Okay, can everyone be here? Okay. My name is Michael Glen. I am the analyst with Raymond James covering ATS. So with me today is Andrew Hider, the CEO of ATS. So Andrew, thank you for attending this conference again. And as always, we start every year, I ask you to give an overview of the company, introduce ATS to the audience. This will be a fireside chat format and, of course, open for Q&A as we go along. But just to start, maybe give an overview of ATS, who the company is.
Great. Good morning, everyone. So Andrew Hider, CEO of ATS. And as of tomorrow, I've been here now eight years. Time flies when you're having fun. Our business, the easiest way to think about us is if you're going to launch an injectable device and you just get FDA approval. And I will often take a pen to show it. So this is an injectable device. And this product has 70% gross margin, seven zero. So what matters to you as the customer that's bringing this solution to market, it's a direct-into-your-bloodstream type of product. So quality has to be of the highest level. Your risk is low because if you have a defect, if you have contamination, you have a market cap hit. And oh, by the way, because it's 70% gross margin and you just get FDA approval, your demand is through the roof. You come to ATS.
We build the entire production line. Then we've also acquired companies that do the filling, that do the movement, that do the vision to ensure that you meet your qualifications. Then we've built out capability to serve and support you over the life of the equipment. Because one thing you learned through COVID was it's not just about the initial equipment. It's about also how you can have continuity in your ability to produce, how you can continually meet your market demand. That's where ATS is a leader. Our largest market is life sciences. We're both in CapEx and OpEx in that space. We do a full suite of integration, as well as we have many standard products, standard machines. We're also in food safety. We're out there on ensuring that when you eat something or have something, it meets the safety qualifications.
We're also in nuclear energy, whether it's CANDU reactors, SMRs, traditional reactors, or even now when you're building out fuel channel replacement. And we've continued to grow. We're in consumer products where we help one of our major customers in that space meet their sustainability targets around sustainable packaging while also providing a solution that's cost-effective. And lastly, we're in automotive. Now it's going to be roughly a little bit less than 10% of our business. So our focus on end markets that are more resilient has taken shape. We're now 80-ish% regulated spaces. Our business is aligned around custom automation to standard machines, to services, and digital. And we've continued to build out that suite of solutions.
I'm not going to lead with a Trump question.
All right.
Okay. But it'll come. The one I want to just start with, though, is really life sciences. So over the last three quarters, you have put up an absolutely huge number in terms of bookings in life science. So just want to dig into that a little more. Can you highlight the particular products and segments that you're seeing a lot of growth in? I know you do a lot of things in life science, but just want to dig into that a little more detail.
Yeah. And I'll go into it. But a couple of headlines. Last quarter was our second largest bookings quarter in company history. Our trailing 12-month book-to-bill ratio was 1.18. So we continue to see strong demand in our core end markets. And life sciences is one of those cores. And the easy answer, and everybody wants to talk about it, GLP-1 drugs. And we continue to see sustainable growth in that market. And we work with anywhere from eight to ten customers. We've invested in this space. So auto-injector is not a new technology. We've been in the market for two decades. But roughly around six years ago, we acquired a company that had a technology that we found very unique. Didn't really work when we bought it, but the IP was there. The innovation was there. And so we were able to take that and launch the solution.
Now we call it Symphoni. Why that matters is in the GLP-1 drug space, it allows you, versus a standard machine, to go up to two times the output and half the footprint. If space matters, which it does, and output matters, which it does, it put us in a unique position to bring that value to market. We've been a leader in that area. But we're also in many other attractive areas. We're in radiopharmaceuticals, which is the identification and treatment of cancer. We acquired a company called Comecer in Italy. The reason we did was we liked the niche space, the high-value niche space that they support. Now that business, over the last six years, has more than doubled its revenue, and the profit's grown even faster. We've helped them bring their product to market.
We've helped them build out their capability on a global scale. We're also in wearable devices, specifically wearable devices in the treatment of diabetes. Yet, many applications that a customer will launch in a medical device space we're working with or have worked in the past, so I say that because boring old contact lenses two, three quarters ago was our single largest order. Because our customers continue to repeat build. They continue to identify areas that we don't want to modify or change, and every time they'll come back and have to look at their automation capability and build out solutions, and so we're also in pharmacy automation. We're in any type of wearables, any type of area that's going to support that medical application. Additionally, there's some strong tailwinds.
So if you take a look at the macro, when people talk about onshoring, reshoring, when they talk about building capability in regions that they have demand, automation is usually the enabler. And I get asked a lot of questions around, does a certain tax advantage put your customers in a stronger buying position? Do they move it because of X, Y, and Z? At the end of the day, it's a strategic product for our customers. And they're going to align around ensuring they get their product to market. And early on in my tenure, we had a business by the name of Insulet. And Insulet does the Omnipod. If you don't know it, it's a wearable device that does; it's an insulin pump. So if you have diabetes, you can actually wear it and you can control it. And it's an amazing product.
