Yeah, warm welcome also from my side here in Zurich to our full-year results presentation, through which actually Philippe and myself will guide you through. And we will guide you through a set of figures of which we believe actually is a strong one underpinning our claim to be the market leader in the CDMO space with significant growth potential ahead of ourselves. But before we actually dive deeper into our figures and into the facts, let's take together a brief look at our safe harbor statement. Please read carefully, take note, and feel bound to it. What did we prepare for today? Four parts. First of all, it's going to be about One Lonza, me taking you in a fast-forward fashion again through the things that we shared during our investor update on the 12th of December.
So, what makes us special and what makes us so optimistic about our future over the next years? Then it's going to be the second part for Philippe and myself to dive a bit deeper into the details of what happened in 2024 before we then turn our heads towards the future, 2025, what you can expect from us at Lonza going forward. And we will conclude with hopefully an engaging Q&A session during which Philippe and myself will do our best to actually, I mean, provide as useful answers to your questions. And with that, a brief summary of, I guess, I mean, key points, key messages of today.
First of all, Lonza reported for the full year 2024 revenues of CHF 6.6 billion, which is in line, according to our guidance, with the prior year. However, and we will take a closer look. If we look at our CDMO business, which will be going forward the core of our activities, we're actually looking at a pretty strong year with growth in the low-teens if we adjust for the extraordinary high base in 2023 with the special incomes and revenues coming from the mRNA business for the COVID-19 vaccine. core EBITDA margin of 29% yielding CHF 1.9 billion. Also here, we will take a closer look and explain to you that our core business, the CDMO business, actually significantly expanded margin as compared to the underlying CDMO business in previous year, so corrected for the mRNA business in 2023.
We continued to execute upon our ambitious organic growth investment program with CapEx of around 22% of revenues, which is important for us to be able to continue to grow also over the next years. We will provide further details on that. Strong cash flow, CHF 470 million, which is a lifeblood essentially for our growth trajectory, and then looking at 2025, and we will, as explained to you in December, we will guide for the two different businesses separately. For the CDMO business, we actually expect an even stronger year, 2025, with revenues approaching 20% and the core EBITDA margin approaching 30%, including the positive impact at least on the top line from the Vacaville acquisition in 2024.
For the CHI business, we actually expect a return to growth of revenue and also return to growth of EBITDA margin in the mid-20s and the top line to grow at low- to mid-single-digit percentage points, so One Lonza, our vision, we kind of walked through that. That's a core part of who we are. That is a core part for defining our ambitions and how we actually want to turn them into reality. We use that slide to kind of break down this pretty rich statement into its core components and how they educate us internally at Lonza, but also the external world about how we think about ourselves and where we want to take our company.
First of all, it includes the explicit statement, decision, and vision to turn Lonza into a pure play CDMO, which in turn means that actually for good reasons we decided and communicated that decision to, in a mindful way, exit the CHI business, which in itself is a great business, but for which we at Lonza don't believe to be still the best owner. Of course, we have the ambition to not only today, but also in the future be the market leader in the space across modalities. So, we will stay a multi-modality CDMO across the value chain from drug substances, drug products, but also across the lifecycle, but not the least, also in terms of creating value. This will be affected through us striving for cutting-edge science, smart technologies, and lean manufacturing. But with the ambition to actually create outstanding value, we, of course, need an attractive underlying market, which provides for the opportunities in the first place.
Let's quickly walk through again what actually the underlying market provides us with when it comes to growth potential. Here, we have chosen the number of new molecules we expect to come and become available actually to companies like us over the next years until 2029. Small Molecules 4%, Bio 6%, Cell & Gene 9%. It's a somewhat different perspective, not in value US dollars, but number of molecules. We thought it's useful because in the end, that defines the number of shots that we at Lonza can actually take on target, shoot on target, and here we are looking at an attractive pipeline development over the next years to come.
That itself already provides for opportunity. However, based on the reallocation of volumes, the reallocation of activities, also the reallocation of funds, cash at the pharmaceutical company level, actually there will be on top of that growth, an additional growth increment become available from volumes, activities shifting from pharmaceutical companies to CDMOs like Lonza. That will add roughly something like 2%-3%. That in the market segments in which we operate at Lonza, we see an underlying market of 8%-10%.
This comes along with another set of attractive characteristics, low volatility, high entry barriers. So, we are in a good spot when it comes to our playing field. But then it's about market leadership. Our ambition to create not only value, but outstanding value. So, how can you affect that? What do you have to have in order to actually deliver that? And here we defined, based on, I mean, looking back and finding out what actually has been the sources of our past success and what will be the sources of our future success, we came up with this concept of the Lonza Engine. So, a unique set of our core competencies, which actually sets us apart from competition, consisting of five elements, high performance team. In the end, it's very much a people's business. While we apply technology, in the end, it's very much trust-based.
