We see a lot of positive feedback on innovation capability and our concept of vertical integration, integrating the systems we have, the tools we have, as well as, of course, our enormous materials portfolio. There will be a deep dive on how we work and with our customers on a daily basis. That's maybe the essence that we would like to get across in the next 30 minutes and how we open the next chapter of AI and high-performance compute. Let's, at first, do kind of the important part that we need to have. What about the midterm guidance? How is the midterm guidance explained? Maybe I can bridge as well to the questions that were asked.
We are confirming, that's very important, we are confirming our midterm organic sales guidance now in words, mid to high single digit, but it's reaffirming our guidance with the exact same position that we had in the previous cycle. You can just take that as the backdrop. As I said last year already, and I'm repeating that every year, as you know, our guidance is a Kagga. It's not a corridor. In a cyclical business, a corridor doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's a Kagga. Very important is to remind you now 80% of the electronics business is semiconductor solutions. 80% is semiconductor solutions, and of which 80%, again, is semiconductor materials. So 80% solutions, of which 80% materials, if you do the math, two-thirds of our business electronics is driven by materials. That's the strongest contributor to continuous growth in that business.
We already have, with Q2, six consecutive quarters of low teens growth on average. Maybe bridging to the question on market recovery, if that is a bad market, I'm eager to see a good market. Just to be crystal clear, I think Belén made it absolutely clear. The market, the way of these cycles, will change going forward. It's not as sharp as we saw in the past. Everything is nose diving. Everything comes back. We will see different industries responding differently. The strongest growth driver, artificial intelligence, is driving the market growth. Other things are fluctuating, and regionally, they are changing their pattern. It's very important to bear in mind that we will respond, of course, to changing demand by changing allocation of resources and changing capacity. The market itself, with the driver AI, is fully intact.
I think if you take our guidance for the rest of the year, the semi-materials performance is absolutely confirmed. If we go forward with that, I think we have the same assumptions here. That's very important on the back of all the discussions around cycles and market recovery. We are in the heart of that transformation towards AI right now and working with the industry's leading player in that area. It's very important to, again, remember, more than 50% of our business in semi is based on AI and advanced nodes. More than 50% AI and advanced nodes. If, of course, the math going forward, these are the fast-driving areas, as well as materials, the fastest growing business, that leads, of course, with that proportion is getting better on the way forward. Why are we outgrowing the market?
This is something that we want to indicate with the next couple of minutes. We create more value per wafer as we go forward, more value per wafer. Why is that so? The miniaturization drives the need for more process steps to make a chip. More process steps means naturally more materials. Process engineering changes because now we are talking about even smaller structures and even more complex compositions of layers on a chip. The process engineering leads to more high-value materials. We need higher-value materials on a chip in order to make these structures possible. The third one is vertical stacking because two dimensions aren't enough anymore to do the trick. Vertical stacking, again, leads to more complexity. That is more layers, more materials.
Now the new kid on the block, which we have indicated already in previous years, the new kid on the block, heterogeneous integration, because now one chip, one die is not anymore enough. They have to be stacked in order to achieve what is needed, more performance. Especially AI is a driver of the demand for heterogeneous integration. Again, heterogeneous integration, more steps, more special compositions of materials because it's a new area we are dealing with, and more metrology equipment to understand whether these stacks are working as they should. Those are all the drivers for our materials business. In DSNS, we see the stabilization, as already shown on the slides in the previous section. We see a stabilization into 2026 of that business. We will return to growth midterm. Belén, you made the point on our customers indicating, of course, what their plans long-term are.
Short-term, we saw some bumps, but that's the way forward for DSNS. It remains a highly strategic component of the portfolio because it enables our novel materials to be deposited on a chip. We will have that in a couple of minutes. Optronics, as we said earlier, and we just confirmed that, will stay broadly stable going forward. This is, of course, driven by new applications on the display side, special applications, as well as convergence for semiconductors on the material side, as well as metrology and inspection, as a very important new contributor to optronics. The convergence towards semiconductors is key here. The metrology and inspection capabilities help us to partner even more intensively with our customers to help them to control their processes and to drive yield in the fabs. That's an important area. We will give you some examples.
Key takeaway for the intro, it's a clean portfolio, strong markets, and I think we are proud of disciplined execution. We're progressing almost year on year as we promised. We would conclude electronics is in a pretty good shape and has proven to be a value compounder for our company. That is the basis. Now let's go one level deeper. The focus for today on our session is materials and some of the adjacencies in equipment and in the tools section. I want to introduce two of my team members in Electronics, Al Chung and Catherine Hutchinson. Both have spent their entire career in the semiconductor area. Both have joined via the Versum acquisition. Together, to allow no indication of age, they have 40 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. It's not one has one year and the other one has 39. It is more evenly distributed.
Both have worked on the customer front, really on a daily basis with customers, know fabs inside out. I think that's an amazing insight. Catherine shaped our technology strategy roadmap in her previous assignment and is now Head of our Thin Films Metallics business. It's a key growth driver in our portfolio. Catherine, you won the Innovation Award and you're based in our Silicon Valley Innovation Hub at Intermolecular. Al, again, award-winning, and now you're Head of Planarization and you're based in Singapore. Earlier, you were our Global Head for Thin Films Material Sales, so the Sales Head, and you were MD in Taiwan in your previous career. Again, very close to very important customers. I'd start to call Al on stage. You will show us now how we support our customers through the fab. We will take you on a journey through the fab.
The questions that we want to answer with your presentation are, where exactly does Merck KGaA create value inside our customers' fabs? What makes the material critical for yield and reliability? How does our collaboration model with the toolmakers, as well as the chip companies, turn value add into growth for us? How does it work? Al, stage is yours. Take it on.
Thank you, Kai. It's great to be here today. It's a very, very exciting time. At a time, semiconductors stretch the limits of physics, introducing unprecedented complexity. This is where Merck KGaA adds value, right? Twenty years ago, so talking about forty years, right? Maybe I'll take the thirty. Twenty years ago, I started off my career with Air Products Taiwan, working with a team of roughly 10 people selling a handful of specialty gases. Today, the team has grown into hundreds, working with the customers closely. We are delivering a highly customized, complex solution to our customers. Today, I want to take you on a tour, right, through a shop floor of a semiconductor fab and explain to you how our materials are used in the fab. At the same time, I'll try to keep it very simple.
In the picture, this is where you see a fictional integrated semiconductor fab manufacturing campus. You will learn where Merck KGaA generates value and why our differentiation matters and how it translates into speed, yield, and reliability. Some of you might have seen the Merck wheel. This captures our ecosystem relevance and comprehensive value creation. In addition to the wheel, we also offer delivery system and services, prototyping, and R&D services. Today, let's focus on the wheel in the center. This is where semiconductor chips are made. Let's zoom in. On the left-hand side, you see a semiconductor fab. A fab is short for fabrication facility. It's a front-end manufacturing facility that produces logic or memory chips. Let's look inside. A typical semiconductor fab has roughly about 50 different types of tools. For our customers, they have multiple sets of the same type of tools.
It runs more than 1,000 tools at more than 1,500 process steps. Each of these tools costs about a few million into hundreds of million euros. Each step also requires a perfect tuning between the materials and the hardware. We group semiconductor materials into six classes: deposition, polarization, etching, cleaning, doping, and patterning. Let's go through them. You will see in the following presentations the Merck wheel on the top left corner as your guide. First, we're showing an etching tool made by our tool partner. Etching is where our materials carve the circuit in the molecular scale. Let's take a 200-layer NAND, for example. Etching is like installing an elevator shaft into a skyscraper that's already been built. We do this by chemically drilling straight down the center without cracking the windows or disturbing the residents.
To use a skyscraper analogy, the elevator shaft is taller than my birch codifos stacking on top of each other. This 200-layer NAND is a perfect example to show you why Merck KGaA's unique broad portfolio, why the unique broad portfolio matters. There are different materials used to build the skyscraper and also to install the elevator shaft. Our materials span from gases, liquids, solids. Every state of matter is involved in the process. The future could evolve into a different direction. We can leverage our broad capabilities. It depends on what customer needs.
Yeah, this is very important. You mentioned what the breadth of our bench is. Now, to use a football analogy, it's important to have a pretty broad bench of different materials in order to be able to cover new needs. What do we do in order to extend our bench? You just explained atomic layer etching. I think a couple of years ago, I was talking about the importance of atomic layer deposition. Unfortunately, we have to get rid of the stuff too. We need etching as well. This is where novel materials come in. This is one of the kind of more advanced technologies these days that is needed on top of all what we have. You've explained how we broaden the bench in the direction of atomic layer etching.
The success in this area means uniting our etch and deposition capabilities under one umbrella and to be a kind of a system partner for our customers that knows both sides of that spectrum. Maybe you can go a bit deeper into what does it take then next. I think planarization would be the next step you will be introducing.
The system approach is particularly true for planarization. This is the next step, planarization. This is where the deposited thin film layer gets polished, and the process is called chemical mechanical planarization, or CMP for short. The tool smooths the surface of the wafer by pressing down the wafer against a rotating pad. When the pad rotates, our slurry actually combines with chemical reaction and mechanical abrasion to remove the uneven area on the wafer. This is an extremely fine-tuned process that yields atomic level flatness. The next picture I want to show you is, you know, think of this like laying bricks. If the foundation of the brick is uneven, it will be much more difficult to lay the next layer. Our customers do this across different process steps, and they are doing the planarization across multiple layers.
Any defect in this structure could impact the function of the chip. Our innovation makes sure this doesn't happen, and this is where our materials and process know-how become critical. Recently, I had the chance to work with one of our memory customers to develop a high-rate, high-throughput copper slurry for their most advanced DRAM application. We designed our slurry to match their performance targets, and we also worked with their engineers side by side to optimize the performance further by fine-tuning their tool recipe. The whole process takes about one year, and we have already developed many novel formulations for our customers.
These processes are not kind of standalone; they are part of a chain. They are part of a larger system where mechanics, the chemistry, and the data used for optimizing these systems interact in real time. They play together. This is exactly how we, as Merck KGaA, think about these systems. We think about it as a full system rather than a single product. It is comparable. Now, having our Life Science team just in front of me, it's like in bioprocessing, the same model, exact same model from R&D, consumables to scaling that, the same model that we apply here, the same logic that we apply here, understanding the full system and not just its parts.
Right. That's exactly right, Kai. The next step, cleaning, is a great example of a horizontal integration. After polarization, there will be many debris and residue left on the wafer surface after you polish. The last particles are difficult to remove, but matter the most. The good news is that we know we designed the slurry. We know the chemistry of slurry, and we co-develop the slurry and clean together. We know how to optimize the interaction between the chemistry, particle by particle and molecule by molecule.
The portfolio element plays a vivid role in driving these changes. This is how we, at the end, get kind of locked in these processes. We call that a process of record by our customers. That's when they qualify a material. If a toolmaker qualifies a material for their tools, it's called best-known method on tools. That gives us the stickiness in one technology going forward, and a very important part, how we drive success of our R&D pipeline.
Right. Our customers are very careful in choosing or qualifying the materials. The stakes are high here, right? The impurity in the materials can be very tiny, but it impacts the performance of the entire chip. One of our customers actually told me, if one particle survives, it could kill the entire memory stack. It is important after the surface is absolutely cleaned. The next step we call doping. Doping is a process our customer adds carefully chosen atoms to fine-tune the performance of the chip. Our ultra-high-purity dopants can help our customer control the transistor speed, leakage, or efficiency. It's a smaller step, but also an essential one.
Right. I think it's, again, the quality of the portfolio that connects every step. The breadth we can probably measure, if you want, in the 13,000, 1,000 patents that we have for our portfolio on all the materials that we offer. It gives us strength and kind of sustainability of our portfolio. We are investing more than €300 million year on year in materials R&D to drive the pipeline together with our customers and to get, again, stickiness, sustainability of our portfolio.
Right. Talking about R&D, the next step, lithography, is probably the most innovative area of the semiconductor manufacturing process. It's a key step of patterning. Here you can see this EUV tool. This is the tool that costs more than €100 million I mentioned earlier. Patterning uses light to create the nanometer scale shape on the coating materials called photoresist. Merck KGaA also offers photoresist on the layer or other related materials. We also supply EUV rings where we clean the photoresist and also prevent the pattern from collapsing. EUV lithography is extraordinarily sensitive to trace ions and impurities.
Yeah, it drives us to parts per billion. That's a measure we use in order to drive quality. Parts per billion, I think somebody calculated it's finding a football on an Arctic car. That's the way to define parts per billion. Unfortunately, now in EUV, we need parts per trillion. You need 1,000 Arctic cars to find one football. That's the dimension we are working right now.
Right. Merck KGaA created first photoresist materials. We continue to innovate. One such example would be the PFAS-free, fluorine-free photoresist as a next-generation material. We deliver the same performance, with a much less environmental footprint. That way, we will be able to protect the ice cap in this picture. With that, I'll conclude my presentation today. Kai, I'll hand it back to you.
