Good afternoon and welcome to Azenta's Investor Day 2025. I'm Yvonne Perron. I'm the head of FP&A and Investor Relations at Azenta. Thank you for joining us, whether you're here in person in the room and got to participate in the tour this afternoon, or you're joining via webcast. We truly appreciate your time, your interest in Azenta's strategic outlook, and our long-range growth plans. As many of you saw firsthand this morning, how we serve our customers. We serve our customers to enable breakthroughs faster, and if you couldn't join us on the tour this morning, that's okay. We're going to bring you along on this journey as we have the discussion this afternoon. Just a few housekeeping items to cover. If you could please take a moment and silence your cell phones, your mobile devices.
In addition, today we will be discussing non-GAAP measures, forward-looking statements, and we make no obligation to update these statements should facts or circumstances change. Please review the 8-K that we filed with the presentation just a bit ago. These materials are also available on the Investor Relations website. In addition, I'll just refer you back to our latest Form 10-K and prior Form 10-Q filings for relevant information. Just stepping through our agenda quickly, our President and CEO, John Marotta, will walk you through Azenta's strategy. Then you'll hear from Alex Esmon and Ginger Zhou, our key business leaders, on the respective business priorities for sample management solutions and for Multiomics GENEWIZ, and then our CFO, Lawrence Lin, will discuss our financial outlook and, importantly, our capital allocation strategy.
Following John's wrap-up, we'll take a short break, and then we'll move into Q&A, and we'll probably handle that for about 30 minutes. Thank you. And with that, I am thrilled to turn the presentation over to our President and CEO, John Marotta.
Thank you. Thank you, Yvonne. Good afternoon, everyone. It's good to be with you. I'm excited to share the future of Azenta and where we're taking the company. On behalf of our 3,000 employees, I want to welcome you to Indianapolis. I hope you enjoyed the tour and the passion that our employees have every day to serve our customers. As I stated, my background, I've spent the last couple of years in private equity, Patient Square Capital. Prior to that, I was at KKR, ran an operating company for them called PHC Group, which was Panasonic Healthcare. Before that, I met Lawrence, our CFO, at Danaher Corporation in 2016. And then before that, I was in medical devices. So I've spent a lot of my career in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and life sciences. If you leave here with nothing today, I want you to leave with these five things.
First, Azenta is in a very unique position. We have a number of opportunities in front of us. The first is top-line growth, outperforming the market. The second is margin expansion and an opportunity around margin expansion that does not rely on that growth. Third is we have a balance sheet to deploy capital for M&A and other opportunities in front of us. We are a category leader in a very niche set of product lines. You saw some of that in the tour today, and we have an opportunity to continue to expand on that with our growth investments. Third, we have an installed base. We have hundreds of stores and vaults in the field. We have thousands of our instruments that handle our samples and help our customers manage their samples.
In GENEWIZ, we have 4,000 drop boxes that give our customers an ecosystem to do business with us. We are a one-stop shop with that company. Four, gross margin improvement and operating leverage. You're starting to see free cash flow come into the business in this last year, and you're going to see that advance. Fifth, we're an incredible value. We're north of 10x EBITDA. $12 of our stock price is cash. We're going to generate $250 million of cash in the next couple of years, doubling our EBITDA and exiting 2028 double-digit. We're pretty excited. In the small mid-cap market in life sciences tools, there's not another company that has that opportunity. We've got a $6 billion addressable market. We've outgrown that. We outgrew that last year in a very challenging market. We're going to continue that trend. We have a lot of momentum going into 2026.
What's driving that momentum? A lot of that momentum is driven by the tools revolution. In the last 10 years-15 years, there has been a boom in new tools coming out serving researchers. The output of that is data. In our world, data is samples. Those are customer samples. We help them manage that. That data and those samples is really important, sometimes more important than a gigabyte of data, the physical specimens. So there's $350 billion a year spent in research, pharma, biotech, government, NIH, other government entities in China, as well as Western Europe. We support that. There's a clear trend to outsourcing. 50% of that spend is used for outsourcing today. Our customers in pharma and biotech want to do business with less suppliers that are more strategic. Azenta fits within that.
