Stephan Tanda, CEO for the company, and Mary Skafidas, who does a wonderful job on Investor Relations. Here for Aptar, they unfortunately ran the gauntlet and ultimately could not be here live, but we are grateful that they're here virtually. That, you know, all the great work that our conference planning people have done, to enable the meetings and the presentation for Aptar to go on as planned, if just in a slightly different format. Welcome, Mary. Welcome, Stephan. How's the weather?
Excuse me? It's what?
Weather
How's the weather?
It's still snowing in New York.
Yeah.
It started snowing again.
Oh.
We're very jealous of those who were able to make it to Florida, and are enjoying, well, what I think is some cooler weather, but still better than New York.
Good deal. Maybe just to Stephan, if you can hear me okay, warm up. You know, what two, three things would you want to remind investors on regarding Aptar, and why, you know, it is the wonderful company that it is? Then we'll get into the meat of the questions.
Good to be with all of you. Thanks for making it happen like this, George. Fundamentally, we have a best-in-class, leading proprietary drug delivery system, a business. Basically, if it goes through the nose, it goes through Aptar. That used to be true just for the sniffles and allergies, but increasingly is true for almost anything that you need to get into the bloodstream to affect human health, which can be a lot. I think that's number one. Number two, our consumer-facing businesses have been significantly improved. The closure business is in and out of its long-term target range. The beauty business has resumed growth. Many aspects of the consumer business benefit the pharma business.
For example, our leadership in sustainability that we've developed in the consumer business is now increasingly relevant for our consumer healthcare business. I think that that's number two. Number three, just a reminder, we're very global. Our supply chain is set up in region, for region. While we don't appreciate at all the global tensions around trade and so on, we are well positioned to manage and deliver to customers and patients in every region because of our multi-region supply chain setup.
Understood. Thanks, Stephan. Some good meat to get into in discussion in a minute off of those points. Just I'm not sure if you can see from where you're sitting, but it's actually a very full room here, so a lot of interest in Aptar today. As always, the company is guiding me. We'll get to the first of the questions to $1.13 to $1.21 in the first quarter. To the extent that you can comment, you know, midway through the quarter, how are trends progressing? Or what were some of the key assumptions and/or some of the macro sort of guardrails? You know, from what you can see, no guarantees in life, you know, relative to what you said, you know, a few weeks ago, how are things looking from those data sets for the first quarter?
Yeah, obviously, we're not updating our guidance here. Fundamentally, we're comfortable with the range that we gave when we announced Q4. The exchange rate was at EUR 1.18. It's still pretty much there. We expect a good quarter across the board, obviously with the exception of emergency medicine, primarily naloxone. I think overall, nothing's really changed.
Okay. Thank you, Stephan. What were the key reasons, to the extent that you could talk, that you expected to be in your overall range for margin for the year, which I think is 21%-23% for the company? Would that, and remind me if you, if you already talked about it, not necessarily mean that pharma has got to be in its range of, you know, 32%-36%? How would you have us conjure on that, ponder on that?
I think we expect Pharma to do quite well, with the exception of emergency medicine. Most of that impact will be in the first half. I think the good news is that, with quarter four, we could kind of confirm the $65 million impact that we had given you three months earlier. I think we're kind of quarter along in honing in on that number and triangulating order intake, what we hear from customers, what little we see from customers in inventory, so that we boxed in that impact, and most of that will be in the first half.
Apart from that, we see consumer healthcare being back to growth. We see of course, injectable growing very briskly, including GLP-1, but not only, also other areas. And Active Materials doing well. Overall, we expect the Pharma business to do well. I will not commit to the range for the full year. We expect improvement in the bottom line margins for the Consumer business and the Pharma to be doing very well for the company to be within its long-term range for the year, which we still feel quite comfortable with.
Thank you, Stephan. I want to switch gears just for a minute to Beauty and Closures, where the performance in the quarter was a little off from what we were expecting, a little off from what you were expecting. Certainly one-off factors were at work, I think, you know, speaking as someone who's covered the company for a long time, we'd, you know, love to see maybe a bit more steady progress on the margin towards the margin goals in Beauty.
You've been getting better. Closures, you know, has been doing very nicely. You know, how soon, to the extent that you can comment, will you be back making more progress towards those goals in the, you know, first quarter? What in particular went so well for you in the Closures reorganization that really reinvigorated the growth and the margin? That was, we've said it before, that was more than we expected, better than expected, and props to you on that.
