Welcome, everyone. Thank you for standing by for the Bora Pharmaceuticals 1st quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm Penny Wang. We have Bora Pharmaceuticals CEO and Chairman, Bobby Sheng, CFO, Alice Wang, and IR, Nadiya Chen, with us. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker presentations, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, please enter your questions directly. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking. Such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our annual and financial reports, including the risk factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. During this call, we will present both IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures.
A reconciliation of the IFRS to non-IFRS measures is included in today's presentation, which is distributed and available to the public through web, our website. We will now begin our conference call.
Good morning, everyone. This is Nadiya Chen, the IR for Bora Pharmaceuticals. Let us go through, first of all, a quick overview of numbers relevant to BORA. Market cap right now is $1.7 billion US dollars. We have 2,100 employees. We export to more than 100 countries, more than 100 markets. The latest update, manufacturing site counts, we now have 11 sites, which we will give you a deeper dive in future slides. Last year's consolidated revenue in US dollars was $634 million. More than 95% of our revenues are generated outside of Taiwan, as you know, and as of now, we are the number 1 pharma manufacturer in Taiwan. The beginning of 2026 was eventful, both in the world and at BORA.
We have seen supply chain disruptions, inflation from wars, and continuous geopolitical tensions. The overall softness was there, and yet we view it as temporary. March, the first quarter in March, showed a very clear rebound across both businesses. As we're entering the second quarter with healthy order book and resumed fixed cost leverage, we are happy and confirms that we will resume growth in the very near future. Most importantly, Bora Group's disciplined approach to growth-oriented investments remained unwavering. As you can see on the slides, we would like to draw your attention to the forward-looking signals before we start the call. Our team during the first quarter advanced Maple Grove site ramp-up significantly with several multi-year CDMO agreements signed or are progressing across emerging biotechs and top 20 global pharma clients.
Bora board also approved the acquisition of CDMO business of MacroGenics in Maryland, Rockville, to scale up its biologics CDMO platform, eyeing at further consolidation. All CDMO operations are now ready for more than 15% CAGR from now on. In addition, we consolidated the iconic sports nutrition brand, Weider Global Nutrition, into Bora Group through our subsidiary, SunWay Biotech, and this officially completes the last mile of dual-engine strategy across platforms. Moving to the next page, the company reported the first quarter 2026 revenues of TWD 4,001 million, down 17.68% sequentially, with a basic EPS of TWD 0.21. Gross margin stabilized quarter-over-quarter. The quarter reflected a temporary slowdown across both businesses.
Pricing and demand variability in the generics market through January and February left Upsher-Smith's first quarter revenue 18.63% below the trailing fourth quarter run rate. While the scheduled annual maintenance of six weeks of our Maryland fill-and-finish facility limited fixed cost absorption during the quarter, which weighed on our earnings quality. As mentioned a second before, March saw a rebound in both businesses as conditions improved for both the top and bottom lines with steady demand. During the quarter, the company advanced our Maple Grove site ramp-up, more multi-year CDMO agreements signed, and additionally, our new CDMO business as a 12-month rolling backlog arrived at TWD 350 million. That's a very healthy order book at our North American sites entering the second quarter.
We do expect fixed cost leverage to resume and also driving profit improvements as utilization builds across the installed asset base. Meanwhile, Upsher-Smith, after the first quarter, has successfully defended our market share and is deploying lifecycle management initiatives that reinforce our ability to set the cadence of sales in a dynamic, competitive environment. Non-operating loss, however, primarily reflected a wider equity loss from our affiliate, Tanvex BioPharma, together with higher tax expense driven by the annual first quarter recognition of tax from undistributed earnings of the previous year. Disciplined OpEx control has driven expenses down 14.87% quarter-over-quarter and a 14.41% year-over-year. This signals that resources have settled in as we begin to see advantages in scale.
The company does expect ROA and ROIC to trend gradually upward, albeit with some quarter-over-quarter variability as operating leverage builds. Product mix-wise during the quarter, it came in at 38% CDMO and 62% pharma sales for external orders only. When we say pharma sales, that mostly means the Upsher-Smith operations. As mentioned, there was a lower contribution from the sterile facility at Maryland in the first quarter, which is why the sterile came in at 14% and also less high-value generics. Channel de-stocking and less working days at the sterile site has led to an increase in inventories and higher net working capital deployed. Overall, net debt to equity was 71.8%, and we have ample cash on hand nevertheless, roughly TWD 4,800 million.
Now I would like to turn the floor to our Chairman and CEO, Bobby Sheng, to give you a deep dive into operational updates. Bobby, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Nadiya. Now I'm in control now. Can everybody hear me?
Yep.