They talked at our investor day about how ATS helped them. They were building their product in China. They moved it from China to Boston. I lived in Boston. It is not a low-cost area. But they improved their gross margin from 45%-65%. Now, how did they do that? This was before reshoring, before supply chain de-risking, before any of these tariff situations. They did that through automation. They used everything ATS. They did that because they had over 2,000 employees supporting the production line in the region, down to 200. It allowed them to build the capability where they had technical expertise. Those situations matter to our customers. That's what we do very well. We continue to add in areas that we can have high value for our customer base.
So GLP-1 still gets a tremendous amount of focus. So where is GLP-1 now as an overall percentage of the backlog? And what's sort of the outlook for that segment?
Yeah. So if we look at ATS as a whole, it's going to be roughly 10% of our total business. And we do view this having a strong tail in the foreseeable future. But I want to be very clear on this. And I've been pretty specific on it. Customers' buying cycles. We're okay with that. We have eight to ten customers around this. They're going to invest in their growth. And some are going to then move to a support model. But we're in many spaces that are like this, and many spaces that are very much tied to where our customers are putting their focus. And so while this is an exciting area and we like this and we're going to drive strong returns from this, we're working on many of those other applications with customers as we speak.
As long as we continue to innovate and drive technology and solutions, ATS is going to be a part of that support.
Would you say so far, year to date, your fiscal year to date, has GLP-1 been the fastest growth category? Or have some of these other categories, wearables, radiopharma, outpaced GLP-1?
Yeah. So you're starting to split hairs. But I mean, our radiopharmaceutical space has been continuing to grow. And there's new drugs like actinium-225, lutetium, as well as many other actiniums. We're a key player in that niche market. And we're going to talk a bit about the tariff situation. But we actually view that as an area that, after the short-term choppiness, we have the ability to provide higher value for our customers. And so I would say, yes, it's on par, but it is not the sole driving growth area for us.
Okay, and M&A, life science is obviously a big focal point for M&A, so where are you now in terms of building out that platform? Where's your vision at for that platform? How far along are you in that journey, and what's that M&A runway look like?
I smile because if you've ever sat with me, you know we're hungry. We're early in our journey, and while we've made nice progress, and we have, I think we've done 26 deals in the last five years or six years, we're early in the process. This is an attractive market with a lot of areas that we can impact. I'll just kind of highlight a few. Heidolph. We have been targeting this business for three years. The best deals we do are cultivated deals. By the way, we're about 90-plus% cultivated deals. This business, we acquired it. It's got EUR 50-ish million in revenue. It's 45%-ish gross margin. We acquired it for roughly around EUR 30 million. It was negative profit. It will be profitable year one.
It will most likely, by year two, between year two and year three, it will be accretive to ATS. And the reason why this works and why the model works is when we acquire a business, we bring in our standard playbook. That playbook, first and foremost, got to get the financials right. Right? Public company, you got to make sure you nail that. But number two, our supply chain ability is one of the things we bring in so early. Again, pick any part. We buy it on such a large scale that oftentimes our discount rate is much greater than the assets. That's pocket margin. We bring that in day two. We switch it over. And then we look at their full supply chain and say, strategically, where do we want to shift? We also bring in our commercial ABM.
We train the leaders on how we think about the world. ABM is continuous improvement, and one of the areas we drive is commercial execution. More specifically, pricing. We look at our strategic pricing in the markets we serve. We want to deeply understand. Because it's not just about increasing price. It's about value pricing. We do that very early on in the journey, and then we train the leaders on those continuous improvement events. How to run effective Kaizen. How to collect information. If you can measure it, you can drive it. We have eight value drivers. Do you measure them properly? Are you setting the right targets? And so you could take Heidolph. Paxiom is going to fall in the same area. And many others that have come into the mix. Avidity is going to continue to add strong returns to our business.
While we've made nice progress, our funnel is very healthy on selective targets. We're disciplined. We have four criteria we review. All of them have to make sense. One of them is the financial return, ROIC. We're very strict on what that looks like and our expectations on the business.
So let's just move over to trade. You guys provided some information with your most recent quarterly report. But that situation has evolved since that time. Maybe just give an update, a reminder to everybody where you've outlined the exposures are, and any plan you have to mitigate some of what's happening right now.
Yeah. So I'll start with the data, and then I'll work to our process, so data is about 15% of our business from Canada to U.S. And, of course, we have been reviewing this for some time. If you look back, when COVID hit, one of the reasons why we were able to effectively operate is we looked strategically at our supply chain. We built out our capability around this space. And we do that. I mean, we have a global look. We get into every business, every site. We call it Daily Visual Management. We can actually do it on my level, so the full enterprise. And we can get to specific around SP in Philadelphia, what's their gap, what's their issue. We do the same with this. So we look at where we've got a risk.