Yeah. Let's start with that part. While we practice the same fundamental industrial processes across the company, Closures is very specific. It has by far the highest material content of any of our products. It's heavy-duty injection molding and a little bit of assembly. The logic of that business is different than a nasal spray, an airless system, an aerosol that we practice in beauty and pharma. The industrial logic of. The assets are fungible. You can make one closure one day, another closure the next day, you just swap out the tool. It is more of a operations-intensive business, where you really need to watch capital intensity and you need to watch your cost base, and you need to be close with customers, both in the stock business and in the tailor business. Hindsight is always easy, 20/20.
Sure.
It used to be that the business structured that way, but in 2010, Aptar decided to go to the end-use segments, and took some of the closures activities into different segments. We just went back to saying: Hey, this is for this particular business, the better way to run it. All the things that I said, the team has done, I'm very proud of what the team has done. Drive capital efficiency, drive cost down, be on the front foot with customers. Of course, the market helps. I mean, let's be clear, food and beverage, which is a big part of this business, is very resilient.
Whether the consumer is doing great, whether the consumer is not doing great, whether they buy private label or brands, whether they buy smaller formats or bigger formats, if they eat out less, it's even better for us. A weaker consumer doesn't hurt that business, maybe even helps a little bit. All of these factors have come together to get that business back to where it needs to be. Not perfect. We had some operations hiccups at one of our larger U.S. sites in the quarter. That kind of made it dip out of the margin range, but we feel very good about the business. Coming back to Beauty. Beauty is more complex. It needed substantial renovation that you are very well aware of.
We're kind of 80% done with that, but as you get done, you have additional ideas, and that's one thing. Two, we were quite heartened with the bounce back of demand that we saw in quarter four. It wasn't 10%, 25% of that was tooling and some easier comparisons, but nevertheless, we see that the market come back, customers come back. Unfortunately, we did lose it with some significant operational hiccups. One, we lost an important supplier, where we had to qualify last minute, somebody else at higher prices and poorer quality. We had some one-time compliance cost at another Asian facility in France. The quarter four margin is not representative for what that business can do by any stretch, and we expect that business to progress along the trajectory we had before. We will do more productivity actions in that business.
Thank you, Stephan. A little bit later on, we have a great presentation at lunch, from a trade economist and attorney who worked for the administration. We're eager to hear what she's gonna be talking about in terms of different regional hot buttons and things like that. One of the things, obviously, and you touched on in your comments at the open, you know, that, you know, there can be pressure points depending on the region. Aptar has long sort of navigated these well.
You have, as a company, and probably more than most companies that we track, have done a very good job of expanding in China and growing your presence there. Help us understand why you're comfortable with that strategy, particularly as regards pharma? More broadly, and more specifically at the non-pharma businesses, are you seeing more competition from non, sort of classic Aptar regions, making it a little bit tougher in closure, a little bit tougher in beauty? Or is that really not an issue for the company on a going-forward basis? Thank you.
We could talk for hours on this one. I think the first one I would say is, we've been in China since the mid-1990s, so that's now 30 years, and we're during COVID, renewed our asset base to now be state-of-the-art, complemented with some acquisitions and joint ventures. In this new geopolitical environment, I'm actually very happy with the competitive footprint we have there. Primarily to serve the growing domestic market, but also especially for beauty, to help with accelerating development timelines, speeding up processes in Europe.
Take the pilot mold or getting product to market. It used to take 18 months was the standard. With the Chinese infrastructure, we can do it in 6 months, even if we produce it still in Europe. The front end of that work, the prototyping, the prototype molding, and so on, it's just faster. I've been on record, geopolitics aside, just as a business person, the capitalistic nature and the just sheer will to succeed, in the country is unparalleled, and that includes our own teams.
Getting things done is just very quick. When you talk about the domestic market, it's 1.4 billion people with increasing spending power. Thankfully, we address consumer and patient needs that are not sensitive to geopolitical issues or national security issues. Everyone wants us to succeed, our shareholders, the local government, consumers, patients, so there is no misalignment of incentives. We feel very comfortable. The last point I would make, we have very strong local talent. You cannot run a multi-region business, especially in today's world, without the strong local talent we have at the senior level, at the executive committee, Shang-Wei Geng , who has very skillfully led the region, including China. All of these factors make us quite comfortable.