Our customers trusting in our people, in our ability to actually deliver upon our promises. Second of all, unique, and I can tell. I'm a scientist myself. I'm working in the CDMO space since almost two decades. And I believe unique ecosystem when it comes to scientific, technological, but also digital capabilities. Thirdly, unique customer relationships. The depth of relationships that Lonza is able to enter into with clients actually is very special and well-deserved, of course, but that will also carry ourselves into the future and will keep us growing above market. End-to-end execution excellence, that's about our ability to put money efficiently and effectively into the ground across the world. So, building new capacities where needed. And lastly, for a growing company, we need to, in a very efficient way, be able to always constantly add people, technologies, assets, be it through organic investments or M&A.
We also briefly talked about those areas, I mean, while being a strong company, those areas where I believe, where we as a leadership team believe we can still do better, and define four areas: reshape, elevate, focus, and expand. I will talk briefly about reshape, focus, of course, and also expand. S o, new operating model shared with you, shared with the Lonza team in mid-December, currently in preparation and to be implemented and fully live in the second quarter of 2024. A somewhat different allocation of our technology platforms into three business platforms for a number of reasons. One being a better, let's say, allocation of responsibilities, not all growth projects in one division. Also standardizing structure so that we actually, within one consistent business model, the CDMO business model, we always and everywhere apply the same organizational principles.
We will strengthen our functional oversight, and we actually create a more unified go-to-market approach, which will also support an increased and even better customer experience. So, we also introduced a new way how we think about our future and how we inform about our future. That's what we called the CDMO Organic Growth Model. On the left-hand side, we see the Lonza Engine. Underlying market 8%-10%, but our claim is actually that we outgrow the market due to the Lonza Engine by 2 % -3%. So, our outlook in terms of growth potential on average over time over the next years is actually low-teens, so 10%-13%, 8 % -10% plus 2 % -3%. However, in an industry like ours where it's about, in the end, manufacturing products, doing stuff, right?
We need to continue to invest into low-teens on average over time over the next years. And here, the correlation, of course, is between revenue, top line growth, and what we need to spend. And here, our rough calculation, that's how we look at our business internally as well, is that we, of course, first of all, need to invest into our infrastructure, existing assets, so keep them fit and in shape, which will be, on average, over time, a mid- to high single-digit % of sales figure. And on top of that, because that is not enough for us to grow, on top of that, we expect to spend low-teens percent of sales into growth investments.
So that all adds up on average over time to mid- to high-teens percent of sales as CapEx required to support a low-teens sales growth trajectory on average over time. And all that, of course, with the core EBITDA growing ahead of sales growth. So that's our CDMO Organic Growth Model. We also talked about expand, the fourth initiative, which is that while Lonza in the past, I mean, we have been able in the past to do successful M&A as well. We will talk to Vacaville, as I think I'm convinced, a great example for that. But overall, on average, actually, we have been, I mean, we preferred actually organic investments, so building ourselves. And from now on going forward, we actually will take an impartial approach to growth opportunities, which can be organic investments, building assets ourselves, or developing technologies ourselves.
We will, of course, continue to do that, but we'll also consider opportunities of inorganic growth. The North Star for us to decide where to invest, what organic or inorganic growth opportunity we want to make use of, the North Star, the measure for what is good, what is not good, what is fit for Lonza, what is not fit for Lonza, will be the Lonza Engine. Only where we are convinced that we will be able to apply this unique set of core competencies, only there we will put our money because only then we have reasons to believe to be able to deliver outstanding value. Here, on the right-hand side, you see a kind of a landscape, a menu even, where we not, I mean, in an absolute fashion, expect to put our money going forward.
Essentially, it means we want and will stay a multi-modality CDMO and will continue to invest in each of our existing business platforms, sometimes organic or inorganic, sometimes rather organic or only inorganic. But there's another field which actually is important, the green one, which is that we have the obligation as management to not only think about today, tomorrow, next year, next three years, but that already today, we need to create the opportunities which will then drive growth five, seven, ten years further down the road. So, we at Lonza will continue to stay ahead of the wave, not only in manufacturing excellence or development excellence today, but also being with our customers, with our clients when it comes to their new breakthrough innovations, new modalities. And CHI, because I've been talking about CDMO so far only, CHI is a market-leading business.
It's a great business, a great team applying strong superior technology and delivering a quality level unheard of in the industry. It's a clear number one in the space with revenues above CHF 1 billion, an industry-leading core EBITDA margin in the mid-20s, also the number one when it comes to innovation and branding, and actually based on the reasons that I will share later with you, a positive outlook not only for 2025, but also beyond. So, I mean, while this, I mean, if that is a great business, why did Lonza decide to actually exit the business at the appropriate time in the best interest of our shareholders and stakeholders?
reason being, I mean, when I said that we will apply the Lonza Engine to each new opportunity coming our way, then, of course, we need to be prudent and also ask ourselves if the current portfolio actually is the right one and each part of our current portfolio really fully benefits from this unique set of core competencies, really benefits from the Lonza Engine, and if you take a closer look, while the CHI being a great business, it does not to the same degree benefit from our core competencies, has a different business model. In reality, the synergies when it comes to go-to-market technology, manufacturing, they're actually rather limited, and also, the business adheres to a different market dynamic, which is why we thought that this business is not the right business for Lonza anymore.