Thank you. Thank you, Al. Thanks for your part. I'm glad you touched PFAS-free because it's a very important topic for driving sustainability. How can we replace materials that we don't want to have? Sustainability is part of our performance engineering as well because it drives the quality and the environmental impact in our customers' fabs. Thanks, Al. I would like now to welcome Catherine on stage. Catherine, are we looking beyond the fab floor? The question that we get most frequently is how does Merck KGaA vertically integrate and translate that into customer yield and faster time to market? What proof points show that we are winning with our qualifications being first on tool and fast in our customer RAMs? What does the new addressable market of advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration mean for Merck KGaA? The stage is yours.
Thank you, Kai. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today with you. As Kai mentioned, I'm based in the Silicon Valley Innovation Hub. I'm based at Intermolecular, and I lead the thin films metallics business. Let's start with the last stage of the front end. Let's talk about deposition. We have technology leadership in this area. We have more patent families than anyone else, spanning across metallics and deposition, which are the two foundational building blocks for semiconductor chips. After decades of Moore's law and levels of miniaturization that push the boundaries of physics, we continue to address these challenges by developing new materials with our customers. Leading fabs today are depositing thin films nanometers thick, 20 times smaller than a typical virus. This means we are building thin films one atom at a time.
Doing this is as complex as putting a person on the moon, but over and over again. At this level of complexity, co-innovation is everything. We don't just ship materials. We solve challenges together with our customers. We tailor solutions for their specific applications. We do this for new architectures such as gate all-around transistors, high-bandwidth memory, and stacked 3D NAND devices. Together, these architectures are the future of AI, and that combination is what makes Merck indispensable to our customers.
Indispensable is a phenomenal segue because it explains the next challenge. How do we get the stuff on the tool? How do we get the stuff in the right purity, as precise as perfectly controlled? How do we get the chemistry on the tool?
Of course, as you say, some molecules require an advanced delivery system. To extend the analogy that we mentioned earlier, now it's time to talk about the rockets that put the people on the moon. To do that, we need to look below the fab. We need to go into the subfab floor. This is the fab, and down here is the subfab. One of the molecules that requires an advanced delivery system is known as molybdenum, or more precisely, molybdenum dichloride dioxide, which we affectionately call MUCL. As chip components miniaturize, the conductivity or the resistivity increases in these small features. The chips tend to get hotter, and they become less efficient unless we use new materials. We need new processes and new materials, and MUCL is one of those solutions. The challenge with MUCL is that it's very corrosive, and it's very hard to handle.
It doesn't melt until 175 degrees Celsius, and any trace of moisture in the line can cause hydrochloric acid to form. That means we cannot use stainless steel. You also cannot allow it to cool in the piping between the delivery system and the tool, or else you will get a clog, and the MUCL can't get to the deposition chamber, similar to how cholesterol can clog your arteries. This is where our ChemGuard vapor comes in. This is our ChemGuard vapor here. We built a custom advanced delivery system to solve these challenges, and it also provides two key differentiations for our customer. First, these systems enable over 99% consumption of MUCL from the container. This provides some of the lowest cost of ownership in the industry. Furthermore, our delivery system provides very tight flow control to the chamber.
This ensures that a high-quality film is deposited over and over again. We have developed a fully integrated process, and with MUCL, we were first on tool, working side by side with the fab. Now we've added a second customer, and we are ramping sales. Molybdenum is just one of many critical materials that we offer.
That's a very important one to bear in mind because the portfolio in semi is not like pharma. It's not like there's a blockbuster and everything depends on that blockbuster. It is about a large portfolio. We're talking about hundreds of different products. We measure these products by millions or tens of millions of sales potential. That's what defines the broad portfolio. Many more shots on goal. They have a significant diversification they create across our portfolio. Maybe you can allude to that as well, Catherine.
Sure. This diversified portfolio includes many highly differentiated offerings. When we talk about scaling innovation from lab to fab, lanthanum is a great example. We have already commercialized a lanthanum precursor. This precursor is key for AI, and it is absolutely essential for gate all-around transistors. This is because this material enables these transistors to meet the high-performance standards that are required for AI-class compute. Because these next-generation architectures are 20%- 40% more material intensive, they will use more of Merck KGaA's materials and more of our high-value materials.
Let me do the bragging. Maybe you don't need to do that. We can confidently say that literally every AI chip that's being made today, 5 nanometers and below, is made with at least one material from our side. I think that's a success of your team, Catherine.
Yeah, no, that's true.
How do we get now from lab to fab? Let's look in the R&D center how that works.
This is a very complex journey and one that we do not do alone. Lanthanum precursors are co-developed with our OEM partners or the tool manufacturers. We fine-tune it with our customers in their R&D centers. Once the customer selects it, once it becomes qualified, we then move this molecule to our Sheboygan industrialization hub. This is where we scale up our molecules that were conceived in a lab, qualified at our customers, and we take them from lab-scale manufacturing to high-volume manufacturing, taking them from a lab concept to reliable high-volume manufacturing.
For that, we use the synthesis capabilities that we have in-house. We do have a real gem in-house. We're using the life science know-how, the catalog of materials from Life Science, our capabilities that we have in Sheboygan to rapidly prototype and scale our materials. That's very important. That's for us an essential capability in order to be as fast as we need to be. Science for us is chemistry and physics at Electronics. The logic that we apply is a lot the bioprocessing logic, as I said earlier in the discussion. Many mindsets that we have from the Sigma-Aldrich heritage is learning to scale organic chemistry the same way as Process Solutions scales biology. In Sheboygan, as I said, is the key asset and they combine then the Merck DNA, I would call it this way, molecular precision, process control, and purity at scale.
Exactly, Kai. This capability enables us to be first on tool, which is crucial with our customers. Sheboygan is where we scale up our thin films portfolio. Once a molecule is proven, we can also manufacture close to our customers, strengthening resilience and shortening our supply chain. Now I'd like to turn to our discovery engine. Let's talk about Intermolecular. It's our Silicon Valley hub and where I call home. We are within walking distance to our customers and partners. We are also very close to the hyperscalers that they serve. Intermolecular was built for co-invention. It is a mini fab that uses many of the same tools and processes that our customers use. The key thing about Intermolecular and the value it provides is that it shortens the development time by half. It cuts it by 50%. This has already delivered a double-digit number of qualifications.
By co-optimizing chemistry and process directly on the wafer, we cut qualification times dramatically. Innovation doesn't just stop in the lab. With Athenia, we are now bridging discovery and manufacturing through data. Athenia, co-developed by Merck KGaA, securely connects materials and process data across the semiconductor ecosystem. We are now embedding yield services into materials intelligence, transforming raw data into real-time insight and continuous optimization for our customers.
Absolutely. I was so excited to jump in because Intermolecular, that's the brain of our R&D engine. This is why we call it materials intelligence. This is why it's not just normal R&D. It's materials intelligence. We unite data discovery and the design aspects into accelerating our innovation pipeline. With Athenia, as you said, we are now extending even beyond that, connecting directly into our customer fabs. These capabilities enable us to open next frontiers, such as, and now we switch to advanced packaging.
Yes. Let's move over to the advanced packaging building. Three years ago today, our revenues from advanced packaging were very close to zero. Today, they exceed €100 million with multiple qualifications at leading-edge customers. This is a huge total addressable market expansion powered by the same fundamentals that make us strong in the front end. These critical dimensions or feature sizes are larger here than in the front end.
Right. They're still relatively large. While they are, of course, small but relatively large compared to front-end processes, hybrid bonding is kind of a term that you will hear more frequently that is changing that. Now we are going into more miniaturization in advanced packaging and putting more of our technology into the play of advanced packaging, more advanced materials, more metrology, and more data to control yield at the atomic interface.
To give a tangible example, we are now taking the same dielectric expertise from the front end into advanced packaging. Our AP LTO family, which was originally developed for low-temperature insulating films, is now finding new relevance in advanced packaging. This opens a whole new market to this family of products. This also deepens our customer intimacy and strengthens our role across the entire semiconductor stack. Returning to planarization, which Al walked us through earlier, for advanced packaging, we are offering new slurry formulations. What has been successful for us in high-bandwidth memory will also find significant TAM expansion in other advanced packaging applications. We are set to extend our ultra-innovative and unique solutions for high-bandwidth memory into stacked 3D NAND dies and eventually to full AI system and package solutions.
It is, again, the same playbook that we have used over and over again in the front-end side, a combination of materials, DSNS, in order to get stuff in the fab. It is a new interpretation of Moore's law that we all have heard of, progress through 3D densification and not just the miniaturization and the shrink alone. Merck KGaA's integrated materials and system solutions are at the heart of it.
That's right, Kai. Specifically, we are integrating our offering. The same logic that applied to MUCL in the fab now applies to planarization in our integrated offerings for advanced packaging. For CMP applications, we offer the FlowMaster, which is a delivery system, an advanced slurry, as well as process control with a TMAP metrology and inspection tool. That means we are surrounding the tool, and now we have more of the pieces. When you are stacking DRAM for high-bandwidth memory, if the parts aren't completely smooth, completely flat, the whole structure will start to tilt. It becomes compromised. A failed high-bandwidth memory stack can start to look like the leaning tower of pizza. That means this device won't work. It's yield loss to our customers, and it's lost revenue. Our metrology and inspection capabilities can help spot these defects and ensure only properly bonded dies proceed.
That means significant improvement to costs and yield. Our vertical integration ends with data because you can't improve what you can't measure. As devices become more complex and the ability to precisely measure and control every layer becomes critical, tiny misalignments or voids at the bonding interface destroy yield and destroy product. That's, again, where metrology and inspection come in. They're the feedback that drives performance.
It is very important to understand that our move to acquire Unity SC was very intentional because it kind of closes the gap into that new technology quite neatly. Deeper visibility into advanced packaging processes of our customers and their processes drives their performance. That is exactly why we have done that. Merck KGaA is now one of the few companies that unite materials innovation as well as process control under one roof.
That's right, Kai. Unity's advanced metrology is already deployed at leading-edge customers. Our metrology and inspection solutions, such as TMAP, Lightspeed, and PSD tool lines, are needed to enable technologies that are absolutely crucial for AI. It will help drive our growth and cement our ecosystem relevance.
Absolutely. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you for your part. I will then bring it home. Thanks. The team is waving that we have to come to an end, which we do in a second. It takes three months in the fab to make a chip. We have done it now in 30 minutes, guys. That was already a fast forward to the process. Let's conclude on the presentation. I think I want to repeat again, portfolio is in great shape. Now, pure play advanced electronics sector, we are driving growth by that. I've explained it in the beginning. Of course, now, since I'm facing kind of a dual assignment for a couple of months, I want to ensure that things are moved forward with the same focus and the same intensity.
We shared last week that I've appointed Ed Shober, a gentleman who worked for us for quite a while, who is an absolute experienced hand in the industry. He will work as Chief Operating Officer to support me while I'm working on the transition myself. He will work closely with our customers so that we don't lose any momentum. Let's conclude. AI is the strongest enabler of that development. AI is driving the growth. A key factor for us, why are we successful, is the passion and, as we call it, the obsession for our customers because we are very close to the customers. We are in their fabs, co-develop, co-create. This is absolutely key for each of the materials and the processes. It's a growth business, clean portfolio, comprehensive materials offering across all the different dimensions, as we explained, vertically integrated where it makes sense.
This is how we drive the growth. We are a value compounder for Merck KGaA overall. We have what our customers need and where they need it and when they need it. Let's leave you with one thought. What is the learning from our transformation journey? I think learning how to innovate alongside with customers, very important. How to commercialize co-innovation, so not just breeding kind of in your own nest, and how a transformation story can create value and growth for tomorrow. That is an important part of that. Electronics has created that momentum via this vertical and horizontal integration strategy. Merck KGaA is overall unique in its ability to scale and to kind of build a partnership with our global partners. Quality in the labs, yield in the fabs, and scale in the plans. That's the secret of all our businesses. I thank you.
Thank you so much, Kai. I believe we all deserve a coffee break right now and a good cup of coffee. We will be back in 50 minutes at 11:20 A.M. sharp. We will continue with Life Science. Welcome back, everyone. I hope you had the chance to recharge and refuel during a bit shorter coffee break. With that, we are coming to Life Science, and I'm very pleased to have Jean-Charles Wirth here, CEO of Life Science, including members of his leadership team. We will look into the new business unit structure, the customer focus, the innovation strategy, and also give a deep dive into our Process Solutions business today. With this, Jean-Charles, please join me on stage.
Thank you, thank you. Good morning, everyone. How are you doing? Nice dinner last night?
Yes.
Good. Charles, I want to see a picture of your house. I hope you like the analogy, by the way, about the new setup. Again, thank you very much for joining us, and thank you for all of you for the dinner last night. I like very much the end change, and also the change in question was great. As mentioned by Florian, we will start with an overview on our strategy. I took over this position a few months ago, and one key question I wanted us to be clear was what about the life science market? We did quite a detailed analysis on the market. We used also external experts, external third party, to address our market question. Linked to it, I will share with you what is our strategy. You will see that we have a very clear strategy.
