Hello, everyone. Good morning. Thank you for coming. My name is Zach Canter. I'm a member of the Healthcare Investment Banking team here at J.P. Morgan. It's my pleasure to introduce Azenta Life Sciences. Today, we're joined by Stephen Schwartz, CEO. There'll be a presentation followed by a short Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you, Zach. Good morning, everyone. It's great to see you here. Just let me start. We're delighted to have a chance again to present here at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. I'm proud to represent about 4,000 employees worldwide from Azenta, who are really focused on delivering on our purpose to enable breakthroughs faster. I'd love to convey just a short summary of where we are as a company, catch up a little bit from the report we had last quarter, and also talk about the future as we see it. Toward that end, I will be making forward-looking statements. I just want to remind everyone, call your attention to our safe harbor statement at www.azenta.com.
As we begin, I wanna just outline for you a tremendously unique value portfolio around sample management, the sourcing, the storage, formatting, and ultimately measurement of samples that are critical for the discovery process across the life sciences space. We have a strong growth record as a company. We continue to serve very attractive growth markets that have served us well for the past 10 years, will serve us well for the next 10 years. I'll talk specifically about some issues we have related to creating value, and how do we continue to grow, not just the top line, but profitability of an exciting company opportunity. I'll give a quick update on the recent actions that we have taken over the past 1 2 weeks. We announced many of these on our fourth quarter fiscal year earnings call in early November.
We're an October 1 fiscal year. I'll start with the revenue profile of the company. We were able to deliver organic growth, again, 2%. And in the market segments that we participate, even a 2% organic growth is outperformance compared to the market opportunity. So we feel strongly that we're in a good position in each of the segments that we have in the life sciences space. On a reported basis, we had 25% growth, and that was by virtue of the fact that we had done an acquisition one year earlier. We continued to drive profitability, and we had another quarter of positive free cash flow. And so the health of the business, the underlying business, is starting to generate a significant profitability with a lot more potential in the future. And the...
At the time, in early November, we were able to forecast with some confidence a mid- to high-single-digits growth for 2024, and a commitment to deliver at least 300 basis points of EBITDA improvement, as this is a margin expansion path that we're on here that'll take us with considerable focus over the next six to eight quarters. But we're really confident in our ability to continue to drive margin expansion while we grow the top line. Fourteen months ago, we announced a $1.5 billion share buyback authorization by the board with a commitment to $1 billion to be accomplished in 2023.
At the time of the earnings call in November, the vast majority that was done, we had purchased about $950 million of shares, with the rest to be done in the remainder of the year. At that time, we also committed to the other $500 million that we intend to complete in 2024. So that'll fulfill a $1.5 billion share repurchase commitment, and that program is going particularly well. Finally, recently, we announced some governance changes as part of our five years now ongoing board refresh plan. We've nominated three strong directors for addition to the board. They represent strong operational and scientific capabilities in the life sciences space, and we have a shareholder perspective, uniquely, to add to the board.
So we think each of these capabilities just will continue to enhance the go-forward position of the board, gives us a very strong governance position, as we've always had, but this refresh continues to set us up for the coming years. We're delighted by these nominees, and we look forward to very strong governance and management profile here in the near future. Let me spend a minute here to frame the rest of the conversation, to talk a little bit about the workflow solutions that we provide. We are an enabler to those who do discovery in life science, by performing critical but non-core capabilities in the management of biological samples. So all the way from sourcing samples of patients with a rare disease type or a particular profile, particular phenotype, we can source these samples.
We format them for automation in a workflow or for storage, ultimately, and subsequent use. We have storage systems and a storage business where we store tens of millions of samples in our biorepositories and hundreds of millions of samples in our installed base of large automated stores. So we can manage these biological samples for storage from a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, for use subsequently in scientific discovery. And we have a very strong platform to measure, and annotate, and decorate these samples, and ultimately provide data to those who need data from a particular phenotype. And so it's a critical capability utilized by every discovery company, and what we do is we enable them to do it in a secure fashion with a much higher speed and much higher fidelity than they could do it themselves. And we're watching this momentum build.
The trends in the marketplace are coming our way to enable us to provide this capability as a supplier of critical capabilities to them. We're pleased with the platform. The market growth opportunities I'll address in a minute, but it remains a very strong and a very unique profile. I wanna comment that we have the reach and sustained growth for market penetration. We have a footprint and a capability that exists to serve a growing global market. We are about a $700 million revenue player in a market opportunity in our space that's greater than $10 billion. We have a unique capability, and we've barely begun to penetrate. We have an opportunity here to continue to expand based on the footprint that we have. We have more than 10,000 customers.