Hopefully, you saw a lot of that today at the Biorepository, and that will continue. We talked about the output of data. There's 24 billion samples today that need cold storage or automation, specifically around automation. About 6 billion of that needs cold, but all of that needs automation. There's a clear trend right now in moving into automation. Lastly, 50% of the FDA therapeutics that come out today need cold storage and/or support from automation. Azenta is at the epicenter of these trends, from compounds to samples to therapeutics. Azenta today, we're a $600 million company. Last year, we grew 3%. About 55% of our revenue is recurring. We have 14,000 customers globally. We are in the top 20 pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the world, and one in three of our employees are either scientists or engineers that help support our customers every day.
This is an important point, and we'll talk about that later. Today, we do about 60% of our business in the U.S., about 25% in Europe, and you can see on the screen about 10% in China. 55% of our business today taps into pharma and biotech. The other is in academic, medical universities, or government. I joined the company in September of last year. Couldn't be more excited about joining the company. I was kind of scratching my head wondering what we have in front of us. What I discovered was we have a great portfolio. That ecosystem is like no other. It's proprietary to us. We have a culture of employees that care. They want to serve our customers. We can do a lot with that. So you have to ask yourself, what happened with prior year's performance in an undermanaged asset?
What have we done to change that paradigm in the company? What we've done today is we moved from a functionally aligned organization that was very centralized to a decentralized organization. We did that quickly. We restructured the business. We now have accountable general managers in all of our businesses, clear line of sight in terms of P&Ls that are highly accountable. We have regional leaders Commercially that are solely centered around driving performance in the regions closest to the customer. Operational excellence through the Azenta Business System is a way of life. It is no longer a project. We are redirecting resources from G&A and moving those into high-growth areas of the business around R&D, sales, and marketing. Criteria around that is high margin recurring revenue. The teams have clear accountability around product roadmaps that move us in the direction of that.
Our product managers are now in front and center in the organization. It's one of the most important roles we have in the company. We are selectively investing in these products today. This year, a lot of the growth investments came in. We're pretty excited about that. You could probably feel some of the energy today in today's tour around a lot of these growth investments, and you saw those today. Lastly, we're tapping into a lot of the pharma and biotech profit pools. We are laser-focused on serving the most sophisticated customers in the world that will have impact on patients globally. Let me get into the business. We have two segments. First is our sample management solutions. As you saw today, we have in the tour of the Advanced Biorepository, we have a broad footprint in our Biorepositories. Alex is going to go into that.
Our automated solutions make up our stores, our vaults, and our C&I instruments and consumables. This is how our customers handle their samples today. We help them manage that. Multiomics or GENEWIZ, we have a very unique company here. Today, we read and write, and specifically, we're a one-stop shop for our customers. We have a broad footprint. We can scale that, 14 labs globally. All of this supports R&D throughout the world for the customers that I just shared with you. We have a proprietary digital ecosystem that is in our Multiomics business in GENEWIZ and in our SRS business. Our customers enjoy a user experience that is unlike no other. We're making investments here as well. It's important to note that this ecosystem is like no other. There is not another private company or public company that has an ecosystem to serve our customers today like this.
What do I mean by that? In our automated storage and integrated solutions, we have the tools that customers can do this on their own, or they can use our off-site Biorepositories and get the same experience. This is critical. You talked to one of our customers today that reiterated that. The clear trend in R&D is they want their dollars to go further in research. This ecosystem supports that. We mentioned our proprietary LIMS system, CLIMS system, and other systems that allow our customers to see in virtually into our facilities or the same experience within theirs. Lastly, we talked about reading and writing of genes. In the center is our employees. This is important. Our employees are experts in the industry that our customers want to tap into to do their work.
It's vital that they're able to speak to our employees about how to optimize and do things much more efficiently than they would have access to with other competitors. This ecosystem you saw come to life in our Advanced Biorepository tour today. Again, this workflow is consistent in pharma, biotech, whether you're in research, at a medical center, in an academic center. Our product lines support this type of workflow. We're investing behind this today. I don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to hear from our customers. You heard that today from one of them. This is unsolicited. I get to speak to a lot of customers, and it gives me great pride personally to be able to support technology and innovation and biotech and pharmaceuticals to make society better. They need us, and we need them, and it's a great partnership.