We identify what plan A, plan B is, and if needed, plan C. We start to work those angles before the issue ever happens. And our team is ongoing with this. So supply chain is one that we've got to get right. Why? Because you're going to start to look at import tax. And we don't want to pass. We can pass it along, but we want to minimize that impact for our customers. Number two, we do view this short-term to be choppy. And what does choppy mean? Choppy means that if we have to move a product, so take Comecer in the business I talked about earlier. It's an Italian-based business. It's got footprint in the U.S. We have a big footprint in the U.S. If we have to move that product from Italy to the U.S., it's going to take a little bit of time.
It's a standard machine, so we're going to be able to do it, but it will take time and effort and energy, but that's the opportunity. So when we look at this, we don't look at it as a, yeah, of course, short-term challenge, but mid- to long-term, we actually view this as an opportunity. Because remember, we're often in times where our competition is niche, and when you think about Comecer, their biggest competitor is right down the street in Italy. For them to move, it's going to be much harder, and so we look at this as we have to help our customers out. We stay very close to them. We can move production where they are, so build capability and capacity in region, and then lastly, serve and support on a global scale.
And so sure, if this continues on, we will drive the business in this direction. If this gets pulled back, that's okay too. Short-term, we'll be a bit choppy. But our business and our focus on this, with the ABM being our guide, really puts us in a unique spot.
Right. I'll ask anybody if anybody has any follow-ons right now. If they have any questions. Moving over to transportation. So I think a lot of people were surprised last quarter. You booked a reasonably good-sized EV order. Can you just give a little bit more information on that project and where it came from, maybe some of the background on that?
Yeah. So when you look at the EV space, if you've tracked us for a little bit, we used to win a lot of work in Europe. And we helped out in that approach to the market. And then that shifted to North America. And what we're now seeing is our initial customers are looking at their Phase 2 or their Gen 2. And they're looking to improve the product, improve the output. That's this application. So we're doing a little bit slightly different application within the battery pack assembly. It is their generation, their next-generation product. And it's a follow-on work from the initial application that we did. And we have many customers that are aligned around this. Now, we're not trying to be everything to everybody. We're very focused on the space that we have high value for.
We expect this business to be less than 10% of ATS moving forward. The funnel's healthy for the size market. We've right-sized it for what we view as future expectations. We're still winning work in key applications that we view our stronger value for ATS.
And in terms of EV as a whole, if we look over the past few years, the segment has seen some lumpiness. Can you speak to?
That's an understatement.
Can you speak to why investors should view the EV space as an attractive space for you? What should we look for from the outside to see that it's an attractive opportunity for you?
Yeah. I mean, so how we think, and I would take a look at it of how we think about it. We characterize this as more a harvest strategy, which means we put very little in. And we expect to take the gain from that and redeploy it in other parts of the business. So it has been lumpy. As a matter of fact, when we were on the trajectory, and it was with a large single customer, we often said that this is a harvest strategy. And this isn't a unique anomaly. We expect this to be less than 10% of our business moving forward. I would look at that as something we track. Number two, it's going to be a more diverse customer base. And number three, we're not trying to be everything to everybody.
If the value doesn't add up with the customers, we're not going to be in that specific space. And so what am I saying? We're okay with it where it sits today. We have a healthy funnel to meet our internal expectations. And we're going to manage it to that level. And we've right-sized the business for that level.
You referenced the large customer. Are you able to give some additional insight into how the relationship with that large customer is progressing and where things stand?
Yeah. So we're in negotiation. We're in talks, and our view is we want to move beyond this and move past the outstanding dynamic. That said, we have equipment that's working, that's meeting the demand of the market or meeting our expectation in the space, and where it's been fully implemented, it meets all thresholds, and so the market has shifted, which has then put the burden on us, but we do view that our best approach is getting to a resolution. If not, then we have to take different action, and we have a focus to get to resolution.
And then overall, for the, you describe it as a harvest strategy. Should investors think about you potentially divesting this business at some point in time?
I mean, our mission has always been get it to the point where it's a profitable piece of the organization. It's meeting what's required in the market. And then it gives us optionality. Today, it sits well within our business. And it fuels a lot of our growth. So I mean, I had an investor who's been with us for a long time talk to me a little bit about the ramp-up and what that looked like. And I can tell you, we took the profit from that. And we bought businesses like Heidolph, Avidity, and others through that process. So we're going to continue to build out strength in our core markets that we view are long-term more stable while we have businesses like this that we can lean on. And it sits within that well today.
