Hello and welcome to the Vimian Group Q3 report for 2021. Throughout the call, all participants will be in listening-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. Today, I am pleased to present CEO Fredrik Ullman and CFO Henrik Halvorsen. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Please, switch to page two. Welcome to Vimian's third quarter conference call. I'm Fredrik Ullman, CEO of Vimian, and with me today on the call, I have our CFO, Henrik Halvorsen. In general, we've had a positive momentum in the group with high organic growth in most of our segments and high M&A activity, with 13 acquisitions signed here to date and a strong pipeline going forward. The market for animal health continues to grow and develop, and there's a lot of white space to go for in all our segments, and we continue to invest to drive growth and innovation. COVID and lockdowns during 2020 has made it slightly harder to forecast growth between quarters, but this does not impact our position and also our ambitions going forward. In my mind, the underlying growth is very strong.
With that, let's just get started and dive into our Q3 results. Please move to page four. In general, the third quarter was solid with solid growth, high M&A activity and a growing innovation pipeline. We delivered 99% revenue growth, of which 5.5% was organic. The lower organic growth in this quarter was due to the Diagnostics segment, which saw some extraordinary sales in 2020 related to COVID testing performed by certain veterinary labs. I'll explain that more in detail in the Diagnostics section. If we exclude the Diagnostics part, organic growth in the third quarter was 13.8%. Even within the Diagnostics division, if you take out that COVID effect, the core business also grew about 10%.
If you look at year-to-date, we have delivered a strong organic growth of 21.7%. If you look at the margins in Q3 of 27.9%, this mainly reflects the MedTech segment, where several factors impacted profitability at the same time. Henrik will explain this in more detail. We also maintain our commitment to invest in all our segments to accelerate growth and development. Looking at the year-to-date period, adjusted EBITDA margin is at 33.2%, 130 basis points higher than the same period last year. During the third quarter, we acquired two companies with combined revenue of EUR 8 million, and after the end of the quarter, we have signed additional five deals with combined revenue of EUR 9.6 million. With that, I would like to hand over to Henrik to go through the third quarter financial highlights.
Thank you, Fredrik. We can move on to page five. Before we go into the financial, I just want to remind everyone that we consolidated MedTech in Vimian from December last year, and MedTech, Specialty Pharma is not included in any of the comparison numbers before that. Just as a clarification and reminder. If we look at the quarter, we had EUR 41.5 million of revenue. That's up from EUR 20.8 million in the same period of last year, so an increase of almost 100%. We have an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 11.6 million in the quarter. That's up from EUR 7.7 million the same quarter last year. That gives us a margin, as Fredrik mentioned, of 27.9%.
As Fredrik mentioned, there were some items impacting the MedTech segment in the quarter. I'll go through this now. One impact was the slower summer months. Typically the veterinary surgeons took a bit more vacation this time than they did previously. That's of course true comparing the numbers to Q2 of this year, but it's also true if you compare it to Q3 of last year. What happened in Q3 of last year. The markets opened up after COVID. There was a very high pent-up demand for surgeries and products. The surgeons basically worked throughout the summer without their vacations. That's an impact we need to consider.
We've also made commercial pushes in the market and gone after new customer sales, and that has also led to some higher discounts, which should be a one-time impact. We also had a high level of education where we educate new surgeons to use our products. When we do that, we onboard new customers, and that comes with sales of some lower-margin products. High value, lower margin, typically protons. As Fredrik mentioned, the product mix have changed in the quarter, and I think that is expected to drive business going forward. We have also consolidated AdVetis. AdVetis was acquired in Q2, in June, Q2, so it was included already in the June numbers, but now it's included for the first time in the full quarter.
AdVetis is a company that we think can create a lot of value for Vimian and the MedTech segment. It is. When we acquired it's more of a distribution setup with lower margin than we have typically in the MedTech segment. We'll work on getting those up over time, but it will not happen overnight. I can also mention that it's similar dynamics to the acquisition of Freelance Surgical that we did after the M&A period, and that will consolidate it into the report.
One additional impact is also that, if you compare the margins to last year, what happened last year when we opened, when the world opened up after COVID, it was a really strong market and we were firing on all cylinders and we hadn't really expanded both based on personnel capabilities to really support the growth. After that, we had support and we strengthened the organization and built out our capabilities. When you compare year-over-year, that is the difference. Hopefully that provides a bit more clarity on the MedTech results. If we look at year-to-date sales, which is sales of EUR 124.6 million, that's up 188% from EUR 43.3 million last year.