We're not the right owner anymore, but we'll look for another owner going forward. So, takeaway of that part of the presentation: one, Lonza is a place of unique opportunity. We have a clear strategy and a clear plan for value creation. The Lonza Engine is the unique set of core competencies, and I hope you see that we don't waste time taking decisions, and by doing so, we have set ourselves up to deliver strong, long-term, profitable growth, so quickly on what happened in 2024. I'm happy to share some observations with regard to overall market environment in the pharmaceutical and the CDMO space, and of course, then taking the one or the other highlight, which is worthwhile to mention. First of all, U.S. FDA approvals, again, very high, 50 as compared to 55 before.
On average, last five years has always been around 50, so a strong pipeline coming to market. Also, clinical targets at record levels, which is good for Lonza because that's where we are providing unique services, and also the CDMO business model remains in high demand. And also, there is a continuing preference of pharmaceutical clients for Western sources. I mean, what have we been able to translate that into when it comes to business? Our signed contract volumes in 2024 amounted to approximately CHF 10 billion , which, of course, I mean, that will materialize over time, but that's what the teams have been able to sign, a significant number. We actually took on 50 new commercial products, signed contracts for them, which is an average figure for the last three years.
Some highlights, I mean, exciting Vertex, the first therapy using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, it's actually a cell therapy, extended collaboration in the ADC space, and multi-modality drug substance drug product integrated offering with another strategic customer. Strong contracting based on our unique business model across modalities and across the value chain. Organic growth investments, ongoing 22 projects, 50% in construction, some. We actually was impressed, I can tell. I mean, so far the integration is going exactly as planned. That applies to technical integration, that applies also to customer visits, contract signing. In the meantime, we have been able to sign the second contract for Vacaville, and we continue to receive customer visits, and we continue to negotiate further contracts for this high-value capacity. For 2025, we expect approximately plus minus CHF 500 million in terms of revenues from Vacaville at a dilutive margin, though.
We, again, expect to invest up to CHF 500 million into the site, not because the site wouldn't be high quality. It is, but in order to make it more flexible and increase automation and make it perfectly fit for a CDMO operation. One last thought, which might be important for you as well. In the end, what we will have to do over the next years is to balance three utilization factors of the site. First of all, of course, continuing to manufacture for Roche. Second of all, taking in new products, but we will also have to put time aside, downtime in a way, so that we can actually introduce the engineering changes that we want to introduce so that the site is not only able to deliver revenues today, but also five years down the road in an as efficient manner as possible.
ESG, another topic to which we at Lonza remain committed, and we will not walk away from our targets here, and I'm happy to report we have chosen this as an intensity, so normalize for revenues. Here we have been able to reduce now by 44% as compared to 2018, with a target 2030 being 50%, so great progress. Also not only being busy with Scope 1 and 2 ourselves, but also looking at our own supply chain. S o, Scope 3, and h ere we create more and more transparency, and now 80% of our suppliers actually have undergone an ESG evaluation so that we have visibility of what's happening there.
Women in leadership, diversity, we are now at 30% with a target being 35%, but we are getting there, which will further add to the one part of our Lonza Engine, high-performing team, because diversity in the right way, I mean, supports performance, that's clear. So, with that, I actually go over to the full year 2024 financials and hand over to Philippe so that he guides us through those figures.
Thank you so much, Wolfgang.
Thank you, Philippe.
Welcome, everyone. So, before we move on to the full year financials for 2024, let me maybe step back and give you a quick recap on the growth-driven value creation model and our financial capital allocation framework. So with that, you saw that in December, our value creation framework is really driven by growth and by investment into growth. By having the right assets and the right technologies, we are aiming at outgrowing and outpacing the market. Wolfgang mentioned that to you. Now, it's not only done with top-line growth. We also want to grow our margins, and so we are committing to grow our core EBITDA faster than we grow our sales. We do this by actually working, actively working on our portfolio, trying to move into higher value products. We do this also, of course, by doing continuous manufacturing and continuous operations improvement.
Also, to be honest, over the next few years, the intensity of our growth projects will actually diminish, and therefore the dilution from early assets will actually decrease over time. Now, once we have the top-line growth, we improve the margin, this will create more cash, and we will drive more cash out of the business over the next few years. On top of the growth and the margin, we will work on our net working capital, mainly around inventory, key things that we continuously need to be working on. Now, once we have the cash, the question is, how do we deploy it, and we shared with you back in December as well, the slightly evolved capital allocation framework.
All starts with cash from operations at the top, and then there's a few things we just have to do. We have to maintain our assets, we have to invest into the right infrastructure to feed our assets, and we have some systems to maintain, so this is the first part, this is just a must-do. Second, we are committed to our dividend policy of maintaining or increasing dividends over time, returning money to our loyal shareholders, so these things are non-negotiable and will be there.
The rest is really what we call discretionary cash, and this discretionary cash will be used to fund the growth going forward. Now, the twist we introduced in December, and Wolfgang mentioned it as well, is we will be impartial as to driving growth through bolt-on M&A or through organic means. I think this is important as this will give us the best chances to really work on the market opportunities and grow and fund the growth for the future. After everything exploited our growth opportunity, any surplus capital will be returned to shareholders. We've shown that with our CHF 2 billion share buyback program that is still ongoing. But yes, again, if we don't have enough growth opportunities, the capital will be returned through means to our shareholders.