Pharma is not so different than the other businesses. In fact, when you go to pharma, who follow the pharma industry, a tremendous part of the upstream development work now happens in China. Clinical trials happen in China. A lot of the biotech innovations happen in China and are now licensed to Western companies. It's like in some other industries, maybe a little bit later in pharma, that's gone from quote, "low-cost" production to now being an innovation, a powerhouse that is important to feed into the global system. It's, yes, you need to run it at a different rate than we ran it before geopolitics changed. We are well positioned to do it that way. The profitability of our China business is on par, actually slightly better than our global company.
Thanks, Stefan. Just a quickie, there was a sidebar to that question. Just, more broadly, are you seeing more competition from producers in China, producers elsewhere in Asia, in traditional closure markets and traditional beauty markets that's affecting margin, the growth outlook, or no, not really, it's competition has been pretty status quo? Then I want to pivot to the pharma business and get in a little bit more deeply there with our questions.
Yeah. It's actually interesting. One, the closures business is very much in country or in region for region, because as what I mentioned earlier, the material content being so high, it's not something that you ship across oceans.
Okay.
what you produce in China stays in China.
Got it.
Maybe surrounding countries, and so on. In beauty, there's more of that. Certainly, there's been a push of Chinese producers, especially into Latin America and into the U.S. and Europe. Given the geopolitics, that actually has been slowed down a little bit or has demanded more of the Chinese producers to kind of have foot, boots on the ground, so to speak, in Europe and in the U.S. and in Mexico. you know, I sometimes say running a true multinational is not that easy, whether you're a U.S. multinational or you're trying to be a Chinese multinational. Having boots on the ground in Europe, making that work, boots on the ground, making that work, there's a lot of hits and starts. Actually, I don't see increased competition, maybe even a little bit less. Latin America is still more of a trading business for them, so we see more competition there.
Okay.
The other thing I would say for the Pharma business, certainly the less regulated markets, you see more Chinese presence there and, last but not least, into Russia. We used to have a big Pharma business in Russia, now it's a little smaller Pharma business. Part of that is really shares lost to Chinese producers, where we couldn't get export license. Of course, the Chinese were happy to step in.
Thanks, Stephan. I just want to switch a little bit more to pharma now. your investor decks show a multi-year increase in both the number and the weighted value of your pipeline opportunities, which is great. Could you bridge the pipeline by stage, you know, preclinical, pivotal, validation, launch, and how that might translate? I know you don't give more than a quarter guide, let alone a year, let alone a multi-year. How that pipeline might sort of evolve over the next four years across those categories. Within the pipeline, we've noticed that the value trajectory has come back down and converged more to be in line with the unit in the pipeline opportunity in that chart. What's been driving that? Those two questions, please.
Yeah. I mean, we disclose what we're comfortable disclosing for competitive reasons. I think, you know, you'll have seen us over the last few years to peel back the onion more and more on that pipeline. The way we give the statistics on the pipeline is, as you would expect, risk-adjusted. Obviously, things that are early in the pipeline carry a much higher risk than as things progress towards the launch. Indeed, we had a big spike of activities during COVID vaccine opportunities, and now the pipeline ratio has more normalized.
Got it.
I think the big news on the pipeline that's really important to keep in mind, and we first discussed it at the Capital Markets Day in September. Maybe it was a little bit drowned out with the NARCAN story, but we gave you more visibility at JPMorgan, and it's in the investor presentation for this event, is the richness of indications in the pipeline. I mean, you're talking. If you had asked me, George, two years ago, "Will you have these sensing in the pipeline?" I'd say, "No, I don't think so." In fact, you may have asked me. Now we have a peptide, GLP-1, in the pipeline. We have people working on neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia. We have people working on mental health and we have people working on cardiovascular indications.
In fact, we just had two important launches in recent times against edema and tachycardia. It's kind of an alternative to injection, where to bring molecules quickly into your bloodstream in a defined manner. The industry has kind of woken up. That is a great way to repurpose all the molecules, whether it was naloxone or ketamine. Now it goes really across the board, and the pipeline is just bulging. That's really what we're super excited about because it's in the sweet spot of our profit engine, proprietary drug delivery devices through the nose.