If that were to change, the only thing I can draw to is about five years ago, we determined we were a me-too player in ICE, and that's ICE's internal combustion engine. It was medium to high risk, low profitability. We sold it, and so when things don't add up for our future, then we look at them differently. Today, it sits well, and it's a harvest strategy for our business.
Last quarter, we saw a pretty notable uptick in terms of your nuclear business, in terms of the bookings. Can you give a little bit of insight into what was underlying that uptick? And then for everybody, it's a question I get frequently is what exactly you do in nuclear?
So I get this question quite a bit too. So there's four areas for us for nuclear. First one, our largest. And it's the biggest piece. It's CANDU reactors. And more specifically in CANDU reactors, our biggest sweet spot is when you do a refurbishment. And if you don't know that, a CANDU reactor is multi-tube. And it has a lifespan. And then when you get to the end of that lifespan, what you'll find is the nuclear core. And by the way, talk to the nuclear folks. They would get a lot more detail on it. I'm just going to give you the Cliff Notes version. You'll start to degrade. And in the industry, when it gets close to the piping, it's called a hot spot. You can replace it for a period of time. And then you have to go through a refurbishment.
Bruce Power was a key customer for us and continues to be a key partner with us moving forward. We help them through the refurbishment process, and effectively, you're pulling the old nuclear core out. You're pulverizing it and putting a new one in, and that allows you to extend the use of that reactor, so you can bring clean energy to the market and continue the capability of that nuclear reactor. We do that very well, and that's the largest piece of our market, and then we, because this equipment is typically in the vault, we serve and support over the life of the equipment. Through that, we then got into traditional nuclear reactors, and those are the ones you're going to see typically in the U.S. where they have a normal life cycle.
When they come to the end of their life cycle, they're going to go through a decommissioning. We do refurbishment, which is decommissioning, then recommissioning. It's just half of that process. We help around the decommissioning phase. We've also, through this, expanded into SMRs, small modular reactors. We're working with some of the key players in this space. What we do is we do, because you have to change out the fuel rods at a certain period of time, whether it's 18 or 24 months, we do the automation around that. Every new build on an SMR, we would have a portion of that new build, low single digits. Low impact for our customers, but high value, and would be a good tailwind for ATS. The difference is, we personally, we at ATS think this is a four to five-year-out type of conversation.
So while everybody gets excited about it, and we are as well, we do think it's going to take time to prove it out. And when that does happen, with nuclear energy being green energy, it is going to have a fairly strong tailwind. And then last, and this is a bit new, is with the resurgence of nuclear, they now need more fuel rods. They need more raw fuel for the space. And so they're looking at automation to help get that to market. And so with the need, drives demand. With that demand, drives people looking at their capability and capacity. We're starting to help there. And it's a smaller piece. But I would say our largest position is still CANDU reactors and the refurbishment process.
And for the last quarter that was reported, it was the CANDU business. Okay. And then for the business in the U.S., category number two with the traditional reactors, are you active there? Is there work that you're bidding on? Could we anticipate some bookings there?
Yeah. So we are active. If you look at the scale within ATS, it's much smaller than our CANDU position. But we are active in the space. And we do provide a solution set. Because these companies, right, when you're decommissioning, you have a certain amount of money. And if you can do it for less and have the same quality and risk, low-risk process, you make more money. And so they look to automation for certain applications around that. And we do specific areas of application for that. And then if you came to our facility in Cambridge, one of our buildings, we actually at one point had a mock reactor in the back to prove out a lot of the technology.
And then within that, we were able to prove out for the decommissioning certain applications around that to help our customers really prove the technology and then be able to implement the technology.
We're almost up against our time. Does anybody in the audience have anything? Time for one more. So.
Got a question in the back.
Oh, go ahead.
There was a balance with some EV customer that, I guess, a collectibility issue. Can you touch on that?
So that was the one I mentioned around. We're in talks. We're in discussion with this customer. And specifically, the machines are installed where they've been commissioned. They're meeting expectations. The end market for this specific customer has shifted. So instead of, and I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but instead of a million per year, they're now 300,000-400,000. And that's driven a lot of the discussion. But at the end of the day, our view is the machines have been implemented. We're commissioned. We're meeting expectations. And we expect to get paid for that.
Is it a legal matter right now?
No. We're in negotiation right now.
Can I just follow up on that?
Yeah.
Why is there unbilled for those contractors? If the machines are implemented, shouldn't it just be built and then dispatched?
Yeah, so I mean, you're getting into a lot of detail, but it's a function of how the customer, their system you have to have access to their system to go in and build, and so at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. The equipment's all been delivered. It's in production.
So that's about our time. We are continuing the conversation down in Cordova 5, Cordova 5 for the record.