Sales are in line with our outlook, they're in line with the prior year, declining just 0.2% in constant currency, driven really by a very strong CDMO business and somehow offset by a weaker product business, our CHI capsules business, but also some weakness and market headwinds on the bioscience side. Now, without the high base in 2023, without the COVID revenue and the impact from the termination of the prior year, the group would have been growing 7% underlying. So, we really, the business grew 7% masked by what happened last year. Our margins also very strong at 29%, declining slightly versus the prior year again due to this high base, but we're very pleased with the development of our margin and we'll get to the details in a few seconds. Actually, the margin was at the high end of the guided range of 27%-29%.
We had in the second half actually a slightly better operation and manufacturing performance, which helped us offset the slightly lower and less favorable product mix versus the first half. Exchange rates also played a role. You see that we had roughly 2% impact on the top line as well as on the bottom line, coming from the appreciation of the Swiss franc versus our two main currencies, the dollar and the euro. Now, our margins remain well protected. We have a good natural hedge overall on the globe, having our revenues and costs in roughly the same currencies. So overall margin well protected. Now, let me give you a new page where we try to give you a little bit more detail on the revenue and the sales evolution. As you can see, we had very dynamic growth in our three CDMO divisions.
Biologics, excluding the impact from the mRNA business in the prior year, grew 13%. Very dynamic growth, really pleased by the performance of the biologics division. Small molecules continuing to drive higher value products and maximizing the assets that are in place, growing 9%, a little bit over 9%. And also Cell & Gene growing 1% reported basis. But again, we had, remember, a termination from Kodiak Sciences in 2023. If you remove that, operationally the business grew 10%. So again, I think the three CDMO division showing that our organic growth model of low-teens growth for the CDMO business is again also in 2024 the case. Now, our growth was impacted by Capsules and Health Ingredients. The business declined 6.6% in constant currency, again mainly from market headwinds, and Wolfgang will get to that in a few minutes.
Another view about our sales is actually showing the risk diversification of Lonza. We spent some time on this topic back in December, but this is how it looks like for 2024. Our top 10 customers are roughly 50% of our sales. Most of them have multiple products with Lonza. And so if you look at the top 10 products, this makes even less than a third of our revenue. So the concentration risk is actually quite low, and we are not subject to any large singular risks. If you look at customers by type, we appeal, and Lonza appeals to both large pharma as well as small, medium pharma and biotech company. 50% of our revenue are coming from large pharma. The rest, over 600 biotech and small pharma companies representing half of our revenue.
And then by phase of molecule, we continue to be heavily weighted towards commercial and late-stage manufacturing, which provides a lot of visibility for future revenue. We care about the early stage. We need the early stage because this feeds our pipeline for future commercial contracts. But again, the revenues are heavily biased or weighted towards commercial contracts. Moving on to our margin evolution, again, a chart that gives you a little bit more detail. Our margin of 29.0%, down 0.8% versus the prior year, mainly for three reasons. One, we had a high base in 2023. The COVID mRNA business was actually a high-margin business, and so this gives you a headwind. Second, as you can see on the chart, a margin decline in CHI, again driven by market headwinds from slight overcapacity in the market.
And third, we had some hedging gains as well that were here in the Corporate segment that we have not repeated this year, and therefore some headwind from the Corporate segment. Removing the COVID business of last year, actually all the CDMO divisions improved their margin, and so we're very pleased with that progression, and we see this continuing. How did we grow margin underlying? One, a better and more favorable product mix, and we mentioned that already in our H1 reporting. Second, a better asset utilization across all three divisions. And third, a higher productivity, which is also based on the network optimization that we started at the end of 2023. So all of that, actually quite pleased with the margin progression and looking to continue that journey.
Looking into CapEx, we invested CHF 1.4 billion into CapEx last year, out of which 60% went into our growth projects, well diversified, but mostly across technologies, but mostly focused on commercial assets, which represented 22% of sales. Slightly less than what we had expected at the beginning of the year, and we mentioned that in H1, we had some lower spend on maintenance across many of our sites, as well as isolated change in specification by customers, which leads to a little bit of phasing. Overall, we are very pleased with the progress of our growth projects construction, and we remain confident that these are the growth drivers for the next few years. Moving from CapEx into free cash flow, we had a strong cash flow year, delivering almost CHF 500 million of free cash flow, which actually represents 21% of sales before gross CapEx.
So before we decide to invest and to reinvest that money, the business generated 21% of free cash flow out of sales, which is a quite strong figure. The higher cash flow is mainly driven by slightly lower CapEx versus 2023, and slightly offset by a little bit more working capital, mainly from inventory that we took on with the Vacaville acquisition, where we get inventory, but we didn't really get sales in 2024 from Vacaville. Now, to our balance sheet, we raised roughly CHF 2.1 billion through the Eurobond market in 2024. This is to fund both our investments into organic CapEx as well as to fund the Vacaville acquisition.