It's about execution, and I'm super confident in the way we are going to strive and drive life science moving forward. Linked to it, last night I mentioned that we are going to change our go-to-market. I call it go-to-market transformation, where we will have three business units: process solution, end change, and the ambition, just to be clear, we love process solution, and the goal is to grow around 10%. We are on track to deliver. We'll have two new business units. We'll have advanced solution looking for, let's say, expertise advice to our customer. The third business unit will be around discovery solution. Here we want to leverage our multi-channel approach, e-commerce being very, very important. Why? Because our customers in discovery are many researchers, and they are looking for quality and speed.
If you think about discovery, think about a make-to-stock business and think about low-value average order, but very high volume. For these two business units, you will have the pleasure to see the two new leaders. Now I'm going to disclose the names. Discovery solution will be led by Anand Nambiar, and advanced solution will be led by Mr. Paulo Carli. They will come on stage later. We will have also Karen Madden, our CTO, to talk about innovation. Innovation is super important for us. I will ask a question at the end of my speech about what is our three pillars on strategy. You should keep in mind portfolio leadership, customer experience, and the third one is operational excellence. Under portfolio leadership, we mean innovation. Innovation could be internal R&D, could be alliance partnership, and could be M&A. This is why Karen's role is very critical for us.
Last but not least, we'll have Sebastian Arana, who will continue to lead Process Solutions, come on stage. Sebastian will talk about the way we deal with and steer the business in Process Solutions. Sebastian will also talk about the recent acquisition we made. We announced it yesterday. Some of you last night asked me if we announced this acquisition on purpose the day before the Capital Market Day. My answer was no, because we have to deal with some, call it, Japanese companies, and negotiation was a little bit longer and tough. Overall, I feel our move in chromatography makes complete sense to offer a broader portfolio and solution to our customers in Process Solutions, and Sebastian will cover it. With that, let's move to the next slide. Life Science is a very important pillar of Merck KGaA, roughly 42% of the total sales of Merck KGaA.
We have a very clear strategy based on three pillars. I won't repeat what I just said. I will have one slide later on. We also have a strong foundation. What I mean by strong foundation is we have a very large portfolio, 300,000 products in Process Solutions, Discovery Solutions, and Advanced Solutions. We have a global footprint. We are doing business in more than 65 countries. In these 65 countries, very often we have a sales organization with sales specialists, but also account generalists, and we leverage our omnichannel approach, e-commerce being critical to us. What I mean by strong footprint or strong baseline is we have very good capabilities. What I mean by capabilities is quality, innovation, but also branding. We have a strong brand. When we talk to customers, think about Millipore. Millipore brand means filtration, very strong brand. Sigma-Aldrich, very strong brand in chemistry.
Merck, if you go to LATAM and you talk to any of our customers, Merck is known in LATAM for quality. We also have a very strong brand in our service business, CTS. The brand is called BioReliance. BioReliance is a very, very strong brand. Overall, we have a clear strategy, but we have a strong baseline and strong foundation, which is important. My additional point I would like to highlight is we want to grow organically, but also inorganically. We want to beef up our portfolio. Last night, I told you it could be through small acquisitions, like we did Herb last year. Herb Organoid was a small acquisition that we announced in December last year, early January this year. By the way, if you have any question on Herb Organoid, Anand will be the one who should be able to answer.
We want to look for mid-size acquisitions, like the one we just did, where we feel that we have already a strong baseline, but we could expand our portfolio and process solutions. The JSR acquisition is a good example. As mentioned by Helene and Belén, we are also looking for larger acquisitions under the frame of Merck. Yes, we are working hard. As mentioned by Belén, to dance, you need to have two partners. This is where we are today. Acquisition is very important for us. The last point on this slide I would like to highlight is our transformation, the new go-to-market. Again, we adjust our go-to-market based on customer feedback because we want to be closer to our customers, we want to answer their needs, their expectations, and we want to better serve them.
Last but not least, linked to the new go-to-market, we'll adjust our business unit setup. Go live January 1, 2026. I'm pretty sure that we'll restate the data in time, and Helene will take care of it. Let's go to the next slide. Strategy. Our strategy is based on three pillars: portfolio, customer experience, operational excellence. Portfolio, I touched it quickly. What do we have in mind? It's everything around innovation, organic, partnership, or M&A. We have also in mind, when we think about portfolio, digitalization and robotics. If you think about pharmaceuticals, a lot of our customers today in pharmaceuticals are looking for high volume of tests very quickly. I can't disclose any information on it, but you should assume, if you think about the biomonitoring portfolio, that we are working on robotics in order to expand the scale of the tests we are doing for pharmaceuticals.
This is the portfolio leadership. Customer experience, linked to the new go-to-market organization we are going to put in place. We want to improve, streamline in a seamless way the way we interact with our customers. When I said it, it's true for our sales organization, but it's also true for our back office, what we call customer service or customer excellence. Last but not least, operational excellence, where we want to improve the way we operate. Yesterday, during the dinner, I mentioned a little bit about our secret sauce. For some of you, I said we have two secret sauce. The first one is our omnichannel, multi-channel organization, our unique capabilities around our go-to-market. The second one is our supply chain. We have to deliver in time, quickly, more than 300,000 products to our customers.
Working end to end between sales organization and supply chain is very important for us. Yes, Belén mentioned AI. We are using AI, big data, to ensure that our sales forecast is aligned with our demand forecast, is aligned with our production forecast. The secret for us is to serve customers and to have products at the right time, at the right place, at the right location. This is our three-pillar strategy, and digital and people are, of course, very important. If we go to the next slide, here are the three business units. Something which is very important for you to know is not only the size of the businesses, but also our exposure to customer segment. Sebastian will lead process solution, €3.5 billion business. We do not change anything on process solution. The mandate of Sebastian is to grow at or slightly above market.
We said around 10%. I am pretty sure that this afternoon, during the Q&A, you will ask about our order book, our book-to-book ratio, and so forth. On this one, I am super confident. Something that I would like to mention, the process solution business is a high-touch, let's say, business, where roughly 60%- 70% of our sales go through what we call global strategic accounts. Sebastian and his team are doing an excellent job to foster interaction with our customers. Some of you last night asked about what did we learn from COVID. What we learned from COVID is, yes, we need to be closer to our large pharma customers, but we also did our homework to have the right tools, the right KPIs in order to steer the business.
For some of you, I have my iPhone, and I have order intake on a daily basis on my iPhone, but I will not share any information with you. You will not have access to my iPhone. Discovery solution, very large-scale business, close to €3 billion. What is interesting in, call it, the light pink here, roughly 25% of this business is done with pharma and biotech, roughly 25% to 30% with academic customers, then INT for roughly 25%, and very low exposure to diagnostics. Here, as I said, we are mainly dealing with researchers, early research. What they are looking for is to have a seamless interaction and to receive product in time. The speed is very important. Yes, we want to leverage an omnichannel approach.
Sales sometimes want to deal with a sales specialist, but the way they transact is very often through e-commerce, and Anand will mention it and cover it later on. Finally, we have advanced solution, $2.5 billion. It's about the specialty of our product. Here, we have five product lines or franchises: lab water, biomonitoring, diagnostic radiating materials, CDMO, and customer testing services. The split of the segmentation is slightly different, and you can see that we have much higher exposure to diagnostics, and diagnostics customers are very important for us. This is the new business, and we go live on January 1, 2024. If you go to the next slide, what do we think and what do we mean on our go-to-market transformation? Here, you have a long list: strong customer experience, scalable growth, on-power structure, accelerated innovation, on-power supply and distribution model, efficiency-focused setup.
I will give you two examples quickly. On strong customer experience, I'm thinking about process solutions. Some of our key customers are based in Switzerland, and now we interact on a very regular basis with them. Two weeks ago, we launched and cut the ribbon of a new production based in Cork, Ireland, Blarney. It's our first production which will produce filters, filtration products for process solutions outside the U.S. During this event, Sebastian and his team invited 45 key global strategic accounts. For the first time, during the entire dinner with some of them, and I was there, we talked about what could we do to share more information, to know more about their forecasts, but also from outside to do better to serve products. This is what I mean by customer experience. It's to interact and to be very close to our customers, one example being process solutions.
The other example I would like to take is scalable growth. Think about diagnostics. Very often, the diagnostic customer will come to us with, call it, a question that they can't resolve. It starts with R&D. We come with a kind of solution, then we move to scalable, then we'll go to mass production, then we'll provide quality testing. It's kind of the full workflow of service we could offer with a diagnostic customer. Just to give you a hint about what we mean in terms of go-to-market transformation. If we go to the next slide, discovery solution, very quickly, we want to drive and to focus strategically on agility and digitalization. We want to make sure that we have reliable, available, and digital-first products in time. Again, think about all the effort we have to do, and we are good at that from a supply chain point of view.
Finally, we want to scale and drive efficiency. With that, if you go to the next slide, I would like to ask Anand to come on stage and, Anand, tell us more about your background, what did you do, and how you are going to deal with discovery, and how you are going to steer discovery solutions January 1.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone, and good to see some familiar faces, although I'm wearing a different hat. It's absolutely a privilege to be here, and thank you for the opportunity, JC. I've been with Merck KGaA for over a decade and worked in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., leading businesses at the cornerstone of science, customer success, and manufacturing. Previously, as Global Head of Semiconductor Materials, and more recently as Chief Commercial Officer for Electronics. I started with Merck KGaA in India as Managing Director, leading the biopharma and consumer health businesses, delivering double-digit growth through a complex regulatory legal environment. Thank you, Belén, for that opportunity. In Electronics, I was able to drive a multi-billion euro business with 30% EBITDA, executed successful M&A, and diversified our portfolio to bring the business to a podium position, arguably one of the leading semiconductor companies in the world.
Thank you, Kai, for that. My approach centers on customer centricity, operational excellence, and building a resilient supply chain, ensuring we deliver sustainable value and maintaining industry-leading compliance and engagement. For Life Science, my vision is to empower scientists and researchers by making discovery more reproducible, scale-up more predictable, and everyday lab work simpler, leveraging digital innovation, cross-industry expertise, and a multicultural perspective. Why am I excited about Discovery Solutions? This is our bold new business unit, redefining how science gets done, combining scale and omnichannel, speed, and digital innovation. This unit comprises chemistry and biology franchises, a long history of a broad range of catalog of products, over 300,000 products and millions of SKUs, along with strong scientific, technical, and application support for our customers.
Our portfolio holds podium positions that continue to be the foundation of scientific research on critical applications that range from neuroscience to cancer or 3D bioprinting to energy solutions. Our customers, who are heavily academic and industrial, have provided feedback as to what's most important to them. To achieve their goals, they need suppliers and partners that prioritize speed, product availability, and a seamless ordering convenience. We are trusted by over a million customers. It's just mind-boggling coming from Electronics. It's just... In thousands of academic labs, to leading biotech and pharma companies, and fueling breakthroughs across every research frontier. Over 90% of our business is less than €100,000. That means we're top of mind for all researchers and scientists whenever they need to do their critical tests and experiments. Karen is going to go through this. I can't talk about discovery without talking about innovation.
We are at the forefront of innovation with our biology products, whether it's organ-on-a-chip, organoids, or 3D cell culture. In digital chemistry, with Addison and Synthia, and with sustainable solutions that we're developing with bio-based solvents, ensuring that our portfolio stays ahead of every evolving research need. Our e-commerce is our jewel. We're sharpening our focus on our e-commerce platform to address the evolving customer needs. Amazon has set the benchmark for what an online purchase experience should be. Amazon cannot ship cell culture media, chemicals, or organoids. That's what we do. Our digital-first, seamless buying experience delivers speed, convenience, and self-service, meeting the demands of today's scientists and procurement teams. Every single day, this is mind-boggling, every single day, customers spend nearly an average of three years' worth of human hours on our website every day. Can you imagine the opportunity that we have with this captive audience?
We process millions of orders annually through our digital channels. Tens of millions of scientific resources are downloaded from our website every year. Our AI-powered recommendation engine delivers more than 100 million personalized product recommendations to our customers, driving smarter purchasing and deeper engagement with our customers. Our focus on efficiency, service, and digital leadership positions us for resilient, profitable growth, even in a dynamic environment that we are in right now. Discovery Solutions is engineered to capture that market share, deepen that customer loyalty, and deliver sustainable long-term value for our stakeholders. Thank you.
Thank you, Anand. Thank you very much, Anand. Anand gave you some numbers. Our e-commerce platform is quite unique. Think about the number of sessions we have per year, triple-digit million. Triple-digit million of sessions per year. This is something. OK, we shift the gear. Advanced solution. Advanced solution, again, very clear portfolio, five franchises. I mentioned it, lab water, biomonitoring. Lab water is close to my heart. Yes, Pete. DXRM, CDMO, CTS, very technology portfolios and extremely differentiated. From an innovation point of view, we want to make sure that we'll continue to launch new products every year to keep our differentiation. Karen is helping us a lot. It's true for lab water, it's true for biomonitoring, but it's also true for DXRM. When we talk about new product solutions on DXRM, it's more kind of partnership, customized solutions for our products. We want to tailor for complex needs.