We serve 150 different countries, and most importantly, even after the considerable buyback and the capital return, we have $500 million of cash to deploy to continue to enhance this portfolio, to continue to make investments in innovation, to take our portfolio and capabilities to the next level. So we believe we have world-class capabilities in every segment, and we have enough cash to deploy to continue to enhance that capability. We believe we're in extremely strong position. So we have a growth profile as a company, plenty of dry powder, and a footprint that enables us to engage customers to continue to innovate and drive further growth here in the future. So when we talk about the capabilities to capture growth, I'll just give you a few data points here. We were a $10 million company 13 years ago.
We're almost a $700 million company today. We are built to grow and to serve a market opportunity uniquely, and we think we're doing it particularly well. We have a mindset to grow. We have a mindset to innovate, and as customers have additional needs that are in and around our space, we're quick to fill those needs and those voids, so we anticipate continued growth. And I think to a person in the company, everybody understands that's a critical and essential part of us serving our mission. Customers have needs that are unmet today, uniquely around the things that we do, and we continue to go after them. In terms of a framework, we've been through a couple of fits and starts in terms of how we go to market here.
We have realigned the company here over the past year to focus very specifically sales organizations in particular market segments, and it's enabled us to regroup and to capture growth. We've made a number of significant investments in the sales organization, and that's served us particularly well in terms of how we gain share. And what we'll do over the next six to eight quarters, is we'll continue to drive efficiencies from a pretty significant investment. But without incremental spend, we think we can drive tremendous value by getting systems and capabilities put in place to leverage a strong global footprint with a lot of expertise. But what enthuses us most is the right column here, when we talk about targeted growth opportunities. We continue to make strategic investments in places that will drive value for our customers.
We're in the process of using our portfolio, our capability to source, format, store, and measure samples, to not just do it on behalf of samples that are owned by customers, but you'll see us in the future going to samples that are-- that we own, or we can provide that capability to customers, that we can source samples that will be used by many different customers, run them through our specific care portfolio and measurement portfolio, and be able to provide data to companies that will be able to utilize that in the future. We have next generation automated store that will store more than 10 million samples with a carbon footprint that's less than half what exists today.
We think this will be transformative, both for customers with high volumes of samples, but also it'll continue to transform the biorepository business and take our world-class capability to yet another level, and we think that will continue to drive growth. And finally, we have a B Medical platform, which is a footprint that's today part of a vaccine network, and we believe this will be an essential part of a unique capability to use that cold chain platform to do surveillance and the retrieval of rare and high-fidelity, important biological samples in the future. So we're enthusiastic about the investments that we're able to make, and to not just serve the markets that we're in, but to also to expand and redefine those markets at the same time.
I'll just give you a little bit of history here, but it's important because it also outlines what the future is for the company. In the first five years of Azenta, we were part of Brooks—we were Brooks Life Sciences, and at the time, we had technologies that we had developed in the semiconductor capital equipment space for controlled temperatures and automation in that space. We used those two capabilities to begin to explore opportunities in life sciences, and over a period of five years, we grew about $100 million of business using those core technologies, inventing new capabilities, doing stores and storage in the life sciences space. Subsequent to that, we added sample measurement, the ability to interrogate the samples that we stored or samples that customers gave to us, and we were able to expand to a $500 million business.
While the sample storage and stores business grew, we added a value to those samples. At the same time, we grew a $500 million business, and from this height, from this particular platform, with a $500 million revenue, we began to look at sourcing of samples so that we could take control of the very specific needs the customers had. Now we've engaged in a major thrust to employ automation across the business. So employ automation in our workflows to enhance the genomics business, just because of the sheer scale, and to enhance the biorepository business by transforming that to what, five years from now, will be a fully automated biorepository business. Because today we are 50 million samples stored in our biorepositories.
We need to get to the point where we can manage hundreds of millions of samples, and the only way to do that effectively for our customers and cost effectively, is to employ automation. So you'll see in our repositories now, we're putting fully automated stores, and this will transform the world-leading capability that we have today to yet another, to another level where we're able to store an order of magnitude more samples effectively and efficiently for customers. In terms of the growth prospects, the trends that we take advantage of, that give tailwinds to the company, are very strong. There's a continued trend toward outsourcing of R&D. More than 50% of R&D is outsourced. The capabilities that we provide are a natural capability for customers to take advantage of.