You see that with that, and together with the share buyback program, we are coming back into our target range of leverage between 1.5 and 2, staying true to our commitment of a BBB+ rating. Now, this level of leverage still leaves us with enough room for both bolt-on investments as well as organic investment in the future. A very solid, actually, financing and balance sheet situation. Now, let me finish with a quick word on dividends. We are proposing to the AGM dividend of CHF 4 per share. As you can see, this is very much following the evolution of the last 10 years, where we have a pattern of holding dividend constant to then increase. We increased dividend in 2022, we increased dividend in 2023, and this year, with the transition year in 2024, the proposal is to stay at CHF 4.
The CHF 4 represent a 44% payout as well at the high end of our payout range of 35%-45%. With that, I will hand back to Wolfgang and maybe providing you with the information that in the appendix we provide some further information for you for the financial models on some financial KPIs. You'll find them in the appendix. With that, thank you very much, and Wolfgang, back to you.
Thank you very much, Philippe, and happy to take you through some more highlights in the different divisions. Biologics kind of talked to that already, a super strong business, and if we look at the underlying development compared to 2023 without mRNA, actually a growth of 13% and a core EBITDA margin of above 34%. Strong commercial demand and some examples here, the large-scale mammalian site in Visp is actually on track and will be starting to manufacture GMP products in the first half of 2025, fueling and supporting our strong outlook for 2025. Also in Portsmouth, so a small-scale asset, which we actually need either for smaller products or for development activities, started successfully with first GMP batches. Bioconjugates, an area where we are also market lead and actually one of the pioneers or the pioneer in terms of coming up with competitive high-quality manufacturing technologies.
Here, the two commercial assets in Visp are actually ramping up quite fast, and we continue to invest into large-scale capacity there as well. Small Molecules, I mean, as mentioned by Philippe, it's an impressive development of the business, almost 10% growth year on year and a superior margin of almost 36%, and the highest number of new customers and programs signed in 2024. Cell & Gene, an area where we are actually reaching out into the future. It's kind of the seed technology of which we believe we will benefit over the next years and especially further down the road. Here, adjusted for the extraordinary effect of the Kodiak termination in last year, the business, overall business grew by 10%.
Also here, profitability of almost 16%, and I think an important information, the Cell & Gene Technology business itself now crossing breakeven, which is a very nice development, and not many in the space can actually claim that for themselves. Capsules, as spoken to by Philippe, a decline by 6%, but still a superior market-leading core EBITDA margin in a challenging overall market environment. This business, this team has been able to actually defend its market-leading position and also to defend market-leading profitabilities through, of course, top-line efforts in order to provide volumes to our clients, but also through very disciplined cost management. What we also did in 2024 and will continue to do in 2025 and over the next years is to roll out our superior proprietary D90 manufacturing technology.
So, this is really a machine which adds to efficiency and further builds out our leading position when it comes to manufacturing cost, manufacturing efficiency, and even further adds to quality in terms of the product itself. So, when we spoke about challenging market conditions and market headwinds, what is our view? And we brought this picture here for the hard empty capsules business, which is the major part of the CHI business as a whole, which in itself can be differentiated, divided into two markets. First one being nutraceuticals , the second one being pharma ceuticals. But let's start with nutra. So, we see pre-COVID, January 2022, with the horizontal line being the normalized 100% volume demand of the market at a point in time. There we see the spike from everyone overstocking vitamin C, vitamin whatever, and actually leading to significant growth rates.
Remember, the CHI business in 2023 grew by top line by 11% at a core EBITDA margin close to 30%. There is an inflection point when customers started to destock around mid-2022. Take a point in time with a grain of salt and then into the charts. However, for nutraceuticals, we saw that actually we are recovering and essentially end of 2024 somewhat back to normal when it comes to market demand. I think the takeaway here is that due to an era, a period of excess capacity due to overstocking and then destocking, here Lonza is returning back to normal. Pharma has a somewhat similar picture, same reasoning, however somewhat delayed.
Inflection point essentially a year later as compared to nutraceuticals, but also here, while not being back to normal yet, we saw at the end of 2024 signs of recovery when it comes to real demand, revenues, but also incoming orders. So that, I mean, if we kind of apply the same pattern as we have seen in the nutraceuticals business and carefully listening to our clients, we would expect that also after overall nine quarters, so probably the second half of 2025, also for the CHI business, we expect to get back to normal, which supports our guidance for that business for 2025, which is returning to growth in terms of top line sales and also margins to low- to mid-single-digit percentages, top line growth and a core EBITDA margin in the mid-20s%.
That actually leads me to the outlook, turning our heads to the future. What can you expect from us in 2025 for the CDMO business? We expect an even stronger year as compared to the strong year 2024, with top line growth approaching 20%, including the revenues from the Vacaville acquisition, approximately plus minus CHF 500 million and a low-teens organic sales growth. If we were to just look at the underlying CDMO business in line with our CDMO Organic Growth Model, for the core EBITDA margin, we expect it to approach 30%, which means with the dilution coming from the Vacaville business that the underlying CDMO business, I mean, continues to expand profitability.