Very often, our customers are coming to us with asks, very clear asks. We want to make sure that we have the right fit for purpose on an infrastructure point of view. With no further ado, Mr. Paulo, please come on stage and tell us more about advanced solutions.
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm very excited to be with you. Cannot be more energized. Thank you, JC, for the opportunity. Thank you to the members of the Executive Board and Belén. Advanced solutions. Maybe we spend 30 seconds on myself, right, very quickly. I have a background in economics and finance. I was a banker my former life before joining Merck. I joined the M&A department at the very beginning of my career in 2008, participating in several acquisitions and divestitures. Namely, the most relevant, if you want, was the Millipore one. I moved to P&L responsibility across several geographies, mainly in healthcare. I worked in Asia, I worked in the Middle East, I worked in Africa, part of Europe. I moved to the U.S. to lead the Latin American operations.
I had a stint as a Chief Transformation Officer in the company to actually overlook the efficiency and effectiveness of our group functions. I moved back two and a half years ago to the United States, leading under the leadership of Sebastian, the commercial Americas for process solutions. I built this customer centricity in life science. I enjoy the track record of transformation and growth. Thank you again for the opportunity to lead the advanced solutions. Advanced solutions. If discovery, as Anand was saying, solution is about catalog products, our advanced solutions business unit is actually about tailored solutions to our customers. It's about having a common denominator of how we approach our customers. It's not about low ticket, small ticket, and high volume.
It's really about having a relatively larger ticket, having a technical sales, a team of experts that often co-develop, actually, the solution with the customer, and that creates long-lasting partnerships. If you want something that I've learned quite extensively during my stint in process solutions, not very different. If the five franchises somehow will have an identity on itself, the common denominator is really going to be the go-to-market approach, which is exactly the rationale for the establishment of this business unit. Here, I provide a very simple example that could be many, where actually this go-to-market approach is actually set to position the whole business unit for sustainable growth.
If you look at one example of a pharma customer, for example, a pharma customer will benefit from our tailored approach in biomonitoring for microbiological detection with our MilliFlex portfolio and the bioburden testing and everything, creating a longer-term partnership for that kind of solution. At the same time, our BioReliance brand can very much have the same approach in order to create a solution for their testing needs. I can say the same for our lab water business with our MilliCube platform, where again, we would be offering to the same customer with the same absolutely go-to-market approach, which, I repeat, is going to be the common denominator of this business unit, and therefore unlocking the value. To be super clear, this is not about synergies, this is about unlocking values and positioning this business unit for long and sustainable growth. As simple as that.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Paulo. Just to give you some hints, we have a unique expertise from a sales point of view. Last night, after the dinner, I was asking our HR colleagues, and thank you, Khadija, how many of our sales reps in advanced solutions tomorrow that have a PhD? Guess the number. OK, above 30%. The level of expertise is extremely high. I also asked a question about how long our sales organization has been with us and how many trainings they receive per year to stay on top of what they do. I won't disclose the number, but I was very pleased by your support, Khadija. The number of trainings they received, not only for lab water, but for the other portfolio, it's quite amazing. Process solutions, quickly, our grand jewel, focused on pharma and biotech.
To answer one of the questions from last night, most of our business is done with maps. Sebastian, feel free to provide more information later on. We want to continue to drive innovation. Innovation, again, organic innovation or inorganic innovation. We have a strong portfolio, a strong core, but we could expand. The JSR acquisition from yesterday's announcement is a good example. We want to have a holistic customer value. I mentioned that our key customer represents roughly 60%- 70% of our sales. Yes, we want to have a unique interaction with them. Finally, portfolio optimization, capacity, regionalization is very important. Sebastian will touch on later on. You will see that over the last few years, we push quite a lot region for region concepts. If you think about single use, for example, today we have a site in Danvers, USA, to cover Americas.
We have Molsheim to cover EMEA, and we have Wuxi to go to Asia. The same is true with the recent announcement on filtration with Blarney. We have a site in the US in Jaffre, and now we'll have a site in Europe to cover Europe and Asia. Region for region is something that we are tackling very seriously, and we are making good strides. I go to the next slide, talking about our mid-term growth ambition. We say mid-single digit to high single digit. High single digit, I have in mind not 8%, but 9% for the comments done earlier today. In terms of growth, process solutions, we stick to what we said, no change. I'm confident in it, around 10%. We believe that the market has normalized. We don't talk anymore about destocking. We are very confident with our order book. It's strong.
We are also very confident in the quality of the information we have from a reporting point of view internally. We feel good on process solution. Advanced solution, we expect to go mid-single digit to high single digit. We think and we believe we are one of the top players in lab water, biomonitoring, DXRM, and CTS. CDMO, you ask a lot of questions. We are going to do our homework. I ask it will be one of the first tasks of Paulo, and I'm pretty sure that this afternoon you will ask again on CDMO, like you did last night. Overall, this advanced solution business unit, we have a differentiated portfolio. We have a unique go-to-market, and we expect to grow at or slightly above market as well. Finally, discovery solution, strong e-platform commerce, omnichannel, two large portfolios, biology and chemistry.
We expect this business to grow low single digit. In a nutshell, this is, let's say, the slice and dice of our ambition in terms of mid-term growth for life science. With that, I would like to ask Karen to come on stage, and she's going to talk a little bit more about innovation. Thank you very much.
All right. Hello, everybody. As JC already described, portfolio leadership is one of the key pillars of our strategy execution. I'm Karen Madden. I'm the Chief Technology Officer of our Life Science business. I'm so excited to be here again, back here at the Capital Markets Day, to tell you a little bit more about how we're approaching and the progress that we're making on our innovation strategy, and importantly, on sparking discovery. Innovation is very central, and it's central to our efforts and what we're doing here. Hopefully, you guys, or some of you here remember from previous years, that we've introduced our five strategic innovation vectors. These innovation vectors are really at the convergence of our customer needs, science, and technological and market trends. In fact, some of these markets are growing at 15%+. I can't remember who asked the question earlier.
It was somewhere over here, who talked about our future-proofing and where we're investing to future-proof our organization and our Life Science business. There are some of the areas, and hopefully, they're not surprising to you as you see them there. Then there's our core. I want to be very clear that we're not forgetting about our core. We have very strong market-leading positions within our core in areas related to separation, cell culture, process materials, biological, chemical reagents, biomonitoring, and so on and so on. You may ask, how are we making these investments and balancing them between the core and some of these newer, higher growth areas? We have a very rigorous portfolio management framework in place where we're balancing our investments both for the near term as well as for the longer term.
We're doing that not only within each of our different business units, but also across Life Science as well. In addition to our own organic investments that we're making and driving innovation with the over 1,300 scientists and R&D and engineer professionals that we have within our Life Science organization, we're using what I like to call other innovation levers that we have at our disposal. One really important one that you've heard, JC, I think you used the word partnership quite a few times up there, is partnerships. That includes distribution partnerships, co-development partnerships, and longer-term strategic partnerships. You may have seen that over the summer we did a strategic partnership with Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, which is very close to one of our very key hubs in the United States. Importantly, Washington University is one of the premier institutes in the U.S. doing incredible research.
This really complements or builds off of the relationship that we have and that we did the year before with KAIST, which is one of the leading institutes in South Korea as well. You are going to see more from us in partnerships. The other thing that we take advantage of is that we work with our MVentures colleagues. This is Merck KGaA's venture investment equity arm here that works to do strategic investments on behalf of the organization, not just life science, but also on behalf of healthcare and electronics, I must say. We are working with them to identify opportunities to invest in emerging early companies that are really at the cutting edge of some of these new technologies, further helping us future-proof our business for the future. M&A, and I'm not going to talk about it.
Sebastian's going to talk about the most recent one, but that's another really important tool in our toolkit to driving innovation. I want to give you an example now. This example that I'm going to give you is at the intersection of two of our strategic innovation vectors. Of course, this is around next-gen biology and our lab of the future here. This is a story of how we're expanding and building on our very, very strong core in cell culture, in 2D cell culture. 2D cell culture has been used for a very, very long time in drug discovery and development and preclinical development, importantly. Why do we need to move to 3D cell culture? Let's start with our customers. Our customers need this. It's very, very clear that the technologies that exist today are not good enough for them to predict human biology, to understand human biology.
Oh, by the way, a lot of those studies right now use a lot of animals for this preclinical testing. It is very important that we have these new models going forward. How have we built and expanded this over the past year? The first, which was one of the levers, and Jean-Charles Wirth mentioned it earlier, is that we acquired the hub organoids. What this allowed us to do is to get some very strong, differentiated, IP-protected access to patient-derived organoids, or PDOs. These are really important because they've been shown with a lot of studies that they're more predictive of that outcome, and they're not using animals, which is terrific. The other thing that we've done to further future-proof us a little bit more into the future, and Anand mentioned this too, is moving now to organs on a chip.
That is taking these patient-derived and other organoids, putting them on a semiconductor chip that has sensors built in and microfluidics so that you can do more sophisticated studies, and the models generate even more data, and they become even more predictive. We're doing that in collaboration now with IMEC, which is one of the leading semiconductor manufacturers, producers, and researchers in the world. Earlier this summer too, we did a partnership with OpenTrons. What does OpenTrons bring us? OpenTrons brings us automation capabilities. We're automating a wide range of biological assays, including some of our cell cultures assays here using this robot. I can tell you, I don't know how many scientists are there. Maybe this isn't the group to ask the question, but I'm going to do it anyway. Being a scientist, I can tell you, I wish I would have had this type of technology here too.
Importantly, the digital enablement and the AI that's built into this robot is incredible. It allows you to generate a lot more data, more reliably, more reproducibly. Of course, data is the food for AI. I want to give you another example here. This example, again, is related to our lab of the future and automation and robotics. Importantly, this was done in very, very close collaboration with one of our pharmaceutical customers. They came to us with a problem to solve, saying, we're doing all this testing a little bit in that lab. We have all our people pipetting and moving bottles around and trying to track samples that are coming in. Wouldn't it be great if you could build us an automated system? Working very, very closely with them, we were able to design this system to do biomonitoring.
You can see it ticks many of the boxes that I just described. It's fully automated. There's very tight data integration and sample tracking in here. It's modular, so it can go into different types of labs, big labs, smaller labs. Very importantly, it's regulatory compliant and GXP ready, which is super important in this particular application. Next slide. There we go. To wrap it all up here or bring it home, I just want to tell you that at Life Science, we feel really good about our innovation strategy. Importantly, there is no real innovation without that impact. Impact for our customers, impact for our patients ultimately, but then also our employees and all of our shareholders as well. We measure our innovation by a number of different metrics, but a few are on here.
We know and we see that when we launch a new product that solves a customer problem, we get good market traction. As Belén Garijo said too in one of her slides here, every opportunity we get, we are trying and looking to provide a greener alternative product. You can see here we're now at 4,000, going to 10%, as Belén pointed out. We do this because design for sustainability is very tightly integrated into all of our R&D processes. Of course, we are truly innovating, right? Our great scientists and engineers are patenting and producing great patents that are helping protect our great inventions that we have and also to help provide differentiation to what we're doing. I think most importantly is the recognition that we're getting externally from our customers and industry associations here.
I'm just showing two up here, and Sebastian's going to talk about a few more when he comes on stage. I want to thank you very much for your interest, your engagement in this, and I'm going to turn it over to Sebastian. Thank you.
Good morning. I'm between you and lunch. Welcome to the Process Solutions deep dive. If you're not super excited after listening to JC and my colleagues, back at your seat for the Process Solutions section. As JC mentioned, we have three strategies in Life Science. It's all about portfolio leadership, customer experience, and operational excellence. I will walk you through this, how we're executing with practical examples in my business in Process Solutions. Portfolio leadership is all about selling the actual portfolio we have that is highly differentiated, but also how we bring innovation both with the organic R&D we're doing and also with the bold acquisitions we're doing. Customer experience is how we take our customer journey to the next level, not only on the on-time in full deliveries, but also really focusing on the needs of pharma, CDMOs, and biotechs of the future.
Finally, operational excellence—I'm sorry, it's coming out of COVID, right? All the deep learning we had in the last few years is really making sure our supply chain brings that supply resiliency and region-for-region strategy that Merck KGaA has been deploying in the last few years. Let's go deeper now in each one of these. Next slide, please. Let's start with portfolio leadership. Let me start saying something super clear. We have today a very solid portfolio. We have solutions and products that help our customers to develop, make, purify, formulate, and assure life-saving drugs. We do this in traditional novel modalities as well as small molecules. We have a beautiful portfolio in upstream process chemicals, single-use and integrated systems, as well as downstream and filtration. We have one of the broadest portfolios in the industry, and we'll continue to invest and develop that.