Now that we talked about what we do as a company, I want to move us into the strategy and where we're going. There should be no surprises here. This is pretty basic, this framework. It's important we get back to the basics in this company. We do the basics well. Those companies that do the basics well win. We'll talk more about how we do that with ABS. I'm going to go into each of these in particular and give you some examples as to how we're driving performance here. Driving operational excellence. It is not a project. This is a way of life in the organization. How do we get better with less? The teams have done a really good job of optimizing the organization. We've just gotten started. Reinvesting, taking those profits and investing them back into the business. We're reinvesting in three areas.
First is scaling our Biorepositories. Second is around regionalization of Gene Synthesis. Third, technology and automated solutions, continuing to invest in this. And lastly, redeploying our capital from a very disciplined perspective. This is going to be critical to this organization. We're pretty fortunate to have a balance sheet. We'll talk about that as well. What does operational excellence mean? We define it, and here's our criteria. The Azenta Business System led by Will Simmons, you got to meet Will on today's tour. We're lucky to have him. He's done this many times. It's a culture. It's not a set of tools. We think about it in three areas. First, how do you drive lean manufacturing, back office efficiency? You reinvest that back into growth. We reinvest growth in two areas. First is around R&D and product innovation. Again, we talked about clear roadmaps there.
I'm going to give you some examples of each of these as we go on today. Commercial Excellence. It begins with the restructuring of our Commercial teams in which we now have leaders in each of the regions that wake up every day to serve locally to those organizations. I often say in Commercial teams, your strategy is executed where your sales reps show up every day. It's really important. We know where our teams are going and who they're calling on. Let me give you some early successes. Again, Will joined about nine months ago. We're early in our operational excellence journey, but we've seen some great wins to date. Some of these KPIs you see on the screen, these are a few. We measure a lot more than that. These are customer-facing. What matters most to a customer? Quality.
We weren't putting our best foot forward in our storage business. We decreased complaints by 55%, and we're still going. Our on-time delivery for customers, we were able to drive performance of 30% for on-time delivery in this, and we're not done. Reducing costs. We talked about this many times on investor calls. Very heavy in G&A. This is an area we've moved fast in certain areas, and we need to move slow in others. We're very thoughtful about this. We've decreased our G&A by 3%. We're going to move to 10% and reinvest that back into the business. Lastly, working capital. Robertson's going to talk more about that today. This is an area we've seen improvement in. For DSO, we were able to decrease that by 10 days. Let's talk about growth. We're not going to be able to cut our way to growth. We've got to reinvest that.
We're doing it in three areas. First is scaling our Biorepositories, both geographically and a broader set of products that we're going to be offering our customers in terms of what we store in our Biorepositories. You saw some of that today in the Advanced Biorepository tour. Again, we're just getting started here. This regionalizing of Gene Synthesis. BIOSECURE has been a hangover. We have clear line of sight into bringing synthesis in the United States and Western Europe. Third, continuing to invest around our automated solutions and our technology here. It's critical our customers want to continue to do more around automation to drive productivity from an R&D perspective. We're going to continue to support that. What are some examples of a go-to-market optimization? Again, early here. We talked about the restructuring of our go-to-market teams regionally. We're continuing to invest in our direct selling.
We invested this year around 25 headcount here, and we're going to continue to do that. We have the right to win in certain markets, and we're laying the groundwork to do that. Again, early. Sales bundling. Our teams are very focused around bundling products in these operating companies, automated solutions with stores and Biorepositories. Separately, with our Multiomics business, with GENEWIZ and bundling solutions there. There's not another company that can do that. Downstream marketing. We need to do a better job of communicating with our customers locally. We're investing here. Lastly, price optimization. I know Lawrence will talk about this as well. We have a clear opportunity here to share value with our customers in all of our businesses. Let's talk about capital allocation. It's kind of a hot topic here at Azenta. We're going to be very disciplined.