When looking at, let's say, the timing of revenues, we currently expect the second half to be somewhat stronger as compared to the first half in terms of both revenues and also margins. CHI outlook kind of shared already, a low- to mid-single-digit constant exchange rate sales growth at a core EBITDA margin in the mid-20s. With that, quick summary, what we talked about, solid results in 2024 driven by a strong CDMO performance, underlying growth of the CDMO business corrected for mRNA in the low-teens percent, and that business actually compensated for the softer demand in the Capsules and Health Ingredients business from a challenging market environment and also for the loss of the mRNA business. We continue to invest into our growth programs, and 60% of that actually goes into a growth project, which will fuel our future success.
CDMO 2025, very strong outlook and the organic growth model being in place and working and delivering what we expect from it. With that, I happily hand over to, I guess, David and look forward together with Philippe to your questions.
Many thanks indeed, Wolfgang. And Philippe, I'm going to ask you to join Wolfgang on the stage. I'm also going to ask our technician who's just following me up to miraculously transform the stage in front of your very eyes. We've got a set of questions hopefully in the room. We've also got people online that are queuing up already to ask questions, and I'm aware that we've run over slightly as well. So, I'm going to already just reassure you by extending this session by 10 minutes. That would allow us time in the room to ask questions until around 2 o'clock and then a further 10 minutes for people online to ask some questions as well. So, I've got two people helping me as well.
If you'd like to put your hands up in the room, then we'll do our best to try and get to as many of you as we can. Just to try and help us include as many of you as possible, if I could ask you to ask no more than two questions, that would be greatly appreciated. Who'd like to ask the first question? Very good.
Thanks, Patrick Rafaisz from UBS. One question on Small Molecules, please. I mean, very strong performance in the second half. Of course, there were some timing effects that helped. How do you think about the operational performance and the margin in 2025 here, right? Because there will be some capacity addition, so presumably utilization will be maybe a bit weaker. Will that affect the margins or do you think this is now the new normal?
No, thank you very much. A great question. And I fully confirm, I think that the Small Molecules business, not only, but also the Small Molecules business actually performed really strongly in 2024, and we expect it to perform strongly in 2025 as well. And it will support this overall very strong top line outlook and also the expansion of the margin of the underlying business. However, we won't share additional details on the divisional or the business platform level going forward. But also Small Molecules, the part of the new business platform, Advanced Synthesis, will contribute to both top line growth and margin expansion.
Okay, understood. Thank you. And can you add a bit more color maybe on the seasonality and the contribution in mammalian from the ramp up in H1? I understand production start will be in the course of H1, but is there any indication or color you can give us on the phasing, how much of the incremental revenues will be H2 loaded and how should we think about the dilution from the upfront CapEx related to those ramps?
Yeah, indeed. When I said that, actually H2 we currently expect to be stronger than H1 in terms of both top line and also core EBITDA. The reason is, among others, that actually two important assets are coming on stream in both Biologics, so the large-scale mammalian facility in Visp coming on stream with GMP production in the first half of 2025, and also the highly potent asset, the new one in Visp, in this case, Small Molecules, will also ramp up in the first half of 2025. So full contribution or stronger contribution from those assets actually in H2 currently is expected to be stronger than first half.
Thanks.
Thank you, Patrick. It's great to have you here. Any other questions in the room just so I can see your hands? Okay. Very good. We'll get one to you next.
Thanks, Daniel Buchta from ZKB. First question is when you look at big pharma, what they recently presented, for instance, Novartis in Q3, they said that their number of phase I and II projects were cut down by 40% over the last three years. Roche was even more steep. So, I'm a bit worried long term, of course, that this 30% exposure of you to preclinical phase I and phase II is going to weaken because it cannot be compensated by all small biotech companies, I guess. So of course, I understand commercial business is very strong, but maybe in a few years down the road. Yeah.
No, thank you, Daniel, for the question, and a good question. While we— I mean, Novartis, Roche being great companies, no doubt, but won't comment on them specifically. It's also not our view on the industry, of course. In the end, what we do is look— we actually look at new drugs being approved. We look at number of molecules in development, so preclinical up to phase III, and there we actually see a record high, right? The number of molecules in development actually is at a record high, and that is still market view, right? How does it translate into what we do at Lonza?
And here I can tell that we see positive developments from the increased biotech funding back to, probably all look at the same figures, $28 billion in 2024, which is probably the level where it has been prior to 2020, 2021. And also incoming RFPs or RFQs. So customers are asking us to offer development services. Actually, that looks very good. So our view is not that we would see any decline in number of shots that we at Lonza can take at target. So actually, we are not concerned in this regard.
Very clear. And the second question, when I look at the Corporate segment, you had years now of declining costs, and now you have again quite an increase in the core EBITDA loss in Corporate. Is that a new area or is that just some one-offs, basically?
[Crosstalk] You might have seen that. I knew it. Look, Daniel, I think Corporate is a mixed bag of many, many things. You have everything from medical benefits to pensions to hedging to electricity sales to Arxada, et cetera. So, there's a lot of things. I think there's a few things that were positive last year that are not positive this year. I can name a few, but I think the three that come to mind is the hedging that I mentioned before. I think hedging gains were lower this year than last year.