Manage our samples, measure our samples, source our samples. These are the kinds of things that leaves discovery to them and takes these really important characteristics into a company like Azenta. We continue to believe that the trend will lean more toward 50%, but a huge percentage of the outsourcing comes to a company like ours. The 2x growth over a five-year period, we've relied on this statistic now for about three years, and it continues to be true. Over the foreseeable future, we continue to see a doubling of the samples over five years. Recently, we've talked about a 15% growth in the storage component of our SRS business, which is consistent with the doubling in our automated stores business.
The volume of that business has grown by more than 30% recently, and those are, again, sheer sample counts that are driving the repository business, sheer sample counts that are being stored that are driving the automated stores business. And finally, although there are fits and starts in and around the cell and gene therapy space, we believe in that market opportunity. We believe in the long-term growth profile there. We're heavily invested to be able to meet the requirements of that market. We have cryogenic technology products that serve the market. We're in a slower period for that business right now, but we do anticipate that as it picks up, we're well positioned to continue to capture all opportunities in and around the critical management in an automated fashion of treatments for cell and gene therapy.
And again, cryogenic temperature is a nontrivial development that we've performed now six years ago, and we're well positioned as the leaders in that space. We have a profile that starts in the research lab, so the capabilities that we bring to our customers, we're proud of the fact that we have scientific chops to provide capabilities to customers. We have more than 400 advanced degree scientists who do perform genomics, multiomics, synthesis capabilities on behalf of customers, who are utilized by the state-of-the-art scientists. If you ask people about the GENEWIZ capability in Azenta, I think to a person, they will tell you that it's exceptional capability and rare scientific talents, we're cited in journals, we're referenced by the kinds of work that we do. We have 10,000 customers, and we continue to serve pharma.
So all the way from research to delivery, we are now becoming embedded portion of the drug discovery and drug delivery for the pharmaceutical industry. I give a representative case study, and the reason I bring this is, one of the things that we intend to do here is, how do we get customers connected to this entire portfolio? So we continue to expand. If a customer stores with us, will they do the omics studies with us? If they do omics with us, will they store with us? And we have a degree of success, starting with the large pharmaceutical companies, and we'll continue to work this backward to some of the smaller, biopharma companies because we do provide value across the portfolio. We have a very specific case study, which is representative of how we've operated.
In the early 2000s, companies that we acquired had automated stores, storing samples on behalf of customers at their customer sites. At the same time, GENEWIZ, as a genomics provider, was serving these same customers in different environments. As we began to explain to customers the value of connecting the storage and the measurement of samples, they could understand that they were getting this now from a single company. What we found is that as they also understood that we could do outsource repository services, in 2020, this customer began to outsource biological samples to us for storage in Indianapolis. They had our stores, they had our genomics capability, and they began to outsource their samples to us with the promise that if they needed to retrieve those, we could perform genomic analysis on those samples as if they'd stored them on-site.
A year later, we expanded some of the genomic services, and we added RNA-seq as a critical capability. Most recently, in 2022, we shipped 100 million samples worth of storage for automated stores to the headquarters building to store the samples for the customer on-site, and at the same time, they continued to give us biological samples from some of their entities for our storage in our Indianapolis repository. So we continue to expand capability, and this is an idea for you about the footprint that we have with the customer. As we begin to penetrate, as we begin to demonstrate capability, customers continue to give us more of what they've given us at one point, and they rely on us across that workflow and cold chain to take advantage of stores and storage and omics, and ultimately, the formatting of samples.
So this is a representative. We have the most success here at the large pharmaceutical companies, but in no instances have we gone backwards, and in every instance, year-over-year, we make progress about capturing more of their capabilities. So we're particularly proud of this as a validation of the platform, and we're keen to continue to expand. And finally, I wanna talk about a change that we introduced at the October first start of the fiscal year. We went to three reportable segments, different from the two that we'd had before. Sample Management Solutions is literally the sourcing, the formatting, the stores and storage, the management of those physical assets on behalf of the customer. This aligns particularly well with the sales force.
How do we work with customers on the physical movement and management of the samples for which they drive discovery? Multiomics is a scientist-to-scientist capability, where we sell the technical capabilities. We have the scientific capabilities, we have the customers, and putting the omics business together in a different sales organization, in a different structure, is proving to be exactly the solution for how do we go to take care of those customers. These are transactional types of businesses, scientists engaging with scientists, and we have a conversation one day, and we win an order the next, and we provide the data back to the customer the day after that. So this is the type of business. It's a fast turn, but highly scientific omics capability. And then finally, B Medical, which is the vaccine delivery capability that we have.