We do this with the highest standards of quality and regulatory, something that is super critical in our industry. It's not only the product itself, it's how you deliver the product. If we go to the next page, we continue to innovate. Karen mentioned two launches we did a couple of years ago that received great recognition from the market: our NPREDICT technology in upstream that uses AI to create a solution for our customers, and also the ADC Mobius bioreactor. Here you have three new innovations we launched this year. First, in our single-use and system platform, which is tied to the manufacturing of the future trend and innovation vector we're following, it's a modular automated sampling technology that provides real-time online measurements of critical process parameters and quality attributes at any process scale.
This is for actual mAbs and traditional modalities, as well as new novel modalities, really helping us to continue to develop. We continue to launch software updates in mAbs that give us that real-time and very critical up-to-speed technology that our customers need. If we go to the next one in downstream portfolios, we launched this year our Natrix CH chromatography membrane that provides an efficient, right-sized, and scalable solution for traditional and novel modalities. Here, you're seeing mAbs and VGT and continues to build that momentum we want to win in chromatography that I'll come back to in a minute. Very excited to this launch that we just did and getting very positive traction in the market. Finally, in our upstream portfolio at the right side, you know, cell culture media and chemicals continue to be very, very important for us.
We launched our CHOZN Elite cell line that provides higher production efficiency, enables high production clones, achieving high titers, and finally bringing that titer increase that our customers are needing. Three very clear examples of how we drive organic R&D on top of the two before that Karen was mentioning. That's not all how we execute portfolio leadership. We continue to do bolt-on, very clear, very well-structured acquisitions. Last year, we did Myrus Bio. Belén was mentioning at the beginning that brings a full template approach for VGT. We're very excited. The acquisition is going extremely well. We announced yesterday the intention to acquire the chromatography protein A business from JSR that will help us to boost our chromatography portfolio and really have a very strong position in the market. This asset has two wonderful portfolio families: Asphere A3, launched in 2016, and Asphere A+, launched in 2024.
Again, boosting our innovation capability in chromatography. As you may know, as process solutions experts, the chromatography step in a biopharma production, it's such an important part of the COGS of biologics. That's why we need to continue to have a presence here, and we need to continue to innovate. Protein A is the largest subsegment in chromatography, growing at double digits. It is the right place to invest. Super excited. Let's go to the next strategy, customer experience. This is way more than delivering products on time in full with the real quality. Let me give you two practical examples that process solutions have been living daily for the last years as we speak in front of our customers. First, at the left, we have our MLab collaboration centers.
I'm sure some of you have been in our collaboration centers in some of our sites, whether it's in Boston, China, or different places in Europe. The MLab is our biologic version of what Kai was mentioning for electronics. It's a small-scale biologic factory where our customers can see our products, interact with them, test their own solutions, get trained, and get excited to what can we do together. These assets have been in place for over 20 years. We have already 12 MLabs globally, and we have increased the last two years 60%, the number of customers visiting our MLabs and really interacting with our technology. It's super exciting. Over 3,000 customers visiting us every year, and a customer can be 1 to 200 people in our MLabs. Very excited how we continue to utilize our MLabs.
At the right side, and I was mentioning before, portfolio leadership is not only the right product with the right technology, it's also about quality and regulatory. Improve is a platform we use, we have at our customers' disposal that brings all the regulatory and quality they need real time. They have all the dossiers and all the information they need to really make sure they feel comfortable using our product. We have over two decades of deep knowledge captured in that platform, and this is unique in the industry. If we go to the third strategy, operational excellence. Again, something you keep asking in our different interactions. What are you doing in building resiliency? What are you doing to help your customers? What are you doing for the next pandemic? Operational excellence, how do we live that in process solutions?
It's all about providing a resilient network in our manufacturing. You have at the right side in different colors our three portfolios and a very clean visual of how we are doing this in front of our customers. As of today, we can offer all our customers in region for region sufficiency in all our major portfolios. We continue to expand this moving forward. It's part of the great investment the company is doing in building our in-network and resiliency across the region. At the left side, before we go there, if at the left side, the last examples and the last investments we have done. First, which is China, JC mentioned, single use for China and single use China for the region as well.
Second, our investment in South Korea, Daejeon, €300 million, the largest investment Life Science has done in Asia, that really helped us to bring bioprocessing in Korea for Korea and in Korea for Asia. That will give us a beautiful opportunity to continue to expand our presence in the largest bioreactor capacity growth area of the world. We will be up and running at the end of 2026, early 2027. Finally, the recent inauguration of our new filtration biopharma manufacturing in Blarney, Ireland, gives us the opportunity to produce filtration biopharma products in Europe and sell from Ireland to Europe and from Ireland to the rest of the world. A perfect, timely investment with the geopolitical dynamics we're facing today. Very excited what we have accomplished. Very excited with our multi-year plan investment. Very excited to report back. We're on time delivering what we promised.
We go to the next page, just bringing everything together. Strategies are just strategies if we're not hitting numbers or we're not hitting growth, right? The last four quarters, process solutions have been growing following the promise of the destocking effect that we faced during COVID. Actually, four consecutive quarters of growth. H2 last year, as you can see in the page, 3%- 4% growth. H1 this year, we posted above 10% growth, actually close to 11% growth. We feel confident H2 this year will remain in the same trend, aligned to our mid-term guidance. You can ask why, why you feel confident. A couple of things. Number one, long-term, something you really know super well. There's a very robust global pipeline of molecules coming our way, and we're ready to serve that growth.
This gives us confidence in the mid-long-term growth that we'll see in the bioprocessing industry moving forward. Second, we continue to strengthen our partnership with our customers. We have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly conversations. We know exactly what they need from.
We know demand planning, short, medium, long term, and we know exactly how we can help them in each factor in each portfolio. That collaboration is happening and is really bringing us confidence. Intake more short term, right? We have line of sight and we have line of sight to what we can expect in H2 and the next coming quarters. That gives us confidence to make sure we're delivering on time in full, and we have a good track record of sequential growth. Finally, H1 this year, we saw a convertible book to bill over 1, a metric that you guys track and you guys love. We also track very carefully because it's an indicator of our future growth. Feeling very confident with what we're doing here for H2 and the remaining of the year.
If we go to my last slide, I would like to wrap it up saying three things. Number one, the market fundamentals are intact. Questions we continue to hear from you, from the community, the investor community. The market fundamentals are absolutely intact. We see pattern normalized, customer orders normalized, and we're back to normal in process solutions and continue to grow as we continue to execute our strategy. Our business in process solutions, Merck KGaA, is really set up for success as we continue to execute the three strategies we mentioned. We both in new modalities, traditional modalities, and in small molecules as we continue to grow our innovation engine. Finally, we continue to be laser focused on unpacking our customer needs and to continue to collaborate with our customers. I would like to wrap it up in the last 20 seconds mentioning a story.
We were with JC in Barney in Ireland, you know, having this 45 customer a few weeks ago and they were asking, you know, how can we cooperate with Merck KGaA moving forward? The feedback we got is the following. We love to see filtration biopharma in Europe for Europe, but also we love to see Sebastian at the first factory with 100% sustainability metrics because you're helping us not only with supply resiliency, you're also helping us in pharma to bring a very to hit our sustainability scorecard. Extremely happy to report back. We're very solid in H2 and next year and very solid in the next coming year. With that, I'll pass it to JC to make it home. Thank you.
Thank you, Sebastian. Again, big thank you to Karen. Thank you to Sebastian for providing a kind of deep dive on what we do in innovation and process solutions. Again, warm welcome to Anand and Paolo. As a team, we are going to rock. Go-to-market transformation. Our goal is to strive for growth. In parallel, we want to address some strategically important topics. The first one, innovation. Our goal is to accelerate innovation. Today, we spend roughly 4% of our total net sales in innovation. We want to move up to 5%. With Karen, we have a lot of good ideas. It's about execution. Digitization and platform. Digitization is there. What I mean by digitization, we have already some solutions, i.e., Addison or Cynthia. We are also partnering now, and we just signed an MOU with Siemens to accelerate and leverage their data expertise. What could they bring to us?
We bring the expertise on chemistry and biology, what we could do together. This is digital. This is what we want to do. Also, it's around e-commerce. We are investing heavily in e-commerce. The size of our e-commerce team doubled over the last four years. This is an engine that we'll continue to invest in and make sure that we leverage it. Last, market reach. We want to ensure that we focus the entire organization on customer first. We'll put the customer in the center of what we do. Capacity is, of course, something which is important for us. With that, I would like to move to the next slide. In summary, I feel confident in the future of Life Science. I'm really clear on what should be our strategy, what should be our area of focus, and what are we going to do.
As I said, we will put the customer in the center of what we do. Two, we'll refine and drive innovation and agility. Three, we are going to simplify our processes and structure to be more agile and to better serve our customer. Last, which is the most important, we'll strive for growth. Thank you very much for listening. I'm pretty sure that you will have questions this afternoon. Thank you.
Thank you so much, JC. Thanks to the team. There was just one promise given, which was not true. This is the one that this is the last slot before the lunch break. I am very happy to have here with me for CEO fireside chat, Belén Garijo, Group CEO of Merck KGaA and Deputy Chair of the Executive Board, Kai Beckmann. Please join me on stage. With that, I would love to kick it off with you, Belén. It is for sure not time yet to look back, but let's be frank, it's your last Capital Markets Day with Merck KGaA. How do you feel?
I feel absolutely fully energized, happy to see all our colleagues as every year. I'm sure, you know, and I really look forward to staying in touch for the future. I feel energized to be here today, but I feel even more energized when I look at 2025. I think we have gone through really tough years. I mean, I have been in the industry, as you may know, for more than 35 years. You know, change is a constant. Transformation is tough. Leading this company in the uncertain environment that we have been leading the company has been a privilege and also a challenge. I am really happy that 2025 is allowing us to deliver on much of what we have promised. First, growth, profitable growth, accelerating growth. Second, the acquisition of SpringWorks.
I have discussed with many of you, and I think you are extremely unfair in not giving us value for that acquisition, which is going to be absolutely critical to the long term of sustainability of our healthcare pillar. Yes, Pete, don't laugh because it's true. Actually, I'm holding your word because you said our share price would raise, and this didn't happen. Anyway, it's not only the acquisition of SpringWorks, but I can tell you one of the most difficult transactions of my whole career has been divesting Surface Solutions. You have to agree with me, Kai, on that one. It was really tough.
No agreement.
For many different reasons that we are not going to share. This we can share in a bar or a drink or something. You know, highly energizing having transitioned to the next generation of leader at the Executive Board. That makes me incredibly proud. Having seen people that I have been working with for 14 years, now being colleagues of mine and Kai at the Board is really a tremendous pride for me. Having integrated people at the Board with the Chief Political Officer, with the Chief People Officer, what am I thinking? With the Chief People Officer, Khadija Benamada, to the Executive Board is, you know, tremendously energizing. The most important thing is what we discussed last night. For those of you who spoke to us last night, you already know that continuity is essential for the company. We really think longer term.
This is something that we have been planning for the family and us have been planning for many years. You know, now working even closer to Kai, we are going to focus on driving execution of our priorities, making sure that we keep the company on track. Most importantly, you know, that we keep this healthy and highly attractive portfolio operating on high margins, up and running. Right? Very happy, very happy to be here and very happy with talking to my successor and my deputy.
Thanks, Belén. Kai, great to have you here with us as well with your two hats. We made a joke about this earlier, but it's important to see this role. Let's start with a personal note as well. How do you feel today?
I'm fine. I'm truly excited. I think I can't really hide that, the excitement on taking on that important role. It means a lot to me. To be kind of leading this company next year onwards, then after many years in the company, means certainly a lot. You can feel the energy in the room by everyone on stage on what's possible. I've seen so multiple metamorphoses of this company over the many years we have changed over and over again. It shows the capabilities that this company has developed to not leave things as they are. We change because there is a need to go forward with the environment changing, the markets changing, technology changing. We have demonstrated that we can do that quite consistently over a long period of time. We have built capabilities that stay kind of true to the roots of the company.
We're not just changing for a change's sake. We have built really deeply rooted capabilities across different dimensions. I always remind everyone on Merck KGaA's quality promise in the middle of the 19th century, the first in the world. Every business benefits from that all across life science, healthcare, and electronics. To be asked to lead that company is an enormous opportunity. We are ready for continuing on that path.
Kai, you have a long track record at Merck KGaA, as everybody knows, right? We learned today that you were also launching Erbitox in Southeast Asia, right? This was back then. You were really an important part of integrations of Millipore and Sigma-Aldrich, and you helped to transform electronics into a semiconductor solutions provider, demonstrating both foresight and execution. What are you bringing and what are your strengths for your future role?
I think to have seen every corner of the company definitely is very helpful because some people would say a company is complex. There are so many different things. To have seen all these things helps in shaping those different areas for the future. When I took over performance materials, everyone said, you know, you have worked more on life science. Why do you do this one? I was involved in Millipore, Sigma Aldrich, and even in times when we were building kind of the VWR-related lab business. That has so many commonalities that we have across the different areas. If we use these commonalities, if we use the capabilities we have built even more, then I think we can do miracles. We stay true to the core of the company. We are not just doing random things. We are doing focused things like Belén shared.