I think on the VPPA, on virtual power purchase agreements, I think also we had a slight gain last year. We have a slight loss this year. And then the same is on pension adjustments due to the interest rate. So I think there's a lot of small things. It's not a new base, if you want. It's just a very volatile line.
Okay, thanks.
Michael Yestervroon and Potterman. I have a question regarding the order you signed, this CHF 10 billion you mentioned. Can you give that a little bit more clarity? Are they sales per year or in total? And then what's the timeline you can cash that in?
I'm actually thankful for that question because, and we always debate, is to include it or not, because, I mean, why did we decide to include it this time? It actually provides us, and I guess also would hope also you with comfort, because we at Lonza are able to sign contracts at a level where no one else can. However, and we kind of shared that figure for 2023 as well, has been CHF 13 billion. So you might wonder, I mean, does it go down with Lonza? No, it's not, right? It's just the volatility, the phasing, how contract signings occur, right? And as you rightfully said, I mean, this is not the same thing, right? I mean, the contract periods can be very different. I mean, in 2023, CHF 13 billion and CHF 10 billion in 2024.
So while it is a somewhat, I would hope, useful qualitative indicator, it's nothing with which I would advise you to do any math with, because it's not a clean figure, right? But it is a strong figure. And I guess that's where I would leave it, because, I mean, any further interpretation probably is not meaningful and not leading anywhere. But it provides comfort.
Sibylle Bischofberger, Bank Vontobel. I have a question about the reported EBITDA and the adjusted expenses you expect and restructuring and other costs going into the delta between reported and adjusted margins.
I think, yes, I think you're right. Thanks for the question. I think both 2023 and 2024 have been heavier years than usual on the adjustments. I think 2023 and 2024 were marked by restructurings that we have done on certain sites, some impairments that we took as well connected to these site decommissioning. So from that point of view, not something that we would expect to see again and again. I think 2024 was marked. There's almost CHF 100 million coming from Bacthera, which is a joint venture we decided to wind down. So also not something that you would expect to see every year. The restructuring, I think, have been relatively contained, are about the same 2023, 2024. I would not expect, but that's a difficult one to forecast now. So overall, I think we have a lot of items that we do not expect to repeat.
Are there any further questions in the room? In that case, I'm going to hand over to Sandra to host the online Q&A for the final 10 minutes.
Thank you, `David. The first question comes from Ebrahim Zain from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi everyone, thanks a lot for taking my questions. Zain Ebrahim , J.P. Morgan, and a couple for me. My first question is just on Vacaville. So you cited strong interest in the facility and you signed a second contract now. Could you help us dimensionize the size of this contract versus the first one or maybe to the average contract that you signed in biologics? And in terms of the interest that you've had, how many customers have you had visit the site so far?
Actually, I had a hard time trying to. It was Vacaville. Contracts and average, I understood.
Zain, can you maybe repeat and speak very slowly?
Sorry. Hopefully, you can hear me clearer now. So just on Vacaville, it sounds like you announced it with a second contract and you've got strong interest in the facility in terms of customer visits. So could you help us understand the size of the second contract relative to the first one and the average for the group maybe? And how many customers have visited the facility so far?
Yeah. Yeah, happy to take that question. Thank you, Zain. Indeed, second contract signed. And again, I mean, we had a very successful customer event on the Monday of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. I went with a large client, potential client there on Thursday. And then on Friday, I've been able together with the team to say goodbye and shake hands to an excited customer. So I mean, there are a number of negotiations ongoing. There are regular customer visits on the site, probably even on a weekly basis.
We are very happy by the way how customers received the message that this asset is now in the hands of Lonza, which is why we are very optimistic to be able to deliver upon our business plan, which is substituting the outgoing older Roche business over the next three to four years and keeping the overall revenue level plus minus constant at around CHF 500 million until 2028, with expanding margin though, because the new business coming into the site will be more profitable than the business that is currently in the site. Otherwise, actually, I'm not in the position to share more details on individual contracts.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Zain.
The next question comes from James Quigley from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my question. James Quigley from Goldman Sachs. I've got a question on the 2025 outlook. So, obviously stripping out the one-time effects, the CDMO business is growing broadly in line with the midterm targets of low-teens. However, in 2025, you have the Visp large-scale manufacturing plant starting as well. So the 2025 guidance implies that the non-Vacaville part of the business will continue to grow in that low-teens area, but you have this large site coming online in the second half of the or first half of the year with the contribution of the second half of the year. So what are your assumptions in terms of the base business, new manufacturing parts coming online as well for that non-Vacaville plant part of the business for 2025?
Should we go? Yeah. Thanks, James. Yeah, you know we have new facilities coming online every year. We have new assets starting up and ramping up every year. So yes, we do have our six times 20K and the highly potent facilities ramping up, but we also had in 2024 assets ramping up in bioconjugation in mid-scale and smaller scale. So overall, this is a constant. We constantly have assets coming online. So I think that's one thing to keep in mind. Second, if you remember the way large-scale assets ramp up, this is not an immediate thing. This is a slow thing over a couple of years. For example, for the six times 20K, the peak sales would be in 2028, 2029. So therefore, yes, there is a contribution, but this doesn't necessarily change the world by itself.