This is going to be a departure from the past. We pull four levers for capital allocation. One, around productivity and gross margin improvement. Lawrence and I often joke if companies were traded on gross margin, the world would be a better place. We're going to drive gross margin improvements through capital allocation and through ABS. Organic growth. It's important we reinvest in R&D and sales and marketing. We've just started doing that. Third is around M&A. What we have in our hands is very exciting. We have a robust funnel, and we're active with that funnel today. We're very excited about deploying capital here. And lastly, and equally, is a share buyback. Today, we authorized a $250 million share buyback, and we're going to use that as a tool in our toolkit today.
I want you to walk away today understanding that this management team is an effective group of operators, and we're also prudent and disciplined capital allocators. What's the criteria for M&A? This is an area that we needed to improve on. The company made 15 acquisitions. We didn't put our best foot forward on two of those. We're going to continue to drive performance in this area with a clear set of criteria. That's what you see here. Lawrence will come in later to talk about what is the financial output of these in terms of what we expect to read through on the P&L, and more importantly, from a stock performance perspective. Strategy cannot get executed without a capable team. I am humbled to lead Azenta in the next phase of our journey. This team is amazing. You saw a lot of those individuals in the Advanced Biorepository tour.
A lot of them are here today. I'm humbled to be a part of this team. A lot of these individuals are new, but some of them are not. They were buried in the bowels of the organization, and when we restructured, a lot of these individuals were promoted to leadership roles. It's very exciting for me personally to be able to do that. Not only do you have to have an effective management team, you have to have a great board, and we're fortunate to have an incredible board for a small and mid-cap company our size. I want to recognize Bill Cornog is here in the audience. Bill is one of our board members, former KKR partner. Every one of these board members brings a very unique perspective to the organization.
It pushes us as a management team to be the best we can for our customers, for our employees, and our shareholders. This is important to the investment in this company. Why would you want to invest in Azenta? As I stated, we have an unmatched product line and ecosystem today to support our customers. Very unique to the organization. This ecosystem is very unique. We have a deep installed base. We can continue to drive recurring revenue and expand our SAM through that. Third, continuing to drive above-market growth. This is an area we're very excited about. It's a story that's top-line and bottom-line, and more importantly, driving these G&A efficiencies and reinvesting that back into the business. Lastly, we are coming from a place of a very strong foundation. We have a balance sheet like no other, and we're going to put that to work.
High return on capital. That's our charge. We're excited about the journey ahead. I want to introduce you to Alex Esmon. Alex is running our SRS business. Alex, thank you.
Thank you very much, John. And good afternoon, everybody. It's wonderful to see you. Thank you for being here. For those of you that were able to join us for the tours today, I hope that you're carrying a lot of energy from that. The energy that we carry every day as we look at our teams perform and how they're serving our customers. So we're really excited about you being here. As John said, my name is Alex Esmon. I'm the Vice President General Manager for the Sample Repository Services business. I have been with Azenta for about three years now. I came from Thermo Fisher Scientific, where I was for 17 years. Before that, I did my PhD in molecular biology at the University of Missouri, and then I did my postdoctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Thank you for being here today. It's wonderful to see you. I get the distinct opportunity today to brag on a great team. You got to meet some of them today. This team is incredible, and it's full of individuals that care immensely about the journey that we're making for our customers. And I'm humbled that I get to represent them and that I get to brag on them today. What they do is incredible. As John said, if there are just a couple of things that I want you to walk away with today from what I'm going to talk to you about, there's really three key things. Number one, we have deep expertise. John talked about this. We have deep expertise in understanding what our customers need and in the value of their assets, sometimes almost even more than they do.
Number two, we are integrating our Azenta Business System into everything we do. We are finding opportunities to remove waste from our processes to add more value to our customers and more value internally as well. Number three, that deep expertise that we have enables us to know where to invest our money in smart ways. What are the bets we're going to place, and how are we going to go into the future? So with that in mind, I'd like to do a brief overview of our business. Sample Management Solutions today is about a $325 million business. We have the privilege of being an end-to-end biologic and therapeutic asset manager for our customers. We want to continue, and we will continue to be a leader in this area for our customers. A couple of things from this slide.