We do them for a reason. All the technologies, purity, membranes, quality management, contamination control, it spans across all different parts of the company in pharma, how we, in life science, do APIs, pharma manufacturing, R&D support in pharma. We see that with the ADCs now spanning across life science and healthcare. I think it's a real science and tech company leading across all different dimensions. The most important part, I repeat that, and I may be very repetitive on this one, customer first. It's all about starting from the endpoint. There has to be somebody willing to spend money on things that we do. If we start missing that point, if we stop focusing on the customer, we will lose. This is why customer first is every presentation focused on customer first. That is like the fuel that at the end fuels our growth. Customer needs are essential.
Needless to say, I think, at the end, a CEO is not a content expert. He's a strong leader that has to really drive the company and the team and the business to the right place. Particularly in this company, the notion of being an enterprise leader and thinking beyond your sector is something that we have, is the way we have operated the company. I have really no doubt that with your technology expertise and system-level views, it can only get better, science and technology. It's really not a matter of industry expertise. We have many other examples. As we were talking last night of other competitors, which are actually even funny.
It's funny.
It's the one you told me lately.
are even more colorful examples worldwide. On that note, finally, it does make sense to have computer science as a background in today's world. When I joined the company, people said computer science, the chemicals company, why that? Nowadays, nobody asks that question anymore. Sometimes twists are quite nice.
Kai, let's come back to strategy execution. Some would say Merck KGaA takes really time to transition CEOs compared to peers. How are you approaching the next month?
Do you refer to the 36 years? That is a long journey. No, that was exactly not what I was looking at. Taking time, spending time is maybe the right notion. You know, you've got to reach out to meet customers. That's what you've got to do. Do that under CEO Electronics and to see a Life Science customer, ask them what's on their mind, seems quite awkward. You have to have some legitimate basis for those conversations. The same is, when I was heading HR for a couple of years, then to visit all our sites was definitely easy. It was good to talk to all our talents around the globe. Again, as a sector head, this is a bit more limited. While we share, of course, responsibility for the full company, still some mandate is helpful.
This is why, of course, the normal journey, like it was for Stefan and Belén, is to give the successor some time to get a full overview. That's important that we do that. Customer visits, absolutely essential to understand. This is not just somewhere in between. You have to understand from their executives, their leaders, what they have in mind. Second is, it's always important. It's not only in a transition important. You did that through the course of your term. It's important we do it at a transition as well, looking in the mirror. Understanding an outside-in perspective on the company is important. Looking in the mirror, seeing the deficiencies, I'm talking from my shaving experience in the morning, seeing the deficiencies and understanding how you get better is an ongoing effort, especially in the context of transition.
The third one is, working with the future leaders in starting to build the right plan for the future. Belén, thank you for the kind of openness in already allowing to prepare for the future. This shows how smooth transition is. That is the third component. This you cannot do overnight. If you did that overnight, it's not good. That's where we spend time as a team and where I spend time, of course, in my future role.
Great. Belén, why make the CEO transition announcement three weeks prior to the CMD?
That is a question that I have answered before because, I mean, we have made the announcements, organizational announcements before the CMD at times. Once again, the first and most important reason or very important reason is that we can focus on what matters, which is answering your questions and giving you perspectives on where we are at the business and really taking the CMD for what it is, which is discussing performance and future. We couldn't miss the opportunity to have our 150 senior leaders from all around the world sitting in Darmstadt for three days in order to be able to celebrate that moment, right? Unfortunately for me, I was nominated in the middle of COVID. I was a COVID CEO, remember? I said that at the beginning.
Stefan and I had to inform everybody, looking at the black screen because we didn't yet have access to the connectivity that we have today. It allowed us to be live with our teams, which is important. I think the teams appreciated that we were able to speak, that the family was with us making the announcement. It was a very important moment for the company. Overall, anytime is good. We act from a position of strength. Once again, with the new Executive Board, we have been really working together very closely and onboarding everybody. I mentioned the addition of the Chief People Officer to the board. This is speaking of how important it is for us keeping our focus on people and talent who at the end make everything.
All those elements and reassuring our teams of stability and reassuring you of stability and continuity triggered the announcement of my succession a few weeks ago. Of course, it was the second step of a sequence which was initiated in February when we announced the GM members. Very well coordinated, very well structured, tons of clarity, continuity.
Understood, Belén. Let's talk strategy execution during a leadership transition. How should investors think about continuity, Belén?
Look, I think continuity is really inherent to the way we operate. I mean, it is a false premise, you know, that a CEO is making decisions on his own, right? At this Executive Board, we make strategic decisions as a board, right? This, of course, is giving us two hats. One is the hat of the sector head, and I have been before also a sector head. Most importantly, the enterprise hat, what we call the GL hat. I can tell you, Helene bought us a very pinky, shiny hat with the GL so that we can use it from time to time. More seriously, this second role that we have at the board level is super important because this is allowing us to make the critical decisions for the company, capital allocation, M&A, shaping a strategy, all this together.
This is the essence which ensures continuity because Kai has been part of that for many, many years together with us.
Kai, how do you look at it?
I think the team aspect of leading the company is absolutely essential. The team has to take decisions not by defending their own territories, if you would use that word, by understanding where does the company move towards. This can be to the perceived disadvantage of your own area of responsibility. We have done that on and on again. We had to take decisions where, of course, in your sector perspective, you would have probably argued, couldn't we do it this way? No, we did it the other way because it was better for creating value for the company overall. I think this is the essential part of the teamwork that we have in the GL, as we call it, the Executive Board. That's how in the transition, we will utilize the same with the team that we have built for the future.
You alluded to last February and the announcements. We have now established a new team working on my succession in Electronics. We will have May 1st then kind of a full team available and capable of driving the next decisions for the company going in the future.
Kai, looking ahead, what's your vision for the three sectors?
It would have been awkward if three weeks after the announcement, now we would present you a new vision. If that was the case, we had probably offered a spotlight session, Kai's vision for today. That doesn't mean I have no vision. Let's come to that once we get there. I think it's absolutely essential that we do things that we just said in the transition properly, that we kind of have a profound vision developed that holds water. At the end of the day, everyone knows strategy is about choices. It's good to have choices. You said it earlier in your presentation, Belén, and Helene has had it on the portfolio chart. Having choices is good. Having no choices is bad. Having choices and taking the right decision is important. That is what we have to work for.
Important is that vision is based on a company that masters the most important sciences in today's world: biology, chemistry, physics. Meanwhile, microelectronics, computer science, we have to add working on artificial intelligence, not only enabling it on the outside, but using it. It was on the chart. That is a sweet spot for the future. Some people in the world have to turn data into real stuff. We feel pretty much in a good position to do that. That is staying true to yourself, to your roots, using capabilities that the company has not only in peripheral knowledge, but core knowledge, driving these aspects into the future is a key part of a future vision. What the content will be, that we will then discuss once we have worked on it in the transition time. We drive it as we did in the past transitions.
We continue on a very successful transformation path that the company has undergone for, meanwhile, one and a half decades. I'm feeling extremely excited about the opportunity now to look into that with the new team. We will definitely find a way to further create value and to further grow the company.
Thanks, Kai. Belén, any final thoughts?
Sure. First of all, congratulations, Kai.
Thank you.
am really happy that we can, as part of that continuity that we have spoken about, we have a Merck CEO taking the news, the CEO role as of May next year. I have gone through the same transition as a sector CEO. We know what we have to do. Over the years, we have been both part of the transformation, the huge transformation of this company. By the way, talking about transformation, I used to have a boss who used to say, or I had a boss that used to say, you have to transform the company before you love the company, before you fall in love with the company. I think we have been in love with the company and transformed the company very efficiently. We both really are true Merckians and will do whatever it takes to make this a tremendously seamless transition. Why not?
A fun one. We are really, really in a very good spot. I believe the future is bright.
Very good.
So.
Thank you both. Excellent, clear strategy, continuity in leadership, and a relentless focus on execution, if I would summarize. Now we come to the promised lunch break, finally. For the ones here based in Darmstadt, we will go up to the sixth floor in a moment. For the virtual participants, we are very happy to have you back at around 1:30 P.M. CET. We will make a break here now and then very happy to see you all at the lunch break.
Thank you.
Looking for another lifeline 'cause I can't do this on my own no more. Something 'bout you, baby, is so divine. I look at you and I see evermore. Looking for another lifeline 'cause I can't do this on my own no more. Something 'bout you, baby, is so divine. I look at you and I see. I'm screaming down your tummy. Pure like the snow. Feeling so low key. I get a fear of your glow. I fear your glow. Sweeter than your tummy. Pure like the snow. Feeling so low key. I get a fear of your glow. Sweeter than your tummy. Pure like the snow. Feeling so low key. I get a fear of your glow. Sweeter than your tummy. Pure like the snow. Feeling so low key. I get a fear of your glow. Sweeter than your tummy. Pure like the snow. Feeling so low key.
I get a fear of your glow. Over and over. I can never get enough. I can never get enough. Over and over. I don't want to take too much. I don't want to say too much. Over and over. I can never get enough. I can never get enough. Over and over. I don't want to say too much. I don't want to say too much. Over and over. I can never get enough. I can never get enough. Over and over. I don't want to say too much. I don't want to say too much. Over and over. I can never get enough. I can never get enough. Over and over. I don't want to say too much. I don't want to say too much. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Show me love.
Do
you?
When you're down and feeling like you're lonely, someone else out there feels just like you. Go outside and be kind to a stranger. Watch what happens every time you do, yeah. When you're down and feeling like you're lonely, someone else out there feels just like you. Go outside and be kind to a stranger. Watch what happens every time you do, yeah. When you're down and feeling like you're lonely, someone else out there feels just like you. Go outside and be kind to a stranger. Watch what happens every time you do, yeah. When you're down and feeling like you're lonely, someone else out there feels just like you. Go outside and be kind to a stranger. Watch what happens every time you do, yeah.
You were everything to me, my worst nightmare. I wasn't expecting you like anything, anything. You cheated me, yeah, cheated me. It was like the best friends of all, damn thing, damn thing. I gave you everything, even my heart and brain. I wasn't expecting you like anything, anything. You were cheating, yeah, I'm feeling. It was like my best friends of all, damn thing, damn thing. You were everything, even my heart and brain. I wasn't expecting you like anything, anything. You cheated me, yeah, I'm feeling. It was like my best friends of all, damn thing, damn thing. I gave you everything, even my heart and brain. I wasn't expecting you like anything, anything. You cheated me, yeah, cheated me. It was like my best friends of all, damn thing, damn thing. You were everything, even my heart and brain. I wasn't expecting you like anything, anything.
You cheated me, yeah, I'm feeling. It was like my best friends of all, damn thing, damn thing.
Don't tell me a story. Bye-bye, my middle of song. 'Cause I forget my worries. When I'm with you, I feel so strong. Don't tell me a story. Bye-bye, my middle of song. 'Cause I forget my worries. When I'm with you, I feel so strong. Don't tell me a story. Bye-bye, my middle of song. 'Cause I forget my worries. When I'm with you, I feel so strong. Don't tell me a story. Bye-bye, my middle of song. 'Cause I forget my worries. When I'm with you, I feel so strong. Don't tell me a story. Bye-bye, my middle of song. 'Cause I forget my worries. When I'm with you, I feel so strong.
Our little time we spent together, in our prime, we were birds of a feather, different kind. We were lightning through the pain. We were never once so vain. Cut the cord that kept us connected. Blacken out the mirror where your light once reflected. All of the love from up above. We used to fit like a glove. I still think about the youth that only exists in my brain. Nothing ever stays the same. Guess it's just a shame with no one to blame. Our little time we spent together, in our prime, we were birds of a feather, different kind. We were lightning through the pain. We were never once so vain. Cut the cord that kept us connected. Blacken out the mirror where your light once reflected. All of the love from up above. We used to fit like a glove.
I still think about the youth that only exists in my brain. Nothing ever stays the same. Guess it's just a shame with no one to blame.
Welcome back, everyone, from lunch. I hope you enjoyed a good lunch and a small break. Also, to the virtual participants, I hope you could enjoy your break as well. We are on time, nearly five minutes. With that, we come to the final Business Spotlight session of today. It's about health care. I'm happy to announce Danny Bar-Zohar, CEO of the Health Care sector, and his team to come on stage in a moment. We will focus today on the future of health care, on our new rare diseases franchise, and also how we deliver transformative solutions to patients worldwide. With that, Danny, please join me on stage.
Thanks a lot. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Florian. I hope that you are well carbohydrated. If you're too much carbohydrated, we're giving free samples of Glucophage there. Yeah, it works quite nicely on also another aspect. Look, I'm super excited to be here with you. I asked myself, what is that thing that actually wakes me up or keeps me up in the morning for a new day in the office? You know, with R&D scientists, with commercial folks, with access experts, manufacturing. What excites me most about health care is that spark. I'm collecting sparks from eyes of people because each and every one of them can talk about the impact. As an ex-patient with a malignant disease, as an ex-physician, nobody's perfect. As a pharma leader, I'm inspired. I'm truly inspired by the strength of science that there is here, there is out there. It's geared towards creating, improving, and prolonging lives.