Got it. Thank you.
The next question comes from Charles Pitman-King from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi, thank you very much for taking my question, Charles Pitman-King from Barclays. Just initially on margins, so ex CHI was 30% in 2024, so very strong. Just kind of wondering what the organic margin expansion versus your specific Vacaville dilution expectation is in 2025. So a little bit more detail on Vacaville. And then just secondly, I was wondering if you could just give us a little bit more information on where your utilization stands across each of your subdivisions. I think we've kind of spoken about mammalian running close to full capacity before, hence Vacaville coming online, but just a bit more information on those other divisions would be great. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you, Charles. I'll be happy to take the first part and maybe Philippe, the second one. On the margin, actually, we will not share specific margins per site. However, we commit to actually the margin for the CDMO business to approach 30%. And if you look at the margin that we reported for the CDMO business in 2024 and assume that actually there is a dilution effect coming from Vacaville, but we still commit to deliver a margin for the CDMO business approaching 30%, so towards 30, that actually implicitly means that the underlying business without Vacaville actually is further expanding margin as we actually promised. So growth of our core EBITDA ahead of the sales growth according to the CDMO Organic Growth Model. Maybe for the second part to fill it.
Yes, sure. So we don't disclose utilization by site or overall by division, but as I mentioned in my presentation, we did improve actually utilization across the sites across all three divisions. Now, yes, you're right on the mammalian side. If you talk about commercial assets, our commercial assets are running at full capacity and therefore Vacaville and therefore we're very pleased now to be able to show Vacaville to new customers because we can offer large-scale capacity again. The mid-scale and small-scale capacity are usually running at slightly lower utilization because nobody wants to wait a year or two years to get access to a site for early-stage materials. So these sites are usually running at slightly lower capacities so that you can offer space.
On the small molecule side, I think our assets are highly utilized and the way the team is working around this to show growth is really through continuous improvement and active portfolio management, which means you're moving all the product out of your lineup and bringing in new customers at higher value. So this is a way around utilization, which is very high in small molecules. And then on Cell & Gene, I think there it's clear that we still have room to grow. I think if you look at the charts shown by Wolfgang, you'll see that we're not looking to buy capacity in Cell & Gene because we have capacity. We have enough sites. We're very pleased with having more commercial products to utilize these sites, but this is certainly a place where utilization will grow over time.
Thank you very much. Very clear.
Thank you, Charles.
The next question comes from Charles Weston from RBC Europe. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thanks for taking the questions. The first is on the CGT, the Cell & Gene division. In the 2023 Capital Markets Day, Lonza indicated an expectation for four new Cell & Gene commercial products by 2025. So if CASGEVY counts as one, should we expect three more this year or have it even failed or been pushed back? And my second question, you mentioned in your remarks that there is a tightening capacity environment for CDMOs. And I just wondered if you could elaborate on that, particularly in light of CapEx from you and your peers. And perhaps would you have an estimate for industry utilization in biologics? Thank you.
Maybe I can start with the second question, which goes back to the slide that I used to kind of explain the overall market environment to you. This graph actually was us picking a certain segment, which is the mammalian capacity. Here we said that actually from currently, I think 55% or so captive manufacturing, this will actually go down below 50% through outsourcing towards CDMOs while the overall market is growing. We actually foresee the overall capacity utilization in the mammalian space to increase from roughly 70%- 80% over the next years, which probably then is what you would call full capacity utilization. That actually is why we say we are actually expecting, and that's what we also hear from clients. It's reflected in the high interest in our services.
We expect actually capacity in that mammalian space to further tighten over years, which is why it's a great thing to have Vacaville because with that, we can actually support additional requests from our clients. First part on CGT for you.
Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, Charles, I think we've made good progress actually on delivering on the number of commercial products for Cell & Gene technologies. Of course, Wolfgang mentioned this, but you saw the press release of CASGEVY. This for sure counts as one. We also have Mesoblast, which is public, which is a product, is the first, actually the first allogeneic Cell & Gene therapy being FDA approved, which we produce in our site in Singapore. So we pretty much have every site now has a GMP-approved product and we are manufacturing commercial products, GMP products in all of our Cell & Gene sites. So we are in a good way. I think we're not at whatever number you said, six, I think is what you said. We're not there yet, but I think we have a good line of sight to be there or about there.
Thank you.
Thank you, Charles.
We are now reaching the end of the 10-minute extension. So I will hand back to the CEO for any closing comment. Over to you, Mr. Wienand.
Yeah, thank you very much, Sandra. Thank you very much for all of you being here with us in Zurich in the room. And of course, thank you very much to all who attended this conference virtually. I, myself, and Philippe, we have been happy to present a strong set of figures for 2024 to you. And I'm very much looking forward to what 2025 will bring based on our expectations and the outlook that we just shared with you. We know we will have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are looking forward to it. Our teams are looking forward to it. And we are looking forward to meet you all again in July when then talking about what we did with our company in the first six months of 2025. So thank you very much. All the best and see you soon.