As Fredrik mentioned, we expanded our margins by 1.3 percentage points up to 33.2% year to date. If we look at last 12 months revenue, we are at EUR 152.6 million with a margin of 33.4%. We have strong operational cash flow of just North of EUR 30 million in the year to date. We have a net working capital consolidated leverage of 1.3x, and we'll get back to both those numbers as well. If we go to page six, looking at the growth in the quarter. As we mentioned, we have 99% growth in the quarter. 5.5% of that comes from organic growth. It provided a bit more flavor.
We have 16% growth in the MedTech segment organically, but we have a negative growth of around 18% in the Diagnostics segment, as has stayed normalized after COVID. Then strong growth from acquisitions, 96%. That's still including the impact of Nextmune, but also of course the additional acquisitions that we made. Since then. We have also had a negative currency impact of 2%, but that's mainly U.S. dollars in the MedTech segment. If we move to page seven, looking at the revenue and the EBITDA over time or the longer trend. We have last 12 months rolling EBITDA revenue of EUR 153 million. That's up from EUR 132 million last quarter. So, that's always driven both by acquisitions and organic growth.
If we look at adjusted EBITDA, that's also coming up. We are at EUR 51 million now, up from EUR 47 million last quarter. That is obviously also being impacted by the slightly lower margin and EBITDA that we have in the current quarter this year. With that, I'll hand it back to you, Fredrik, to cover the segments.
Thank you, Henrik. If we move to page eight, we can start with our Specialty Pharma business. Nextmune, our Specialty Pharma, is our largest segment, accounting for 41% of revenue and 47% of adjusted EBITDA in the quarter. As Henrik mentioned, Nextmune will be consolidated in December. If you look at the underlying organic growth, we can see that the segment is showing solid growth at around 10% in the quarter and about 20% year to date. That is against relatively tough comps in the second half of last year. All main geographies and therapeutic areas are growing rapidly. Allergy diagnostics and treatments, dermatology, as well as specialty care and specialty nutrition. Continued strong profitability with adjusted EBITDA margin of 33.9%.
During 2020, the second half of the year was exceptionally strong. We are very happy with the performance in this segment. If we move on to page nine, and we look at our MedTech segment, which accounted for 35% of revenue and 29% of the adjusted EBITDA. We saw a continued strong organic growth of 15.9%, and the year-to-date organic growth was 25.8% in this segment. We have now launched our full-service orthopedic offering under the Movora umbrella in Canada. That's an important milestone in our efforts to realize the commercial synergies between the different companies that we have acquired in this segment.
We will continue to roll that out globally, and launch the franchise in the Movora in several markets over the months to come. The moderation of growth in the third quarter compared to the second quarter reflects the tougher comparatives like in our Specialty Pharma business. If you look at sales in July and August this year, it was actually lower than in July and August this year as opposed to last year. Because last year, people actually didn't go on vacation as they were catching up from the lockdowns in the second half. Whereas this year, veterinarians have never been this busy ever, so they had to take a break. We saw the slightly lower activity in July and August, which will pick up in September.
If we then move on to page 10, and we look at our Diagnostics business, which accounted for 13% of revenue and 11% of adjusted EBITDA. Our Diagnostics business organic revenue declined by 17.9% in the quarter, giving a year-to-date growth of 25.8%. Just to explain a little bit about this. In our Diagnostics business, we sell automation equipment for PCR diagnostics and reagents to run the PCR diagnostics. And that can be used both in an animal setting and for human applications. Now, during the COVID situation, we had customers buying equipment and actually helping out governments with human COVID diagnostics, which we were not really aware of, that was the purpose. But that equipment sale of course, doesn't come back this year.
That is actually the main reason for that decline are lower equipment sales this year than last year. If you take that effect out, that one-time effect out, what we see is actually a more than 10% organic growth even in this segment in the third quarter. You know, mid short-term, this is more of a one-time effect. We're not too concerned. We knew that because 70% growth in this segment last year was extraordinary.
Now if you look at the innovation side here, we did a deal with Aero-Collect, a Danish company, in the second quarter, and that has now launched, and we see great interest from producers as we combine our Aero-Collect technology, which is air sampling technology, with our salmonella typing technology that we acquired through the acquisition of Check-Points. This is our effort to improve prevention of animal disease in production animals. Quite excited about that. If you look at the adjusted EBITDA margin, that recovered from the temporary low in the second quarter, now at 25.1%. It's still below our midterm target due to investments in the organization. We are going into more regions here.