I'm not going to read all the numbers for you, but if I explain this business very straightforwardly, Sample Management Solutions has two components, as John talked about: our automated solutions business and our biorepository business. Our automated solutions business has over 10,000 pieces of instrumentation and/or vaults in the field supporting our customers every day. That's millions of people being supported through our products every day. On the repository side of our business, we have over 80% of our revenue is recurring. We have sticky relationships with customers that last for a long time, and we are embedded in 20 of the 20 top pharma and biotech companies in the world. They trust us every day, and that trust is growing, so we are a very strong partner for our customers, so as I walk now into our markets, John gave a really nice summary of our markets.
If we specifically look at our SRS-focused markets, we have about a $3 billion, pardon me, addressable market. We have about 11% of that today. There's three key things that I want you to take away. Number one, there's a massive increase happening in the preclinical space in spend. We see it happening from public and private funds. This increase in spend is also having an impact on the number of clinical trials that are happening. More clinical trials means more samples. More samples means more data, more breakthroughs. We are incredibly well-positioned to support our customers through these breakthroughs. Third, as John spoke about, our customers are looking at going deeper with partners they trust. We are incredibly well-positioned. Again, 20 of the top 20 pharma and biotech companies we have strong relationships with and growing. So we are incredibly well-positioned for all of these market tailwinds.
Now, if my passion hasn't come through yet for this business, then this is the slide where it's really going to come through strong. This is where I'm going to brag on our teams. Why do I believe, and why should you believe, that we can attain what we say we're going to attain? Number one, I'm going to go trusted reputation. We have over 85 global compliances, licensures, and standards that we meet within our business to support our customers' work every day, and that's growing. We're always looking at ways that we can grow that. What do our customers need us to do, and who do they need us to be to support them with quality and reliability? Number two, we know what we're doing. We have deep expertise, as John spoke about.
No one can do what we do because no one has the depth of knowledge that we have on serving our customers the way we serve them and how we serve them. From our Chief Scientific Officers through our entire organization, we have a breadth of knowledge and expertise that is unmatched and unrivaled. Number three, we have automation capabilities that are over three decades in the making. We have been in the market serving our customers for over 30 years. That's 10 years older than my kids. It's incredibly exciting every day to get to be a part of this team and to see how we bring this to bear for our customers. It's easy to make a freezer. It's a little bit harder to make a freezer that goes to - 80.
It's really hard to make a freezer that is at - 80, but it's also in an automated environment doing things that not anyone else can do. Our teams can do that, and they've been doing it, and they will continue to do it and innovate in that area. Number four, data. Data, the backbone of all of these samples, is data. The data that's generated, how we manage that data, and how we carry that for our customers and manage their assets and the data that goes along with it. This is why we are well-positioned. These are our true competitive advantages that we have that are sustainable serving our customers. So I'm now going to talk to you about how we're going to focus on driving operational excellence. As John teed this up, we're looking at really three pillars.
I'm going to talk to you about this first one of driving operational excellence. What are we doing in SRS? We are actively implementing our Azenta Business System throughout our structures. Many of you were at the Indy site today. You saw our daily management boards. You saw our Kaizen funnel. You saw our value stream maps. You saw all the nuts and bolts of what it means to make a lean transformation, to make this journey. And make no mistake, we are early in this journey, but we've already seen some positive results coming from the journey we're making. And we are highly confident that that's going to continue. This is a cultural change from the top down. Everybody is invested in this. I participate in Kaizen events almost on a monthly basis. We are shoulder to shoulder with our team working through the ABS transformation that we're making.
As I was at Thermo for 17 years, I'm familiar with process improvement. It's a part of who I am, and it's a part of who our team is. So next, I'm going to talk to you about how we're reinvesting for profitable growth. How are we going to focus? Well, number one, in our biorepositories, really two key areas. Number one, we're going to continue to grow our off-site sample storage solutions. What does that mean? That means that we're going to get to 100 million samples stored, and we're going to do it in about four years. How are we going to do it? We're going to grow our footprint. We're going to maximize our space.
We're going to introduce innovations into the storage space, which allow us to optimize the footprints we have, and we're going to position new footprints globally in new regions. We're incredibly excited about this. Number two, we're going to scale our customer on-site solutions. We have teams that are incredibly well-positioned to grow our customer on-site solutions 3x in the next three years. So we're going to manage our customers' assets in our walls, and we're going to manage our customers' assets in their walls. This is a competency that we have that our customers value us for. Now, how are we going to invest in our automated solution side of SRS? Number one, we're going to elevate our digital experience.