In the inhalation space, also, we have a big transition going on to low global warming potential propellants. Last time that happened, it was very accretive for our business. Again, that is a big piece of our pipeline. The richness and breadth and depth of that pipeline is really super exciting, it's not about the sniffles anymore. You know, it's about treating heart disease, it's about treating dementia. It's about maybe taking your GLP-1 through the nose.
Thank you, Stephan. Thank you, Mary. I wanna make sure there aren't any questions in the audience. Any questions for Stephan or Mary? Okay. We'll keep forging ahead from our side here. Stephan, kind of a micro question to the extent that you can comment. I know you're not gonna break out the revenue, but is there a way to talk at all about Unidose and how, you know, large it's been in your CAGR over time? You know, if your CAGR in Pharma has been 7%, Unidose has been, you know, a point to that, eight points to that. Obviously, it's not gonna be that, but, you know, any way to size how important it's been to your growth rate in Pharma?
Yes. We obviously don't disclose that growth or sales by product line. Clearly, the proprietary drug delivery systems.
Okay
Is the key driver. When you think about the Unidose and the Bidose and related formats, they're really controlling the dosing of a drug. If you talk about life-saving drugs that you need to dispense with 99.999% reliability, basically, that Unidose device is an auto-injector that goes through the nose. It has a vial inside, it has a plunger inside. It has very precise dosing. Same for the Bidose. Those things will carry more value than, you know, a plunger in a prefilled syringe, you know?
That's really what's driving. The same is true for an inhaler. I mean, you wanna get your asthma dose very, very great. The reason our inhalation franchise is so strong is, again, it's treating chronic disease, and if this thing doesn't work, patients get in trouble. Precise dosing of medications is what our PDDS is all about, and Unidose is a part of that, and it's an important part of it.
Thanks.
if I could add before
Sure, Mary, please.
When you look at, Stephan mentioned that we had made available the pipeline forward-looking for pharma, for prescription. Not just prescription division, prescription, you know, including injectables. The top three, when you look at them, are, you know, pulmonary, so not Unidose, biologics, right?
Yeah.
Which is primarily injectables. Then you have systemic nasal drug delivery, which is a number of delivery systems, including, you know, Unidose, Bidose and others, as Stephan mentioned. It's important, but it's not the only thing that's driving the growth or the only format that's driving the growth.
Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Stephan. You're very, very clear on that. Can you talk a little bit about the tailwinds you expect to get from Annex 1, you know, maybe perhaps related to biologics and also for GLP? Second question, you know, we've seen the growth in injectables. It's very good business, but it is a little bit lower margin than the overall for Pharma. Over time, how does that impact your longer term, that mix effect, as that grows more quickly, perhaps, than your proprietary drug delivery systems impact your long-term margin target of 32%-36% in Pharma?
Well, let's start, we are in the injectable business because injected medicines are really a major part of the how drugs get delivered, especially modern biologic drugs that have been manufactured through biotech means. Meaning they are large molecules, they are sensitive molecules. You can't just punch them in a pill. Maybe they're too big for nasal delivery. The injected format is the format of choice for modern biologic drugs, whether they be biologics, biosimilars. We wanted to be part of that, and, you know, we have the technology and the right to play. By the time COVID came around, our technical capabilities have been developed so that they are on par with the market leader.
The market, you know, we didn't have, thankfully, the big COVID whiplash because we didn't have a large position in the COVID vaccine. The market continues to grow. You mentioned Annex 1. Annex 1 is basically a leaning in or a tailwind that convinces customers, in case of doubt, go for the higher value solution, go for the sterilized solution, go for a solution that is premium-coded. That means for us, a higher margin product. That means for the industry, more in a shift towards higher margin products. GLP-1 obviously is a very nice tailwind. I expect that to continue. I do not believe that oral will take away, oral will just expand the market, especially in countries with non-chilled distribution. Overall, we're dealing with a growing market.
Biotech is still at the beginning of its S-curve. I mean, if you think of how we understand traditional small molecule chemistry or physics, compare that to biotech, I mean, we're still many, many, many decades away from reaching the peak of the innovation cycle and many diseases to cure. I would never bet against biotech drugs and we wanted and we now have a position in that. On your margin point, clearly, we've invested $200 million in brand-new state-of-the-art facilities, and they are now being filled. As they're being filled, we gain efficiencies. Margin will improve as we shift the mix to more higher margin products, margins will improve. This negative mix effect that you've seen very pronounced in quarter four, will be less over time. Will it ever go away?