We have a great portfolio of very high-quality products that customers want, and so we see great potential to grow here organically as well with more salespeople and also increased investment in R&D. Moving on to page 11. Our Veterinary Services accounted for 11% of revenue and 13% of adjusted EBITDA. The organic revenue growth was 7.6% in the third quarter, which gives us an organic growth here of 9.6%. As we mentioned before, the whole COVID has had a negative impact on this business because we were not able to visit customers or clinics to grow our member base. We have seen that actually accelerating in September as veterinarians came back from vacation and COVID restrictions were lifted, and we could travel and meet customers.
The lower adjusted EBITDA margin here is reflected by OpEx investments as we prepare to enter a new geography, but also launching new services. This will continue to weigh on the margin in this segment over the next year. We appointed a new CEO, Alireza Tajbakhsh, who is taking over from Michael on first of January 2022. This is a great recruitment for us, and Ali is a very experienced and appreciated leader. Another exciting news is that we have extended our service offering here to co-ownership in veterinary clinics. I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a little bit. If we move on to page 12, and we look at our M&A track record for this year.
During 2021 until today, we have acquired 13 businesses with a combined annual revenue of EUR 30 million, adding 20% to our pro forma 2020 revenue. During the third quarter, we acquired two companies, Check-Points, a Dutch company focusing on salmonella and antimicrobial resistance diagnostics, as well as Laboratoire de Dermo-Cosmétique Animale (LDCA). It's a French pet dermatology company. After the end of the quarter, we actually signed an additional five deals, of which four are co-ownerships or co-ownership investments in veterinary clinics, and one is Freelance Surgical, which is a distributor of surgical equipment in the U.K. As we said in the second quarter, average multiple for complete acquisitions is between seven and eight times EBITDA. We of course see variations in that.
Typically, we see higher multiples for larger deals and high growth and slightly lower for smaller deals and/or lower growth. If you look at our pipeline, it remains strong. It actually strengthened since the IPO and since the creation of Vimian. I think the fact that we are the home of entrepreneurs is very much resonating with the companies we speak to, and also the visibility as a public company has actually created a higher stream of inbounds for M&A. Now, if we move on to page 13, I'd like to give you a little bit more color on the two larger deals. If we start with LDCA, they have a strong product portfolio developed by a team of veterinary dermatologists and pharmaceutical specialists.
The products are today distributed in 45 countries, and the company has annualized revenue of about EUR 5 million. Why do we like this? It's a great complement to our over-the-counter products within Nextmune and complements our dermatology portfolio. It also strengthens our position in France for direct sales, and of course, also provides us with a broader channel through its international distribution network. If we move on to page 14 and we look at Freelance Surgical, that is one of the leading providers of veterinary surgical products in the U.K., with 17 employees and an annual revenue of about GBP 6 million. It's a family-owned business founded in 1987 based in Bristol.
Freelance Surgical is recognized for its high-quality products that they sell to about 1,500 veterinary clinics in the U.K. What we're also very excited about with Freelance Surgical is their newly built training facility. As you know, education is a very key element to our marketing and developing the market here, and they have a newly built training facility in Bristol. They also have access to laparoscopy technology, which is a new MedTech segment for Vimian, and we hope to be able to take that technology into markets we are already with Movora. Freelance Surgical will be consolidated in the MedTech segment, and it marks an important milestone in our strategy to establish direct sales into certain key markets.
Now let's focus on R&D and innovation. If we move on to page 15. This week we announced a very exciting partnership with a Canadian biotech company called Angany. Together with Angany, we're going to develop a novel allergy vaccine that is much more efficient than today's available treatments. The technology is patented and unique, and we have exclusive global rights to all animal health indications also beyond allergy. This gives us global access to a completely new technology platform. Very exciting. The vaccines in allergy targets a global billion-dollar market that is actually growing rapidly. If we are successful with this first project, this could be significant. Of course, it's a relatively ambitious project in terms of, you know, development timeline could be five years.
Of course we have mitigated the risk of that development by having a milestone payment for the development. So we should be able to find out relatively quickly if this is going to fly or not. It's a bit early days, but it is the type of investments we also want to make to boost our growth in the mid to long term as well beyond what we have today. These development costs will be activated on the balance sheet, so it will not impact our EBITDA. To sum up, this is something we're truly excited about. So very nice partnership that we're happy to have signed now. Now, moving on to page 16.