Okay, great. Thank you, everybody, for joining the call. My name is Bobby Sheng, Chairman and CEO of Bora Pharmaceuticals Group. I will do a little summary of the Q1 activities and highlights of our business in quarter one. Let me start off with the CDMO business. As Nadiya mentioned, we had a small decline in our year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter earnings, or sorry, revenues for the CDMO and the business in general. It's mainly due to a scheduled maintenance at our fill-and-finish facility, which is pretty much one-fourth of our business now. The scheduled shutdown for maintenance had a impact, but a predicted impact, also seasonality in our Canadian facility. We still have strong visibility in our backlog.
The 12-month backlog has increased 19.31% compared to last quarter, and it has a total of TWD 314 million. During the quarter, the CDMO business also booked TWD 27.2 million in external wins. What's strong about those wins as well is that six of them or seven of the molecules came in, they were pre-commercial or they're development stage molecules, which is really good foundation for our sites as they commercialize over the coming 2-3 years. Finally, our strength is our on time in full for Q1 was at 88%, and right the first time was at 92%. As Nadiya Chen also mentioned, we just announced the acquisition of the MacroGenics facility in Rockville, Maryland.
That really continues to amplify our ability to support our customers in the United States and solidifies our footprints in the United States, especially with regards to now large scale commercial biologics in the United States. As you can see, we continue to be building our platform and strengthen our one-stop shop capabilities within North America and across the world. On top of our acquisition, we continue to also invest in CapEx. This slide really just to show that the CDMO market continues to outpace the pharma growth market as more pharma and development companies continue to outsource their development and their commercial manufacturing, not only for new molecules but also in rationalization for some of the customers.
They are transferring a lot of their legacy and large products, old products into commercial CDMO commercial sites as well. We wanna be prepared for that. A lot of our facilities are getting up to 70%- 80% capacity, even in double shifts. We are increasing our investments into those. In the past 30 months, we've invested, including acquisitions, $520 million. In 2025, our CapEx investment is 10% of our 2025 revenues. A little bit of visibility into how we view our sites and how our sites mature over time as we acquire them. Basically, we have two part, two sections of our, of our sites.
Ones that we have acquired for over 3-5 years, they become sites with economies of scale, like our Canadian facility, our Tainan facility, Zhunan facility, and Zhongli facility. These have strong gross margin profiles, and we continue to invest with our partners into efficiencies and CapEx into their delivery platforms. As you can see for example, the Canadian site, we've had over five years now, and we are seeing very strong economy scale as we continue to have more commercial products come into that facility going from development into commercial.
As we acquire facilities, they are investments for the future, including the Baltimore fill and finish facility, what we bought about 14, 18 months ago, our Taoyuan site, which is our ophthalmic facility, our Maple Grove facility, and the biologics platform in our strategic investment, Tanvex, and now currently the Rockville facility that we've just acquired from MacroGenics. That continues to build out our U.S. footprint. It continues to build out our growth in scale and in scope. Investing in new technologies. We do see a lot of new development programs in these facilities. We continue to see a high demand for our Maple Grove and our Baltimore fill finish facility, and that will continue to drive the growth for our company in the future.
Now we continue to focus on benefits of scale and high-growth modalities that we see potential to drive a 2x- 3x revenue over the next 3- 5 years. A little bit about our MacroGenics carve-out deal. This is fresh off the press. We did it beginning of this week. Here's some basic details. It is a commercial scale U.S. FDA inspected facility with over 140 full-time employees. It is a biologics GMP manufacturing site with a warehouse, 122,000 sq ft for the manufacturing facility and 70,000 sq ft for the warehouse.
It has five 2,000 liter single-use bioreactors and two 500 liters, three commercial stage products and six programs in the portfolio and four active customers. A little bit of highlight on why we continue to invest in large scale biologic manufacturing. It is well known that the demand for the global capacity for mammalian antibody is fastly increasing over our availability to supply the demand, so we are increasing our capabilities for that as well. A little bit of highlights. You know, we have stable commercial revenue as a base for this facility. It's 30% utilized and with our capabilities in sales and marketing, we through our Bora Biologics and Tanvex JV, we will continue to grow that out.
We have visible near-term growth with the PPQ work that's being done at the facility already. A little bit insight on how we see and how we view the large molecule growth in our group. This acquisition really strengthens and differentiates us in many ways. As you know, we have a strategic investment into Tanvex, which now the CDMO business is called Bora Biologics.
It has a very, very strong brand presence and strong BD capabilities that continues to bring in and service customers and a lot of early-stage PD cell line development technology and capabilities in our Zhunan and San Diego facilities that pairs really, really well and has complementary skill sets to the MacroGenics site, which has highly skilled executives and 10 plus years of commercial scale manufacturing. Also, a lot of complex modality capabilities specifically in ADCs and bispecific, trispecific.