This is a part of the cold chain for going to remote parts of the world in fast-growing, emerging markets to deliver vaccines. This is and will become an even more critical part of the physical contact to a patient to inject a vaccine, simultaneously to bring a biological sample from that patient back into a network of highly desired, highly rare, and valuable genetic makeup from rare populations for which there's a tremendous demand in the industry. So B Medical is a separate segment for various reasons, the funding mechanisms, but as we build that into the capabilities that are supported by Sample Management Solutions and Multiomics, we see it as a tremendous opportunity. But right now, for clarity for investors and for an opportunity to continue to grow that business separately, B Medical is a separate reportable segment. I mentioned here the breakdown.
So you can see Sample Management Solutions is approximately $300 million business. The Multiomics business is about $250 million of business, so these businesses are at considerable scale. Investments independently for each one, how do we continue to grow those? And as I mentioned, at the portfolio level, how do we continue to bridge between Sample Management and Multiomics is a tremendous opportunity for the company. B Medical Systems in fiscal 2023, ended at September 30th, was $113 million, so a good sizable business. It is irregular, and it's not as predictable as we'd like as a business, but it's a steady winner of business, and when the B Medical team knows they want a piece of business, ultimately, they deliver. So we're highly confident in their market position.
We're highly confident in their ability to continue to drive a strong revenue. It's a little bit more irregular. Exposing that is a really important part of the portfolio, but again, it's a healthy business at more than $100 million, and we anticipate continued growth from B Medical and continued opportunity to drive samples back into the Sample Management and Multiomics business. We're a growth company, so we're used to it, we're built on it, we're fueled by it. We've grown particularly fast, both organically and inorganically.
We continue to look at an opportunity going forward with the $500 million of investable capability to add on to this portfolio, to continue to drive toward what we believe will be a business that ought to be aiming toward a couple of $2 billion here in the next five years, because we think there's just tremendous opportunity for the company in and around this space. We're lightly penetrated, but successfully penetrated in each and every area. As customers make that conversion, we are ready now at scale to deliver huge returns to them. And finally, as I wrap up here, there's a tremendous focus in the company now. We've built all the capability and capacity that we need, and now as we derive efficiencies in the company, we have the resources we need now to build revenue on top.
But at the same time, we'll continue to work on the EBITDA expansions. We're going to continue to make investments in the company to drive profitability, and some of these investments will be necessary to-- it'll impact negatively EBITDA, but nonetheless, the investments we make here over the coming quarters will increase EBITDA 75%, and we do have an intention to get back to the type of growth rates that are in the low teens, and we want to get the EBITDA at least to the mid-teens here over the next few years. We will spend a considerable amount of time reporting that back to you with specific programs, but we're keen to continue to deliver here in the near term, and we anticipate 300 basis points.
We commit to 300 basis points of improvement here in fiscal 2024 as a starting point on this trajectory. To summarize, we're a $650+ million revenue business, pretty close to $700 million. We have a global platform that we think supports capabilities and customers' needs here for the foreseeable future. The balance sheet, we think, is extremely well-positioned in and around the additions that we'll make to continue to add value around the portfolio that we hold today. And because of the uniqueness of it and the needs for it, we think we're in a particularly strong position as Azenta Life Sciences. We really appreciate the support that you've given us, the attention today, and look forward very much to continue to report out on progress of the company.
Toward that end, I want to announce that we plan to hold an Investor Day in New York City on March fourteenth. We welcome your participation, either live or remotely, but we are keen to share with you the next steps that we'll take from a profitability standpoint, from a growth standpoint, and we do anticipate we'll put a longer-term model back out for you, based on the foundation that we have today and what we see as just tremendous prospects going forward. So we look forward to that. We thank the team at J.P. Morgan for including us today, and I guess with that, we'll be glad to take some questions. Thank you.
... If anyone has any questions, just raise your hand. We have a mic going around. Yes.
Okay, good morning, Steve.
Hi, Chris Sangaduce. Mic for you here.
Yeah. Good morning, Steve. Just a question on the three segments that you're now reporting, right? Do you break out margins? Do you have segment margin reporting as well?
We do.
And-
Actually, we do.
Would you just comment on kind of those three segments relative to kind of the consolidated corporate margin?