As I touched upon earlier in the presentation, our Veterinary Services segment has extended its service offering to include co-ownership into veterinary clinics. We're launching this program in response to what many of our members are looking for. They want support to unlock higher performance or plan for succession while maintaining entrepreneurial autonomy. So far this year, we've invested in five clinics, all Nordic VetFamily members with annualized revenue of around EUR 4.4 million. Our ambition is to scale this over the next years to partner with more high-quality clinics in the Nordics and Continental Europe, moving to a clinic as a service. This co-ownership program really has a very strong strategic rationale for us.
First of all, we have a unique opportunity to build on our existing strong clinic relations where the clinics are well known to us. We can drive growth and profitability in these clinics through our existing service offerings. We also see significant incremental revenue upside from higher supplier volume commitments which will also have a positive impact on the rest of the VetFamily business. In addition to that, we see opportunity to boost growth and innovation across Vimian segment by working closer to these veterinary clinics and developing a more and more sophisticated offering with, you know, clinical services, as I mentioned. With that, I would like to hand back over to Henrik to take you through the financials in more detail.
Thanks, Henrik. If we move to page 18 and have a look at the income statement up there. We already covered revenue and adjusted EBITDA, we will not go through that again. If we look at operating profit, we are at EUR 4.5 million in the quarter. That's up by around 14% compared to the same quarter last year. This is also impacted by around EUR 4 million of items affecting comparability.
If you look at the profit for the period, that is -3% . We have booked very high taxes in the period, and there is more technicality where we have losses in our central companies, which have not been invoiced out as management fees in the group, so that will normalize during the remainder of this year. We already looked at growth in the quarter, but just to quickly highlight the year-to-date growth, for the first nine months of this year, we have an organic growth of around 22%. Acquired growth of close to 170% and then still a slightly negative impact on currencies, which again is the U.S. dollar. In total growth of 188% year-to-date.
If we go to page number 19, look at cash flow and financial position quickly. We have cash conversion of 68% year-to-date, so that's up significantly from last year when we were at 44%. We have very strong cash generation in the operating activities before net working capital. Net working capital has a negative impact on the cash flow in the period. And that is reflecting growth but also inventory build-up in the MedTech segments as they roll out into more geographies. If you look at investing activities, the majority of the impact here comes from acquisitions, mostly to some extent, of course, CapEx. Financing activities year-to-date still mainly reflects the refinancing that we did prior to the IPO and the primary issue that we did during the IPO.
If you look at cash position at the end of the period, we have EUR 85 million of cash on the balance sheet. This is actually a bit lower now as we financed some of the transaction acquisitions through internal funds. If we move to page number 20, looking at the net working capital. Compared to Q2, net working capital is up slightly in Q3 by about EUR 1.4 million. The main driver here I would say is the inventory build-up in MedTech segment that I mentioned that will enable continued expansion. Previously, I think you may recall in the Q2 report where I mentioned that we have high accrued costs for the IPO, which we have now paid out, so that has a major impact.
We also have the taxes that I just mentioned that balances that. If you go to page 21, looking at net debt and leverage. We are at the net debt position of EUR 76 million at the end of Q3. That's up from EUR 59 million at the end of Q2. This will also increase in Q4 as we fund those acquisitions. If we look at net debt over EBITDA, we are at 1.3x. Now that's up from 1x at the end of Q2. That also reflects mainly using internal cash to fund the acquisitions. With that, I'll hand it back to Fredrik to wrap up.
Thank you, Henrik. To finish this presentation, I hope you feel the excitement we feel at Vimian. We have a positive momentum in the group with high organic growth in most of our segments in the quarter. If you look at our year-to-date growth, you know, we're close to 22%. Our ambition that we have said was 15% organic and 50% of M&A. If you look at our M&A growth, we've added 20% growth this year already, and that despite doing our IPO in June. You know, you see this, we actually are very, very happy about the future as well.
Despite some, you know, volatility between quarters, that the underlying business is very sound and we are gaining market share in all our businesses as we see it. When you look at animal health market, you know, I've been meeting with a lot of veterinarians in the last weeks and months, and they've never been this busy. That seems to continue. We are very happy about being where we are and the way that Vimian is developing. Yeah, we hope that you are too. With that, we can open up for Q&A.