We are going to enable our products as a true ecosystem of products which share a user experience that is unified across the products that provides a better experience for our customers. And we're going to introduce e-commerce solutions which will allow us to serve our customers faster, more effectively. This will be especially impactful for our consumables and instrumentation business. Number two, we're going to evolve our leadership in automation. We're already really good at automation. It makes me smile every day. We're going to get better. And we're going to take our customer to even better places than we take them today. What do I mean by that? Has anybody ever built a Lego set? Just show of hands. Anybody ever played with Legos? It's okay. Oh, that's great. My son built a 5,000-piece set last weekend while I was gone, and it was amazing.
What does he have to do if he wants to make that a 5,500-piece set? You just add more Legos. You just keep building. Why? Because Legos are modular. You just click them together and build and go. It's easy. Our stories need to be easy. Our vaults need to be easy to configure, to scale, to build, install, and our customers to use them effectively. And in the future, when they want to slightly change what they need, we can enable that through the modularization of that product. The second thing we're going to do from an automated solution perspective is introduce new products. Not everybody needs a vault that is huge. Some people need something that is just more point of use, smaller, especially in the clinical space. We're going to introduce that into our portfolio.
So I'm going to leave you with a customer story that illustrates how we have served customers and will continue to serve customers as SRS. We had a pharma top- five customer who was in a non-optimal space with non-optimal processes that were highly manual, that was introducing massive amounts of risk into their business and not enabling them to come to market fast with the breakthroughs that they needed. They came to us for solutions. And what did we do? We brought the entire scope of SRS to bear for that customer. Our BioArcs, our CryoArcs, our services, our product services, our logistics services, our storage services. Every piece is a part of the solution we offered to that customer. And what was the result? The result was they were able to de-risk their business, to go faster, and to enable true business continuity.
We helped them manage their problems. We removed waste from their work. We helped them make the journey that we are making as a business. It's incredibly exciting, so I'm going to go back to my three points at the beginning. We have passionate experts who know how to support our customers, and we do it with quality and reliability. Number two, embedding the Azenta Business System into SRS and into these businesses is going to remove waste, improve our value, and enable us to serve our customers even better, and number three, because we have this knowledge of our customers, it means that we are positioned to make the right strategic decisions about where we're going to make our investment and how we're going to grow. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you today. Thank you for your attention.
I now get the opportunity to turn the floor over to Ginger Zhou, who is our Senior Vice President for our Multiomics and GENEWIZ business. Thank you so much.
Everybody can hear me okay? All right. For those who haven't met with each other, this is Ginger. You are looking at Ginger. I'm president of GENEWIZ. I'm a trained Molecular Biologist with a PhD degree, and before I joined my first industry job, I did two years of research in Yale University. I have a very long tenure with GENEWIZ, 14 years as of 2025. So I know the business inside out. Before joining GENEWIZ, with all the research background, I was GENEWIZ customers for a few years. So when managing GENEWIZ business, I always carry two lenses: customer lens and the supplier when managing the business. It's really beneficial for me when I think about the business, how to add value to our customers.
So I'm very happy to have the opportunity today to share with everybody about my thoughts, my view about in current very highly dynamic market environment, why GENEWIZ business is resilient, where the growth is coming from, and how to achieve those growth. All right. The scope I just mentioned being summarized by three key messages. The resilience coming from unique position. GENEWIZ is category of one. Category of one. It's uniquely positioned with nearly three decades of know-how, Multiomics experiences with trusted brand. And also, it's exceptional convenience and speed we built throughout the years, really resonating very well with our customers. The third, to make it very resilient in this market, is diversified portfolio. We are the only one actually in the market specialized on both Sequencing and the synthesis solutions with the breadth of solutions we offer to our customers.
So the second message is the second and third are all continuous growth. Continuous growth. The second message is leveraging the newly built-in muscle, Azenta Business System. Me as one person, I'm not as tenured as Alex to have 70 years of process improvement, but I have my own experience in the last year, and this is very powerful too. To simplify it, it drives strong execution and efficiency gain. There are so many opportunities once you know how to utilize the tools. So the second message is leveraging Azenta Business System to drive efficiency gain, which is equivalent to profitable growth. And the third message is where we invest with all the profitable gain from the efficiency. Three areas. Gene Synthesis regionalization, we truly believe is one of our key growth drivers for the next few years.