I'm not in a position to do that, Chris, but at the earnings call, we'll be glad to do that.
Okay
... still when we post that-
Then, uh-
Be part of the reporting.
Follow-up question is, B Medical, you acquired that, what, in the last 18 months or?
October 1st of 2023, we closed.
Okay. And you-
2022.
2022. You commented that, you know, it is kind of a lumpy business. Was it historically lumpy, or has something kind of changed, you know, in its end market, that has introduced, you know, that kind of lumpy feature?
Yeah. So historically, it always was lumpy, and, Chris, I'll give you- I'll give back. We had known B Medical several years before, and we had a chance to look at the company, and we'd witnessed some lumpy behavior. But at the same time, we knew that when they had a forecast for the business, they were confident they were gonna win. When we visited the company then some years later, indeed, everything that they had in their pipeline, they were able to capture. So they have a very solid look at the business that they've won and why they won, and they delivered on every part of that. This same thing gives us confidence about their ability to deliver.
The quarterly performance is turbulent, for sure, and so it remains a little bit hard to predict, but when the business is won, we're confident about the ability to capture it. The funding sources are different from the ones that we've been aware of, but they're not different from what they've had. We wait for sometimes UNICEF or WHO to finally make the decisions, and that's beyond their control and our control.
I guess I have a question about... Oh, go ahead.
So really nice presentation. Thank you.
Thank you.
I've seen that you won the FinnGen contract.
Yes
... so that's a wonderful population health opportunity-
Thank you
... where investing in something like that requires a little bit of a compromise on margins.
Yes.
And then I heard you talk about B Medical and the opportunity to bring in some rare ancestry samples.
Yes.
I wonder if you can comment on how your team is looking forward in that population health space, particularly in this fast turn business, and I really see it as bridging these two business units that you describe.
Yeah, thank you for that because that's how we see it as well. So this is a, this is a new capability for us. It's one that we've been aiming at, aiming at for some time. In a like representation, we announced a few quarters ago that we won the Lupus Research Alliance, so same kind of thing. There are studies, maybe not so much population studies, but these are diseases where patient advocacy groups or different researchers collaborate for us to be the central hub for that, for the preparation of the samples, the management of the samples, ultimately, delivery of some results, is really consistent with what we do. So FinnGen is one. We plan to continue to build on this. So this, for us, is what we think is a tremendous opportunity.
We're gonna learn how to be really good at this, and then as we take it out to other organizations and research alliances that we think can benefit from that, we think we provide a tremendous service. On the fast-growing emerging markets in Africa, these are the... The realization we have here is today, the B Medical boxes, if you will, are funded by charitable organizations, by Gates Foundation, by World Health Organization, but the interest in the samples that we have potential access to, and to bring them back on a cold chain, the fidelity increases dramatically. And the interest in these samples comes from a completely different source of funding.
It comes from pharmaceutical companies, from research organizations, and we really plan to use the B Medical starting point now as a cold chain back and the different sources of funding for the return cold chain, and we think that's critically important as it relates to a particular disease, as it relates to a study of an area for surveillance, for example. We have a network of 50,000 of these cold chain boxes around the world. We can literally target an area of a country for surveillance studies to determine, is there an outbreak of Ebola, for example? Those are the kinds of things that are enabled by this, but only if we can bring the samples back. So I really appreciate your question.
It's exactly on target with what we're doing, and the FinnGen one is a great opportunity for us.
It's an integration of multi-omics under one-
It's exactly what we-
Yeah
... built, so thank you.
I guess building on that, I mean, the synergistic opportunities are, are really incredible with B Medical. But just taking a step back and thinking, you know, you had mentioned Africa, just thinking on a global perspective from the company overall, are there any, like, particular regions that you would like to highlight? And yeah, just for us to, to think about that.
Yeah. So thanks. So a few things. We talk about Africa, it's 54 countries-
Yeah
... so we really focus country by country.
Okay.
It happens to be an opportunity. There are, there are health systems built out at various levels and various stages.
Yeah.
What we really care about is ultimately, if we can get, samples from populations with consented medical records-
Mm
... is really infinitely more valuable, and it's, it's really the target for us. And so there, there's a gap between what exists and how plentiful those samples are, and the sheer amount of the population, but we're zeroed in on that. So we think there's a great opportunity there. So country by country, we announced that we had got a letter of intent from the Democratic Republic of Congo, to do the B Medical boxes. But in return, we're working on how do we manage the return of whole blood for use in the country for some of these studies? And those are in the discussions and negotiations about how do we do that, but it's, it's exactly what we set out to do.