Well, probably not. Why? Again, I come back to in life-saving medicines, we control the dose that saves the life. That's a slightly different value add than the plunger in that auto injector or that needle shield. Not saying that it's not important, but it doesn't demand the same kind of pricing as life-saving medications. But certainly, we see margin expansion in injectables itself through both operational efficiencies, economies of scale, and mix enrichment.
Stephan Tanda, you've been, you know, very candid, over the recent years that GLP-1 is nice. It's a nice to have. It's not, you know, the entirety, for sure, of your Pharma business. Certainly, investors like to come to Aptar because you have that full suite of products. With that being said, and you already commented on, touched on it, why do you think oral winds up being something that expands the category as opposed to and also continues the growth in injectables, as opposed to expand the category and maybe flattening out injectables? What kind of takeaways have you had that you're laying with us here today?
Yeah. I see a number of reasons. Number one, what drives a big portion of the GLP-1 growth these days is weight loss. There is nothing today that's better than Zepbound, tirzepatide. If, if people are interested in weight loss, they're gonna go for the one that delivers the biggest bang for the buck. I have not seen any data that oral formats outperform tirzepatide, injected. You know, Wegovy is close behind that, semaglutide. Number one. Number two, there are many markets that do not have chilled distribution into the pharmacy or even chilling capability at home, and those tend to be markets with massive, overweight populations. Think India, think China, parts of Mexico.
That's where the oral dose will be the biggest fit because it's the first option people have because they don't have the injectable option. Clearly, there will be people who don't want to inject themselves, who just have a phobia, also in the developed markets in the US, and they will go to the oral format. I do not believe, again, until oral formats become more efficacious, that they will rule the day. Last is an e-economic argument. Most of the oral formats come from the same producers who have built tens of billions of infrastructure, to deliver you more auto injectors. Their economic strategies and pricing strategies will be such to take advantage of the installed capacity and not obsolete it. I think it's just economic sense.
There is plenty of commercial strategies available to them. You just saw Novo cutting price 50%. There is not a big, strong relationship between cost and price, so they have a lot of flexibility in managing the market so that they don't obsolete their investment base. Now, I'm not talking about 20 years from now, but the kind of time frames we are interested in, we believe this business continue to grow. Anecdotally, consumers still have a hard time getting their injector when it's prescribed and often have to wait a week. It's not an oversupply by any stretch.
Stephan, maybe touch on it here a little bit. How much runway does Aptar have across its injectable capacity before additions have to be made? Where might the bottlenecks be, whether it's mixing or coding, if you can share or remind us?
Think of investment in injectables really in several categories. One is, do you have the building? Those are massive buildings with the ability, all the utilities that you need to run clean rooms and automation. We just made a massive investment in a brand-new building in Normandy, France. Those come around every 10-15 years. Certainly nothing on the horizon. We just finished one. Inside the buildings, you need the mixer
Which basically creates the first step, the polymer, then the molding, and then the finishing, whether that's coating, washing, sterilizing, and so on. Those are much smaller investment increments. Maybe the mix is a little bit larger than the others, and you can just creep capacity inside the existing buildings with doing that. Again, we think we are done for quite a while, with the large investments and now just can creep capacity in the ordinary course of as this business is growing.
Thank you, Stephan. Any questions from the audience as we're wrapping up here with Aptar, Stephan, and Mary Skafidas? Stephan, just, you know, point of confirmation on emergency medicines, you remain comfortable that, the destock will run its course based on the timeline that you said, most of it in the first half, based on the intelligence that you've got in the market? Just want to confirm that.
Yes. You know, that's more your territory, but what we kind of took away that the market felt somewhat relieved that we gave the same number three months later than we gave three months earlier. It kind of tells you that we feel comfortable that we've boxed this in.
Yeah.
It's, we hear from customers, certainly, don't see any reason to change that. $65 million, most of which in the first half.
You could be a securities analyst, Stephan. It's your next gig.
I'll stay in my lane.
Any last questions on beauty, on closures, on pharma before we wrap with AptarGroup? Well, if not, we'll wrap it here. Stephan and Mary, thank you so much for your fortitude and being here even though you couldn't be. We appreciate everything that you do to support our research and the community's work on, on AptarGroup. Thanks very much. Everybody, join me in thanking Stephan and Mary for a great presentation.
Thank you, George.
Bye, guys. Good luck the rest of the day!