Thank you. If you do wish to ask question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw you question [audio distortion]. Our first question comes from Pete Savard with Citi. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Pete with Citi. I'll keep it to two questions, please. Fred, you talked about what you've done this year? In general terms, could you talk about the M&A environment for next year, your pipeline, your ability to transact at historic multiples? I realize you can't talk about, you know, individual assets that you're looking at, but can you just characterize the environment, and your confidence and ability to transact at historic multiples? Second question, Henrik, if I look at consensus, you know, the Q4 expectations, to meet full year 2021 consensus, that seems to imply a strong jump in the quarterly run rate for both revenues at EBITDA from the current run rate. Is this feasible in terms of trends you're seeing in Q4 or could consensus still just be a little bit on?
Thank you, Pete. On the multiples in the M&A environment, as I mentioned before, what we've seen is a M&A activity and number of opportunities actually been so many that we have to be quite selective as to what we want to transact on. In terms of inbound, in terms of the number of opportunities we see, that's just accelerating. We're actually now starting to add more and more M&A resources to be able to do even more. On the multiples, the way we look at it, I mean, we don't have a multiple definition that we say we only do deals at 7x-8x. That's been our historic numbers.
As I mentioned before, depending on size and growth profiles of the companies, we might pay a significantly higher multiple because the way we look at it is really return on capital deployed. I think that is in our world the way to look at it. We want to see a good IRR on all investments, be it organic investments or M&A investments. Historically, we've done quite a number of, I would say, relatively smaller deals, but we are starting to actually look at also significantly larger deals and companies. I hope that answers your question. Again, if you ask me, as we grow, I think we might pay higher multiples because it makes sense from a return on capital deployment point of view. We've also looked at, you know, post-acquisition multiples more than just, you know, because there are more synergies as we grow.
Good. Hi, Pete. Hope you're doing well. To address your question, first off, just want to remind everyone that we do not provide forecasts in general. We don't provide detailed forecasts. Fredrik started off by mentioning that we, you know, with the COVID backdrop, it's been kind of a, I should say, difficult year to analyze in some senses. Hopefully it will be, you know, this is now clear and the financial profile of Indical will become more clear as we trade out of this, somewhat difficult comparison period.
Now if we look at Q4 without providing a forecast, I can say that, you know, looking at consensus, I think that, on a three-year basis, you know, we obviously need to reflect the actual numbers for Q3. We are very optimistic about the business, but, you know, having said that, we think that, of course, that the margins in MedTech will recover. You know, having said that, it may be slightly.
Thank you. Very clear.
Our next question comes from Kristofer Liljeberg with Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Thank you. I have three questions. First, on the Anthony vaccine project, could you comment about upcoming news flow and what type of data points we should look for in that project? You mentioned here that you expect margin in the MedTech business to recover. Generally, how do you think we should think about margins going into 2022 as it seems that you will continue to do more investments in the geographical expansion? Maybe a little bit related to that, it would be good if you could comment how we should view the overhead cost line, adjusted for non-recurring items, as historically you haven't had them, you know, so much of a group function and that's changing. Now, you mentioned also that you're hiring more people for doing M&A, etc . Thanks.
Sure. On the Anthony news flow and what data points you should be looking for, I think this is a typical high value, it's a long-term R&D investment like in human pharma. We'll be running trials like you would see in a human pharmaceutical development. Now, I can't tell you already now when news flows will occur. Of course, we'll keep you updated on that as we progress. What I find quite exciting is that Mikael Dolsten, who is, you know, on our board, he was very engaged in the discussion here with Magnus, our CEO for Nextmune, and looking at the technology. He's of course, you know, developed a vaccine for COVID in six months or so at Pfizer. His first focus now is how do we accelerate time to market here. I'm sorry, I can't be more precise here, Kristofer, on the news flow.
How about on price target?
Sure. On the margins, for MedTech, I can just say high level, we don't expect. This is an area where we have high pricing power, and we have not seen, you know, massive increases in costs. Some material cost is going up now because of the situation in the world. But you know, on a gross profit point of view, it's very sound. Now, of course, with the two acquisitions of Freelance Surgical and AdVetis, which are investments into distributors to get direct access into certain markets, that creates a slight change in the profile of, or I would say business mix within the MedTech segment. But of course, we have a plan on how to increase profitability of those businesses over time.