On top of that, you add that under the Bora Group umbrella, which we continue to have financially strong investment into the facility and into its people, as well as allowing now not only have drug substance capabilities, but you tie that in with our Baltimore, Maryland fill and finish facility. It is a complete end-to-end drug product, drug substance platform that we offer now to our customers. Some insight into our quarter one activities for our pharma sales business under the Upsher-Smith brand. We continue to see strong growth in our rare and orphan disease specialty pharma division led by our Vigabatrin franchise. We have, you know, some data here. Unique patients were up 141%.
We continue to see that as a strong growth platform for our business and along with our strategy as well to not be as dependent on the generics business that we have and continue to focus on high-value generics and focus on our specialty branded 505(b)(2) rare disease business here. At the same time, as you know, we continue to see competition in our generics platform, especially with our main drug DLS, dexlansoprazole. We see that as Nadiya was saying, we see that sort of flattening out and as the co-competitor comes in and has taken a little bit of market share, and we've defended pretty well on that. Our main goal is to also launch new generics.
So we've launched three new generics so far to complement our generics platform. Finally, I'd like to introduce another acquisition we've done in this quarter. Actually, it was in April. We, under our subsidiary, SunWay Biotech. SunWay Biotech is a supplements ingredients manufacturer with patented technology and patented supplements, especially ingredients in red yeast rice and fermentation technology for probiotics. They were able to acquire the 90-year-old global brand, Weider. Obviously, some of you investors might know the long history of Weider and Joe Weider and his affiliation and his leadership. And a really iconic representation of bodybuilding and health and fitness in the 1980s and 1990s. This is a very strong brand.
It did over $100 million last year in revenues. It really complements our SunWay Biotech supplements ingredients. As you can see here on the far right, we will launch the Ankascin
brand, which is the red yeast rice under the Weider platform. We see this as a solidifying direction for SunWay, and also we see it as a way to definitely increase our visibility in our ingredients and supplements CDMO manufacturing. Here's some of our global network for this Weider brand. Its headquarters in Gilbert, Arizona, also having offices in Madrid, Spain, and Hamburg, Germany, as well as Taiwan and Seoul, Korea. A summary of our quarter one and our vision in 2026.
We continue to have unwavering commitment to the rest of the year in 2026. Our Q1 2026 financials are in line with our expectations. Once again, it was due to a scheduled maintenance shutdown for our injectable facility in Baltimore, and DLS competition was expected, and we're expecting company to take market share. The financials are in line with our expectations, and our 2026 complete year outlook has gone still unchanged. We believe in the strong growth of the Vigabatrin franchise, and that will continue to grow quarter-over-quarter, as well as we see strength and demand in our Maple Grove facility, continued signing of new customers and new development projects into that facility.
We see strong growth with that facility, quarter-over-quarter, and then from this year on to next year. Finally, Upsher-Smith continues to get generic products approved and has external programs that they're working with our, with our partners. Finally, we see these two M&As to be contribute to a consolidated financials starting May. So the WGN, excuse the typo here, the WGN will be, Weider will be consolidated in May of this month, and the MacroGenics deal will close hopefully within about 60 days. We will be able to also consolidate that, those financials as well as the operations in starting within about 60 days.
A little bit of insight into where we see these two acquisitions contributing into our business and then outlook into 2027, which we will see a full year benefit from these acquisitions. I will highlight this graph is not to scale, but we just want to show that the WGN Weider business and the MacroGenics business does add on to our top line. As we also continue to see CDMO backlog increasing and to drive double-digit organic growth. We also see steady expansion of our specialty pharma business and inorganic growth from these acquisitions we have. Finally, I want to highlight here, our marketing efforts are seeing really huge payoffs.
We're seeing a 94% 12-month run rate increase in our qualified leads. That's really due to the increase in demand for North America, U.S.-based manufacturing, as well as our high-quality brand name reputation that is continuing to increase quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. All right. Thank you very much, everybody.
Thank you, Bobby. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will only need to enter in the QA session. Thank you.
We will now give the audience one minute or two minutes to type in the QA section, which we will stay mute for two minutes. Okay. Okay, we are now back. The first question is mostly on inventory.
The question is you mentioned that some large customer orders in the U.S. have now started production and should show results from the second quarter. Should inventories expect a meaningful sequential recovery, I assume it means decline, in revenue and profitability in the second quarter, or should the recovery be more back-end loaded into the second half of the year? We would like to clarify on inventories the higher inventory-
I'm sorry. I think, Nadiya it says investors, should investors expect meaningful sequential?