That's our goal. Our purpose, that's what drives me as one for patients. The clear vision to make this an innovation powerhouse and create value. Together, they define who we are and actually the future that we are building for Merck Health Care. Caring as humans, thinking like scientists, taking decisions like investors. That's the tension that we need to be able to hold in order to write the next chapter for Merck Health Care. Yes, you know, I come from Merck. As compared to the distinguished GL members here, I'm a baby, only five years in the company. Anyhow, I took the time to talk to people, talk to myself, reflect on what we can build on and what are the watch outs. This is not to be judgmental about previous decisions or previous strategies because, hey, you cannot argue with 21 consecutive growth quarters, quarter after quarter.
You cannot argue with that. Still, having a sober look, you see first a recent buildup of rare diseases. This is not the place to praise rare diseases now. I'll do it later. It means that we, as a team, as a company, can identify opportunities and act on them and make the right pivots. Obviously, we are super diversified. We touch many disease areas. We touch many geographies. Our ability to catch opportunities, being able to understand different markets, so different markets, their access is supreme. It's actually disproportionately high to our size. OK, whether it's with a 60-year-old drug like Glucophage or a more innovative drug like Mavenclad, we know how to reach these markets. Talking about rare diseases, with this capability, we can lock a lot of value. We're also super disciplined when it comes to the company culture.
It translates to excellence in manufacturing and keeping our gross margins, as well as other line items that drive profitability. You see that quarter after quarter. We have a clear gap in the depth and the breadth of our pipeline. The engine has improved quite a bit, but we need more fuel, and I would say of different, maybe higher quality of the fuel. We also have a lot to do when it comes to how we are set up for sourcing innovation from the outside. Going a little bit deeper, and this is very reflective, I believe that we have also been acting under the impression that areas that brought us success in the past, large population, solid tumors like colorectal cancer, head and neck, or multiple sclerosis, would be those areas that will bring us success in the future.
It's a good thought, but actually, these areas harbor a lot of risk, biological risk, R&D risk, commercial risk. I feel that to some extent, we fell in this success trap or bias that hindered us. Last but not least, several of our brands, you know that, are at different stages of maturity of their lifecycle. They need to be managed as such, and this will require modifications in our setup to avoid a situation where this diversity that I spoke to seconds ago becomes a complexity. I don't want it to happen. I will mention some principles later on. Let's move to the next one. You may hear, or you may want to hear, what will stay, what will change. Simply put, what's going to stay, I'm nothing short of 100% committed to a global specialty innovator strategy. That's ticked. I talked about an innovation powerhouse.
Second one, we'll continue leveraging on the resilience and the diversification of our cash-generating CM&E and fertility businesses to financially feed this innovation moving forward. You heard about the financial ambitions of mid-single-digit long-term growth, which will need to be achieved only by innovation. There are three things that I see clearly changing in the months and the years to come. First, rare diseases. Rare diseases will become a strategic pillar for us, and we will expand on it. We started with PMI. We then moved for SpringWorks Therapeutics and are looking at other rare benign or rare malignant tumors. Now, overall, though, some of these benign tumors, and we spoke about it yesterday, behave from an unmet need perspective, homogeneity of patients' perspective, value potential perspective, regulatory. They behave like other chronic rare diseases. In some cases, these rare diseases fly under the radar of other pharma.
It's very attractive for us. Second, regardless of whether rare or non-rare, because we will operate in both. I just mentioned innovation because, you know, obviously, innovation needs to be courageous. At the same time, it needs, it must be disciplined and humble. We need to have this healthy mix of big and small bets. This mix should be monitored continuously on the basis of, first and foremost, data and then capital intensity and landscape changes. We need to continue looking at that. Put it more clearly. We will avoid, I will avoid, together with David and the rest of the team, locking disproportionately high amounts of capital to our size and our budget to a single asset, as theoretically amazing it could be. There are mechanisms for doing that. We will do that.
Last but not least, we heard that, I heard that under certain circumstances, maybe given the binary nature of the events, maybe we could have been managing expectations a little bit better, both internally and externally, I would say. Yeah, both on R&D and commercial. I hear you. I hear you loud and clear. What you'll get from me, not just transparency, but also a lot of clarity. I'm on it. Now, where would attention be focused? What kind of attention will we put? What you can actually take away from this cheerful slide, it's here, sorry, when it comes to the portfolio of marketed drugs in all TAs, you see there are a mix of products in yellow at different stages of their lifecycle. For these, our approach would mainly be to manage them for cash.
There should be focused investments for growth when it comes, for example, to selected LCM activities for CM&E or Pergoveris or Erbitox. Overall, the investment intensity will be quite modest. Rare diseases, strategic pillar in which we will consciously invest for growth and for leadership. External innovation, internal innovation, data generation, we want to be, and we will be ahead of the competition. Third one, I treat the pipeline, whether it is in neurology, immunology, oncology, rare, non-rare, I treat it as a different beast. It's a mix here. As I said, I will be very intentional in terms of investment intensity because this is our future. Two important things. First, I still see at least 50% of our future launches coming from external innovation. You'll see more activity on that.
The second one, we will be looking at all creative inbound and outbound activities in order to manage the composition of the pipeline for the right risk profile. Let's talk about growth. In the midterm, you heard Belén and Helene, we are talking about low to mid-single-digit growth. The rare disease pillar will be the major contributor to this ambition with double-digit growth. What needs to happen here is executing in OXIVIO when it comes to deepening the U.S. penetration and, of course, launching outside of the U.S. We're making great progress. Same for Gomekli and same for Pimecotinib that we are right now accelerating towards approvals, first in China, in TGCT. We must not miss a beat there. For CM&E and fertility, we're overall foreseeing mid-single-digit growth. This will require continued flawless commercial execution. Our MS and solid tumor oncology will be declining.
Let's switch to the next slide for a little bit more color. We spoke about OXIVIO and Gomekli when we announced the deal. OXIVIO, around blockbuster potential. Gomekli, neo-blockbuster potential. This stays. We are not changing that. It's the right time to say for Pimecotinib, for this brand, while we are approaching approvals, that this brand has a near $500 million peak sales potential globally. That's clear. One important thing to mention, each one of these exciting products has competition in the class or will have very soon. There is no intention, from my perspective, to fly blind here and to assume that these numbers will make it. We are doing scenario planning. I'm not going to expose all scenarios here, but we are. Data generation plans and other activities to ensure, to secure that we're going to meet these numbers. Pergoveris here is under maximized potential for a reason.
Pergoveris is a 20% five-year CAGR. It's an exciting drug, huge potential. It's an innovative drug. It's growing in Europe, in Latam, in the Middle East, and Africa very nicely. The good news for expansion is that we are expecting approval in China for Pergoveris at the end of the year. We have a clear plan for Japan, clinical plan. We are making our efforts in order to bring it to the United States. With Erbitox, there are clearly, I would say, two major forces. One of them is the upward force in terms of expansions with the BRAF mutations, the Beacon and the Breakwater, which are super exciting. On the other hand, we will continue seeing competition, tough competition from the non-comparable biologics in China. We underestimated them.
Towards the end of the midterm period, I do expect, or at least we need to expect, the entrance of ribaventin, amiventin, and colorectal cancer. Overall, I would see it with these forces broadly stable to slightly declining. Gonalef, most of the recent decline driven by price cuts in the U.S. It's not volume. The market fundamentals are, I would say, very, very healthy. After a reset in performance, we broadly expect stability. Mavenclad, as we said a couple of times, still the base case, October 2026, LOE in the U.S. August 2027, starting in August 2027 in Europe, it will be much more gradual. We have, to Helene's point, for every single country that sells Mavenclad, a plan on what to do when in terms of investments. That's one. Bavencio, the decline is clear. It will stabilize only in outer years due to the Pazov-Keytruda competition.
We also have a very, very clear plan there. Move it aside. Let's move to the longer-term view. Without getting into the exact slopes of growth in the long term for each franchise, because it's purely hypothetical, it's clear, super clear, that in order to secure a long-term growth of mid-single digit, we must act on filling the pipeline today. We have our own nuggets and pattern, CCAM5, Cladribine and MG. It's not enough. We'll continue building internally and externally. We need to increase the number of shots on goal. As I said, have a much more controlled mix of bigger and smaller bets. Towards 2029, 2030, we need to have around five ongoing phase three studies in order to fuel this growth curve. I spoke about the high investment intensity that we are planning for that.
We will do that at the same frame of overall R&D spend of approximately 20% of revenues. I'm sure that we'll get questions on that later on. I also referred to a much more active portfolio management in terms of inbound and outbound activities. It's very important for us. We will do everything. Everything is on the table as long as it modulates risk, creates value or preserves value, and increases optionality. For CM&E and fertility, as I said, mostly R&D light de-risk assets, regional deals, such as the recent ones that we signed for China. For rare disease, we are looking at pretty much everything from discovery to fully de-risked assets and everything that in between could be in-licensing or small bolt-ons. Other not necessarily rare here, I would say mostly around neurology, immunology, selected tumors with a much more homogeneous patient population.
We would like to get them at the peripox stage. Phase two, this is the sweet spot for us in terms of higher probability of success, ability to control the development plans, and a lot of de-risking for sure. To summarize this part, we started already several months ago where we are poised to make the rare tumors launch a great success with, I would say, very high value creation and build on it to further expand into rare diseases. Now, given the nature of our portfolio, we will make the necessary adjustments and modifications to the organization to enable this further expansion. We will not drop the ball on our established medicines pipeline that provide growth and cash backbones. It's super important for us. Mainly for the longer term, we will start today building a much more balanced and target-rich pipeline. I do believe that we can do it.
I do believe that apart from a good plan, we also have a great team that can deliver on it. I wish that I could bring all of them. I brought a sample in the form of Miguel, who is the President of the EMD Serrano, our U.S. business, and the Chief Commercial Officer for the rare tumors business, as well as David Weinrich, our newly appointed Head of R&D. Before they go on stage, I want to get a little bit of heart into what we do. Let's switch to the video.
Name.
My name is Alex Owens.
Age.
I'm 12 years old.
Grade.
I'm in seventh grade.
Yeah, what's your deal? Why are we here?
Because I have a rare disease named neurofibromatosis. It is a rare mutation that allows tumors to grow along the body.
For me and for Alex, as a family who has NF, the most impactful innovation that Merck or SpringWorks possibly could have brought to our world was pimecotinib, right? When we started this journey with Alex 12 years ago, there were no treatment options. There was nothing you could do for your child. We moved forward in life on a wing and a prayer, watching and waiting for symptoms, hoping somebody would come up with something. Here we are, a decade later, and with the FDA approval in the U.S. for pimecotinib, we now have a plan for my son's future. We now have more than hope and prayer. We have proven science, and we're seeing the results. It's been amazing. What would you want for your NF, right?
If you had the opportunity to speak to the top researchers in the world and they had your undivided attention, and they're like, Alex, we're going to go find a solution. What should we go after first?
Tumor shrinking.
Tumor shrinking? More tumor shrinking?
Yes.
Different kinds of tumor shrinking?
Yes. Faster.
Faster tumor shrinking?
Yeah.
OK. As the parent of someone who has NF1, where Merck KGaA, where Merck KGaA can bring us the most innovative value is in finding more options. We are incredibly grateful for the FDA approval in the U.S. of Gomekli and, of course, now in Europe as well. That's one treatment for one type of tumor. The world of NF is so much more complex. We need topical treatments. We need more options for adults. We need a plan B if a patient has side effects to the first MEK inhibitor. I feel like we've got this ball rolling. We have the heart now of what could possibly change the world of NF. We need to push that snowball downhill. We need to gain that momentum and not stop. My commitment to you is I'll do the fundraising. I will get you your money.
Please bring me solutions for my child.
Thank you, Danny. Yeah, I downloaded this video, actually, on my phone. Every time that someone asks me, why are you still in pharma? I show them this video. It's a noble purpose to be in this business, and we shouldn't take it for granted. The people in pharma, David and I and the whole team, are thinking of Alex every time that we wake up every morning. Let me walk you through the next minutes in the journey of our aspiration to be leaders in this rare tumors world, as Danny mentioned before. These are not metastatic large malignancies. These are rare diseases that pretty much are unique and behave in a much more similar manner. We have the capabilities to leverage many of the synergies that I will give you in the next slides regarding these diseases. Alex said that he wants more tumor shrinkage.
Yes, that is very relevant, but there are many other data points that we have to keep on working at: pain, stiffness, other patient-reported outcomes, PROs. This is what our molecules will keep on bringing to the patients. Of course, surgical intervention in these particular diseases is, in many cases, still the name of the game. David, as a surgeon, will know that these types of surgeries are extremely complicated and in many cases are unsuccessful with lots of recurrence. In many cases, they need a systemic treatment right after that. One part of our commercial execution, which I will touch upon later, is going to be in flipping the pyramid and treating the patients faster with systemic treatments that are now available before going into surgery. As chronic conditions, and you have that in the slides, these patients will stay in therapy for a long time.