You know, that actually has an impact on the overall EBITDA margin, not on the legacy business, but of course, you change a bit the profile. Nevertheless, what we look at is, are these good investments from a strategic point of view and from a return capital deployed point of view, and the answer is absolutely. I mean, they're fantastic deals. I hope that answers the question on the MedTech margins. That said, we are investing. We plan to go into a few more markets directly. You know, we entered Japan with KYON, one of our brands, in the last 12 months, and that's we've done that organically, so hiring people on the ground.
We've seen a pickup in growth in Japan that has been absolutely phenomenal. Of course, we want to go after those types of opportunities as we see them. We all recognize as the innovation leaders in the world of orthopedics, and there's a lot of long-term potential there. I think that's a good investment to do into organic growth. Yeah, at the cost of slightly lower EBITDA margins short term possibly, but I think this is absolutely the right thing to do. If I look forward, I mean, this is a very exciting segment with a lot of potential. We also expect this to be a growth engine going forward.
Sorry, Kristoffer, just to check, your question on margins, was that strictly MedTech or was that Vimian as a group?
I mean, I think, partly MedTech, but if you want to comment on Vimian as a group, that of course be helpful also.
Okay. No, no, maybe I'll just address them quickly then. I mean, Fredrik outlined what our thinking around the MedTech segment. In the presentation, you also mentioned that we are investing in growth in the Veterinary Services segment as well, so that will weigh on the margins in that segment. I think in general, our view is that there are extremely exciting opportunities in the market, and we feel that we are very well positioned to grab them. We are, we will make those investments. We will make the investments that we see make sense for us as a business. Maybe not a clear answer, but hopefully indicating how we're thinking in this. On the overhead costs, not entirely sure I understand the question.
If we look at the IACs that we're looking at, the items affecting comparability, that will typically be in the other external expenses bucket, not always. In this quarter, we actually have quite a big part of it in personnel costs, and that's relating to personnel bonuses from transactions, acquisitions. Typically, you will see the majority of the investment, the adjustments in the other external expenses line. You also asked about investment in M&A capability, so we are looking to strengthen that function, and that will of course add to personnel costs. It's not the only function that we will strengthen over time, as we want to be a very good company, and that means that we need to strengthen some functions.
We will always keep a very close eye on central costs so we don't build up massive overhead. We want to add overhead where it creates value, not just for the sake of it. I can maybe also elaborate a little bit on that there, Kristofer. The functions that we will invest more centrally is M&A, but they are of course allocated into the verticals for the most part. We're also strengthening our ESG function in Maria's team. We have Ellen joining us, who will come straight to us from Italy into that function to work with on our ESG agenda across the verticals.
Then we're looking at strategic HR and possibly, you know, legal counsel that would then typically also reduce external spend on legal. Last but not least, you know, we are looking at also new verticals and we're looking at the whole digital space there. Possibly a CTO type person at the group level to look at our digital strategy.
No, because the reason I'm asking, historically, I haven't had any group function cost really if I look in the comparison period. I think year to date, before non-recurring items, it was EUR 2.8 million. Q3 isolated was EUR 0.7 million. If yes, that's the new run rate now, and I would believe that might gonna continue to increase then.
Yeah. I mean, I think there are two, a couple of things to keep in mind here. We have we essentially formed Vimian during the spring, right? Before it was more like four companies. We established the central costs or central function with the associated costs made in the first half of this year. There will of course be a run rate impact of the cost base that you mentioned. A lot, the majority of the costs that we booked before adjustments this year are IPO related, so that will of course tail out. We are adjusting for those.
Going forward, you know, yes, this will be a reasonable run rate, but we will be able to build on top of that to have the strength on some functions as we previously mentioned. Part of this is also, you know, type of resources we need to be a listed company as opposed to being a private company. It just puts a certain cost burden on us in terms of the value of the company.
Okay. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Svante Krokfors with Nordea. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Fredrik and Henrik. Svante from Nordea. I have a couple of questions, if I may take them one by one. The first one is regarding when would you expect the kind of comps to normalize? I mean, we have limited amount of historical data. There's some impacts that we perhaps weren't aware of six months ago, like perhaps the Diagnostics one-off impact or COVID impact in 2020. So I mean, looking at the division of Specialty Pharma and MedTech, I guess the Q4 will still have a kind of tough comps, but will it be normal from 2022 going forward? In Diagnostics, I guess comps will normalize in 2022 and in VetFamily there is still a COVID-19 burden in 2021. Could you elaborate a bit on that to help us to
Yeah.
make our estimates?