Should investors, yes, expect a meaningful sequential recovery in revenue and profitability? We would like to clarify on inventories, the uptick in the first quarter inventory was from less working days at MacroGenics, the fill and finish site and also, DLS market conditions. However, as a absolute dollar amount starting the second quarter because of the consolidation of Weider Global Nutrition, the landscape of our overall inventory mapping will be very different. We cannot, and we do not suggest a direct comparison between the second quarter inventory level in terms of absolute dollars on that front. That's what we would like to clarify first.
When asking about if business would be picking up in the second quarter, the answer is yes, and we actually did see very significant improvement in March, standalone from top to bottom lines already. Bobby, would you like to address more into the question?
Yeah, we did mention large customer orders. Obviously they are in line with our expectations as especially within our more mature facilities like in Canada and in Zhunan, as well as in our Baltimore fill and finish facility. We do see a lot more customers signing in, and they're more development projects and they, those are more short-term based. The commercialization of those really happen in about a year or two. These are strong leading indicators for second half of the year and also for the upcoming years to come. Should we expect meaningful sequential recovery? I think definitely compared to Q1.
There will be a, I wouldn't call it a recovery, but I would say in line with our expectations, to get back into business obviously because of the main scheduled shutdown for our Baltimore facility, recovery more back-end loaded into the second half of the year. We do expect quarter-over-quarter increases as these orders mature and we actually fill out the backlog for the year. As we mentioned, we have over TWD 300 million in backlog that we will be able to fill out over the year. We also see increased quarter-over-quarter demand for our gabapentin franchise as that grows out and some new product approvals. Okay. Second question. I can take this one.
Thank you, Bobby.
It's pretty much the same thing.
Yeah. Sure.
Do you expect this year's revenues and earnings to decline compared to 2025 as the company experienced negative operating leverage due to high fixed costs combined with short term weak demand? We don't really ever give forecasts into our revenues and earnings. We expect, like I said, we have can give you details in the business. There is a we expected a decline in our leading generic product, dexlansoprazole. We saw headwinds with that. We announced that in Q4 of last year. We see strong demand and strong increase in our lead branded product for the vigabatrin franchise. We also see new products now. The timing of those are important. We will manage that and manage the increase and the decline as well.
We also see increase in demand and revenue uptick for our CDMO business. We don't see any huge headwinds that would have any large differentiation. But it's hard to make a direct comparison to 2025 as Dexlansoprazole is a large impact on the business and we are trending to recover from the decline in that one product. Has the company expected negative operating leverage? No, there's no high fixed costs, but I will say, I think Nadiya did mention our for Biologics Tanvex business. We just finished completely investing into 2,000 liters. So the ramp up of the biologics business is a lot slower.
We also know it's very well known that the biologics business has higher margins and has long-term stable growth once the facility gets filled. As we continue to say, we continue to make investments into our future, it's not there is no short-term weak demand. There's just investments that we are making and some of those will need to be made before the business comes in. We do not see a high fixed cost combined with short-term weak demand. That's definitely not true. All right. Next. Maybe you can answer this, Nadiya.
Thank you, Bobby. The third question online is on the MacroGenics deal. For the acquired MacroGenics CDMO business, could you clarify its current profitability profile? Is the business currently EBITDA positive, break even, or loss making? After consolidation, do you expect it to be EPS accretive or dilutive in the year and the coming year? A quick question is the MacroGenics sites has very healthy order book again because it does own three commercial projects and a very strong pipeline. For current year 2026, because of the merge, there is a one-time cost there.
Aside from that one-time cost, the site is roughly at breakeven level, but we do expect 2027 with these commercial projects boom, the profitability will be a very strong platform for our biologic CDMO business, meaning, yes, on an EBITDA level, should be positive. We also expect a couple of months of consolidation between the platform and our DP or fill and finish capability also in Maryland. Altogether, we do expect it to be a positive contribution to the business.
Okay.
There is-
I'll quickly go through the last one. CDMO backlog has. Are we running out of time?
No, no. We're good. Go ahead.
Okay. CDMO backlog has increased meaningfully and could reach around three or so as after MacroGenics. Could you comment on the margin profile and revenue conversion schedule? Its backlogs, should investors expect margins to be similar historically to CDMO or during the ramp-up period? We don't know what the margin will average out to after the MacroGenics acquisition. We'll need to realize our synergies and also see what new programs we can bring into that facility over the next 12- 18 months. We can't give you an expectation on the gross margins. The margin profile revenue, yeah, the conversion schedule, I think it'll be relatively the same as previously.
We don't see an increase or decrease in the conversion schedule. It should be relatively the same as before.
Yes, when we disclose backlogs, it's usually 12 months rolling. The conversion, we already calculated and give you a 12-month conversion number out there. So far this has been the last question, and it's 8:00. Thank you everyone for your participation, and we will wrap up today's call.
Okay. Thank you, everybody.