Many times, they discontinue the medication because of personal preferences, many times because of adverse events. Our job is to make sure that we are close to them with our patient support access programs to make sure that they understand that with the right approach, those adverse events can be minimized. In the long term, the benefit of being treated with systemic treatments outweighs by far these adverse events. Again, rare tumors, rare diseases, not clear referral pathways, not clear guidelines in many regions, in many countries. Our job is to create those communities, to create the guidelines, and to work with the providers to make sure that these patients have a logical patient journey. We have data scientists working 24/7 to master the AI tools to identify these patients. These are not large communities. We need to find these patients as soon as possible.
We are having a lot of success already with our artificial intelligence tools. Let me give you a bit more color about OXIVIO. You have on the left side of your slide the market potential. I want you to take a look at the bottom of that potential rather than going into the top of the funnel. Between 20% and 30% of patients are in active surveillance. What does it mean? Patients that are identified as, in this case, desmoid tumor positive patients. They are right now waiting in their houses to have an active intervention. This is our pool of patients. If you do a quick math, you see that there are thousands of them waiting only in the U.S. to be treated with a drug like OXIVIO. Market potential is there. You see the growth of the OXIVIO launch since 2024, 80% quarter over quarter.
This is the typical, by many of you that have been watching at other rare diseases, typical S growth curve of patients that are warehousing and waiting for something unique to be in the market. You have a bolus of patients that are captured very fast and very furious. Of course, you have to keep on building that funnel of new patients that are going to be coming from these 20%, 30% surveillance patients. I said before, still today, around 50% of the population of this disease will go through surgery as a first line, 50%. Before this patient came to life, more than 70% of the patients went through surgery as a first line treatment. What does it mean? In only, give or take, 18 months, this treatment is already changing the books of medicine. More than 20% percentage drop in the systemic first line use of surgery.
This is unique. It, again, speaks about the efficacy and the tolerability of these drugs. Satisfaction is very important in rare diseases. You don't have thousands and millions of patients like in Glucophage or other diseases. We understand what is the level of satisfaction of these patients. In our data, it's more than 90% of satisfaction of balance, efficacy, and tolerability. Again, despite that this is the only FDA-approved therapy for desmoid tumors, there is still around 25% of off-label use of chemotherapy and other TKIs, tyrosine kinase inhibitors. We definitely have to keep on educating and making sure that every single one in the U.S. is aware of the existence of OXIVIO, especially in the communities. Last but not least, persistent and refills. I said that before, long-term treatments, chronic treatments in and off patients.
The fact that we have today more than 90% refills after more than 18 months of launch gives me a lot of happiness because it means that the patients are wanting and willing to keep on being treated with these medicines. Having said that, of course, we have to keep on working in the long-term treatment of these patients, only 18 months in the market. So far, we are delivering the right duration of treatment. Before I move into the next slide about Gomekli, one more message. I think that Danny Bar-Zohar touched upon that. Competition is everywhere. In this particular disease, the right strike of balance of efficacy, deep over our amazing PRO results, with the right balance in tolerability is going to be key.
If you're a patient that is sitting in your house without any systemic treatment and the physician tells you that you are going to go through efficacy, definitely tumor shrinkage, but a lot of nasty side effects, it's a very tough sell. The good news about OXIVIO is that we have that balance. That is why we think that we have a best-in-class disease treatment. Moving into Gomekli, pretty much the same narrative of the slide. You see on the left of your slide the potential of the market. At the bottom of that part, I want you to take a look at the potential of the adult population. Three quarters of this market resides in the adult population. The good news is that we are still the only FDA-approved therapy for both pediatrics and adult population. We are doing very nicely in both populations.
40% of our prescriptions come from pediatrics, give or take 60% from adults. What does it mean? It means that the growth is sustained in both legs. It's not sustained only in one leg. That has a lot of value because, of course, the center of excellence in the U.S. will treat pediatric syndication, the kids. There is absolutely no center of excellence in the world treating adults. In other words, these adults, more than 30,000 patients, are spread across the communities. The good news is that we have that depth. It's not only breadth. It's not only depth in the center of excellence. It's the breadth in the communities. 50% of our prescriptions come from this non-center of excellence in the communities. In other words, we have a 3.5% growth CAGR, month over month. We don't think that this is going to slow down at all.
Moving into the next slide, why Merck KGaA and the GL thought that Merck KGaA would be a better home for these products than SpringWorks? Because of this slide, because of the global expansion and fast access to other regions that Merck KGaA is providing already for these medicines. Yesterday, we launched OXIVIO in Germany in this market. Two weeks ago, we launched Gomekli in Germany. This could not have happened without Merck KGaA putting all the resources to make this achieve. Just an anecdote, we have physicians calling us, calling our German team to be detailed and to be educated about these diseases. I can tell you that this is pretty unique because usually, we are the ones harassing the physicians. In this particular case, it's they that are calling us to be educated. This is the name of these rare diseases. It's pretty unique.
So far, I will not tell you the number, but we have already some dozens of patients treated in the last days with Gomekli and OXIVIO in Germany. Again, off to a great start in Europe. We are already filing and discussing regulatory approvals, of course, in the rest of European countries and moving into other geographies like Japan, China, and the rest of the world. The last part of the leadership journey in rare tumors is called Pimecotinib. Same philosophy of a slide. You see the market potential. Danny already talked about it, half a billion euros as in peak potential. What is the good news about Pimecotinib? Of course, this is still not a registration and approved product. We already filed in China. We are about to file in the U.S. with approvals in our base cases in August 2026. It's the data.
If you go public data of the competitor of this drug in the market, it's not as amazing as the 54% ORR and the very low discontinuation due to adverse event. We think that with this data, and again, the case is Friday in Berlin at ESMO, we are going to present new data of the long-term maneuver data for this product. It's under embargo, so I cannot give you the details. I can tell you that if you are interested in that, you will love what you will see. This medicine is keeping its promise of being a potential best in disease based on this data.
I think that I already alluded to what are the logical synergies of these tumors and these diseases: active surveillance, surgery, flipping the pyramid in the surgery space with the right referrals from the surgeons to the medical oncologists, and last but not least, persistent adherence. Those are the three common areas that we are going to keep on working at, that we are already working at, and it's giving a lot of good news to ourselves and to the patients. Before I hand it over to David, as the Chief Commercial Officer for this business, I can tell you that what I've seen is that this has not been a wholesale acquisition. This is a function by function, very detail-driven, talent by talent, taking the best of both worlds, SpringWorks molecules and skills, Merck operational excellence, and muscle in the rest of the world.
We are going to make great things with these molecules and for patients. We cannot be leaders without the right science. For the science, I have David with me. David, over to you.
Thank you. I'm about six weeks into the role, so go a little easy on me. I'm still learning the people, I'm learning the capabilities, and my first impressions are positive, actually more positive than they were just looking from the outside on the interview circuit. However, there are some things that we have to fix. I'm also a transparent individual, so I'm going to call it out. We have to balance the risk in this pipeline. We are skewed right, for the statisticians in the room, of what we've got coming in the pipeline. I'd rather have something that's more normally distributed, and that is completely doable. Sometimes you would think of that as rare disease, and I'm going to use a slightly different definition for R&D. I'm going to call it homogeneous patient populations. It could be true and true rare, meaning low incidence, low prevalence.
Those also tend to be very homogeneous diseases. It could also be selected populations in a much larger disease setting. From my perspective, both of them accomplish the same thing. They push risk down, and they do that because earlier studies de-risk later studies. Preclinical studies de-risk early studies, and we need more of that in the pipeline. In order to do that, I'm totally aligned with Danny. We need to bring in more assets, and as I'll go through the pipeline in a minute, really the sweet spot is to fill the middle of this pipeline, phase one and phase two. There isn't enough to my liking with the risk profile that I want presently there. I can't just wave a wand and make the early research programs move faster. This is a long cycle time business. It has to be done through external acquisitions.
Lastly, we have to be faster, and that's faster in how we internally decide what we're going to do, but it's also all of the processes, the manufacturing, the toxicology, the clinical operations. We have to be faster, not just compared to other big pharmas. We actually have to be faster than the smallest, most nimble biotech because they outnumber the big pharmas more than 20 to 1, and they're also our competitors. I have limited time to talk about the pipeline, so I'm just going to dig into a couple of the assets. I'll be honest, these phase three assets or phase three ready assets that I'm going to talk about don't fit the risk profile that I would ultimately like to build, but on the other hand, the data looks pretty good to me, and they're already here.
I'm going to walk you through how we're going to approach it. I am mindful of how much I have to spend on each of these assets. Consistent with what Danny said, we're not going to put all of our money into one asset, no matter how good it looks. We have to have enough shots on goal when there are inevitable failures in the pipeline. They're going to happen. The pipeline as a whole delivers, even if any one asset does not. Let's start with Cladribine. We know a lot about this drug from years of development. It eliminates B cells preferentially, and it reduces antibody levels. On the left-hand side, you can see an ex vivo experiment where Cladribine successfully eliminated the production of anti-acetylcholine receptor. That's the predominant antibody that produces the symptoms in myasthenia gravis.
On the right-hand side is a pilot study of oral Cladribine, not intravenous, in patients with myasthenia gravis, with a clinically relevant and statistically significant reduction in the scoring system of symptomatology due to MG. There are a number of reasons to want to go into this indication. It's quite large. We think the safety profile of Cladribine in this patient population will be, compared to other drugs that are in development, highly favorable. It's also an oral, so it'll provide an option for patients who don't want to take an injectable biologic. The phase three study, which is comparing placebo versus two doses of Cladribine, is ready to start. It's phase three or part B and open to recruitment. Although it's quite early, we expect to have data in mid-2028. Let's move on to Empatiran.
Empatiran is an oral, highly selective, potent, and reversible inhibitor of Toll receptor 7 and 8. For reasons I'm not going to go in today, we really believe that this mechanism, TLR 7 and 8, is important in the cutaneous manifestations of lupus. We ran a phase two study shown here, which on the left shows the results of the CLAASI-A score. That's one of the measures of disease in cutaneous lupus, where we had a statistically significant and clinically meaningful reduction. In the subgroup of patients with systemic lupus who had cutaneous symptoms, that's on the right, we saw the same result. This market is quite large. What we are currently doing is conducting regulatory discussions to align on this cutaneous manifestation of lupus. Presuming we can reach alignment, we would plan on starting phase three studies next year.
Lastly, and it came up earlier in the questions to Belén, we'll talk about CCAM5. This is a first-in-class antibody drug conjugate that in the phase 1B study in third-line colorectal cancer had a very impressive objective response rate and progression-free survival. As you probably know, CCAM5 is almost universally expressed on the surface of colon cancer, so it's a good antibody drug conjugate target for this disease. When you look at this phase 1B data and you do some cross-study comparisons, it looks very favorable to the current standard of care in third-line CRC. The safety profile is very consistent for our Topo1 ADC, and in our opinion, the risk-benefit of this is highly positive. Consequently, we're moving forward with a phase three study in third-line colorectal cancer. We've completed all the regulatory discussions.
We have agreement on the study design and endpoints, and we hope to have first subject in in the first half of 2026. Although it's also early, having not even started recruitment, we'll guide to data being available in early 2029. We need to stay ahead of competitors in the field. Having grown up in oncology, when you play with an oncology drug, you have to play to win. We are having internal discussions about how to advance this drug into earlier lines of colorectal cancer now. To the question that came up this morning, if we were to invest all of our R&D money on this broad program, this would be a singular bet, and we are not going to do that.
We do want to move this program forward and keep it first-in-class, and that requires having a strategic collaborator who shares this vision, to share the risk, share the cost, and share the reward. You don't want to have a first-in-class agent and then lose it because you didn't do the right studies. To quickly summarize, we've got three assets that are on track to go into phase three next year. That's actually not bad for a company of this size. Going back to my original comments, we have to expand this pipeline. We have to put more shots on goal with a differential risk profile, and over time, because this doesn't happen immediately, we will have a much more healthy pipeline that can weather failures and still deliver the returns that both Danny and Miguel talked about.
With that, I'll turn it back over to Danny for his concluding comments. Thank you.
Thank you so much, David and Miguel. Thank you for the can we switch to the next powerful slide? Great. Thanks a lot. In essence, executing on our rare tumor and rare disease strategy, A. B, leveraging the strength and the resilience of our CM&E infertility as Cash Bank. Bones
See, building the pipeline today is mostly at the phase two stage in order to come to the right number of phase three assets that will fuel us at the midterm, at the long term. Sorry. It's been a pleasure to be here with you. I hope that you got the gist of the spark in our eyes and our mission. Thanks a lot.
A big thank you, Danny, Miguel, and David. We are now at the end of the session here in that room. Thank you very much again for your attention, also for everyone in front of the screens. We are now about to end the webcast. The recording of the webcast will be available, the latest by tomorrow morning, maybe already tonight around midnight.