Of course, the vaccines are good for human health and for the life-saving opportunities in the country, but there's an initiative there very specifically to use the samples from those patients also to begin to develop a broader health opportunities in Democratic Republic of Congo. So you'll hear DRC, Kenya, Nigeria, Ivory Coast; these will be the target... among the target countries here, and South Africa, among the target countries here in the near future.
And then when we think, like, outside of Africa, like for China, for example, it doesn't have to be with B Medical, but just for the company overall, like, you know, how does this fit into your growth portfolio?
Yeah, so for us, China's been particularly strong. It's a little bit unusual compared to what's going on in the market. In our June quarter, we reported a strong growth, more than 20% growth in China. In the September quarter, we reported growth again. We continue to have a good footprint, and from the standpoint of our ability to genomic capabilities in China, the team's been particularly aggressive, particularly supportive, and we see China as a remaining as a strong market opportunity because of the things that we do. It's not... On the tools business, we're softer like other companies, so we're not bucking that trend, but because of the footprint we have.
As a true Chinese company, we have 900 employees in China, and we have a headquarters building there for the omics and for the synthesis. So that's particularly strong. On the sample management side, we've never penetrated in China. There are regulations and rules that prohibit us and other companies from the management or movement of biological samples if you're a foreign company, and so we haven't participated there, so it's neither up nor down.
Hmm. I guess, like, just going back to your, your cost reduction initiatives, and, you know, with the commitment to $1.5 billion, you know, you guys also talked about the $500 million that you're gonna be able to buy back in the upcoming future.
Yes.
You know, how has that kind of changed the projection of your margins and your growth going forward? And then kind of building off of that, you know, with your recent divestiture of semi, I guess, kind of recent, you know, how has that also changed, and are you excited about the future of the business?
So, Zach, I'll answer backwards if I can.
Yeah. Go for it.
So the divestiture of the semi business, when we separated the two companies, we sold the semiconductor equipment business to TH Lee, and the proceeds were $3 billion, and that's what we've used for growth of the company. We use it now for the return of capital to the shareholders. One of the things that was clear was that we separated the companies. We dropped half the revenue for the company, but we dropped only 20% of the cost structure, and so I think that's what you see us working off right now. When we talk about the opportunities for us to increase profitability going forward, it's how do we streamline the Azenta Life Sciences company now? How do we continue to shed those costs? How do we manage a $700 million business with the cost profile that it ought to have?
Those are the initiatives that are pretty straightforward, but getting the separation right-
Mm
... was important. I think we did a really good job in making sure that there were no issues associated with the separation, the IT systems, the ERP, those kinds of things I think were done particularly well, and now we're being able to shed those costs and get those efficiency improvements in place. As we look about the growth opportunities, to have $500 million of capital at a company our size, we think is just tremendous. We've been an acquisitive company. John O'Brien and team have been out. We've done more than 15 acquisitions and divestitures over the past years. We have a good look at the landscape about what opportunities exist for us to continue that capability. We're a strong engineering company.
Mm.
So from a tool standpoint, generally, we develop those on our own, but from a services standpoint, we have the ability to add more capabilities to the company. But we think that what makes sense to the company is on our radar screen.
Mm.
And we've always been acquisitive of the best capabilities out there, so we don't think any are slipping by us. We've looked at a lot of things, but we always zero in on the ones that we think make the most sense, and we've been really successful. So we like the position, and the semiconductor sale set us up particularly well, and we feel really good about where we are right now from the standpoint of driving profitability while we're driving growth.
I guess kind of touching on to, like, the firepower, you know, you mentioned $500 million. That's, that's very impressive, and you guys have a lot of opportunities. When you look at your different segments, is there any one that you guys are honing in on in terms of deploying that, or is it kind of what comes up in evaluating?
Yeah. So the way we look at the business now is it's really solid in the center. On the workflow chart that I showed, sourcing will be one.
Yep.
So continue to add capabilities from a sourcing standpoint and delivery of data on the other end. We built the center core, but as we get close to the participant and the patient, we think those are the most important. And our ability then to continue to interrogate those samples and provide data to people who can utilize that to continue to develop cures, including AI companies that have models and capabilities ready but are in need of data. We think that's a tremendous opportunity for us going forward.
Any other questions?
Well, Zach, thank you, and thanks, everyone. I really appreciate your attention, and thanks for giving us the time today.