Yeah, sure. As I mentioned also in Q2 when we reported Q2, if we start with the I would say the two businesses that have been most impacted percentually are Diagnostics and VetFamily. As also mentioned during the IPO roadshow, Diagnostics had a lot of tailwind with COVID. We didn't know. It was very hard to assess the impact of this or to understand this because we couldn't go and visit labs. We were getting orders. What we did say to our sales forces, "Only sell to vet labs, do not go and sell to human labs." But you can't. What we didn't know was that some vet labs were doing COVID diagnostics with our equipment.
That is something we have kind of realized in the last couple of months as we've been starting to see more labs. If you look at which quarters are high on the Diagnostics side, it's really up into Q1. I think Q1 was extraordinary, as we also said. I think as of Q2 next year, I would expect to see a certain level of normalization. I do not expect next year to be a very strong growth year in Diagnostics because even this year we've had some of the customers who bought equipment in 2020 have been running also reagents on those pieces of equipment for COVID.
I think that, you know, I expect that Q1 2022 will have a probably negative growth in the diagnostic space. After that I hope that this is going to be level off or keeping. The good thing is that the underlying business is really sound and growing nicely double-digit and which is, you know, the major part of that business. Also we have a very strong innovation pipeline and the team is very strong. That, that's on the diagnostic side. If you look at VetFamily, they've been negatively impacted by COVID in 2020. You know, that was a business growing 98% yearly for the, you know, the five- six years before COVID.
It kind of took a stop almost. We grew 10% during COVID. The nice thing there is that if you look at the animal health market and what we need to do to grow this market is really to free up the time of veterinarians. They are the bottleneck. Getting access to a veterinarian is difficult. They're typically overworked, and you know they can hardly take on more animals. So the more we can unload from their plate, the more we can grow the rest of the business as well in the industry. So the need for VetFamily services is there. We are seeing that you know the level of commercial activity has really picked up.
Since September, we're seeing a good uptick in activity in new, you know, new members. We also look here at adapting the value proposition in terms of membership tiers, etc . Ali is rolling out a new strategy there. I think here we will most likely see. I would think that second quarter of next year, we should start to see positive momentum, you know, picking up again. Now with the news on COVID that we hear today is in the market, it's well, it's very difficult to predict how the world will look in a few weeks even with the new South African strain. That is really what makes it very difficult for us to predict the level of commercial activity.
In Specialty Pharma and MedTech, I mean, the kind of comps should be quite normal already from Q1 or Q2?
I think so. Yeah, I think, I mean, the way to look at, I think, those two segments is that we had a, you know, last year, relatively slower first half of the year, which then recovered in the second half. Yes, I would say that this year is more of a normalized pattern. I think by looking compared to 2020, I would say that it makes more sense to look at year-to-date rather than individual quarters.
Okay, thanks. The second question is regarding your-
Sorry, Svante. If you look at the seasonality in 2021, when we have finished this year, I would say for MedTech and Specialty Pharma, I think that should be a relatively. That would be my best guess for seasonality in those two businesses, yes, going forward.
Okay, thanks. On your acquisitions, you said that AdVetis and Freelance have clearly lower margin. Can you give some indication of what I mean, I know you don't give those numbers when you release the acquisitions, but it might be useful if you could kind of give some kind of verbal guidance in conjunction with the M&A regarding the margin level if when you disclose the top line level also?
Like you say, we don't really disclose that. As we've mentioned during the call, currently they're more of a distributor type of business model, which typically comes at a lower margin. I would say it's, you know, not half of where we are now, but a bit more from those in the MedTech segment.
Okay, thanks.
Just to understand this one, what is interesting here is that over time, we will sell our own products in that channel, so with a higher gross margin than they get, right? Because they get a distribution margin, typically that would be, you know, whatever, 30%, 40%, 50% gross margin. We will have typically higher gross margin. That is the beauty of that type of deal. Yeah. That, that's what we mean when we mention that we'll work to get those margins up over time, but it will not happen overnight.
Good. Thanks. That's all from me. Thank you.
Thank you.
There are no further questions. I hand back over to our speakers.
All right. Well, then I think we can wrap up. Thank you all for attending this third quarter call. Yeah, we look forward to continuing being in dialogue with all of you. If you have follow-up questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to Maria, Henrik, or myself. We'll be happy to answer any follow-up questions you might have. Have a great day, and enjoy the weekend when you get there. Bye.