And we are going to bring it to the U.S., expand to the U.S., and Commercial intensity to have a better reach to our customers and enrich portfolio. Enrich portfolio by bringing in more cutting-edge technologies to enrich, strengthen our one-stop shop position to our customers. So three key messages. Now let's dive in. Resilience. I'm going to dive in each individual. Resilience, how and where the growth is coming from and how to gain the growth. This is where the resilience starts. It's who we are. Nearly three decades of reputable brand of scientific expertise and know-how in Multiomics field. We are only one in the market specialized with reading genes and writing genes. Reading genes through Sequencing technologies and writing genes through synthetic technologies. All our work anchor with our mission. And our mission is accelerate discovery by providing high quality, reliability, and innovative solutions to our customers.
That's how we anchor our work. In addition, exceptional scale. Exceptional scale. I really wish I had the opportunity to host everybody in one of the GENEWIZ sites so that you can see the scale, but today, by talking about it, I have to get help from everybody use a little bit of imagination about the scale, so I use two examples. On the left, on the Sequencing side, last year, 2025, we produced 15 PB data. What is 15 PB data? How big, how small? Okay. Imagine 15 PB data, the size equivalent to more than 7 million two-hour Netflix movies. More than 7 million. That's the size of data we pumped out last year. How many of you can finish 7 million movies in this generation, in this life? It's mission impossible. That's the amount of data we pumped out.
On the right, on the synthesis side, the same. 425 million nucleotides we synthesized last year. Imagine each nucleotide equivalent to one centimeter. We piled them up. The height is reaching Mount Everest 480 times. That's how big size and scale we're operating today. Why scale matters? Scale equivalent to quality, consistency, capability, and the capacity. Right? So that's how we operate and what we built in the last 26 years. Now let's see what we achieve with what we built. In 2025, revenue size is a little bit over $250 million, and we have a very broad customer base, more than 120,000 end users from 8,000 institutions, and on the bottom of the panels, we have diversified portfolio on both Sequencing and synthesis solutions, and we have very balanced regional reach and market reach to our customers.
What's even more powerful of this business and the model is customer stickiness. More than 70% of the revenue is from returning customers. This is why it's so resilient. And you may have a question, why? Why GENEWIZ? Why do customers have such big stickiness with GENEWIZ and such high loyalty? Here's why. Trusted brand, exceptional speed and convenience, one-stop shop. On trusted brand, you're looking at me, right? Started to use GENEWIZ services since my first college research project. That's years and years back. And I represented many of our customers. And we offer the tools that they can start, essential tools they can start with early research. So many of our customers grow with the brand. And it's a trusted brand to our customers with three decades of reputation of know-how. And the exceptional convenience to our customers. Okay?
One example, as John mentioned, one example is we carry the largest sample pickup network among our peers in this market. More than 4,000 sample pickup locations right outside of researcher lab, so researchers every day they just walk, walk, and drop the samples right outside the door, and for us we have a very sophisticated logistics system to pick the samples up every day and distribute it among all of our sites, depending on where it makes sense through a very sophisticated logistics system and produce data very fast and give customer back data or product, and exceptional convenience. This is why customers feel, okay, so easy to do business with GENEWIZ. The third one, one-stop shop. True one-stop shop. True one-stop shop specialized on both synthesis and the Sequencing solutions. If you really look into the market, you cannot find anyone else specialized on both. This is know-how.
It has to be know-how. And run both, scale at both, like at this level. Okay? A quick data, more than 50% of our customers are ordering both synthesis and the Sequencing solutions from us. That's the stickiness. That's the stickiness. So I'll bring it all together. Why GENEWIZ business is resilient in any type of market is strong foundation and its great business model. Trusted brand, exceptional convenience and speed that we built throughout the years. One-stop shop on both Sequencing and synthesis and a suite of Multiomics solutions. And in combination of quality, reliability, good deliverables, and run at the scale. And we have a large customer base, but also very diversified portfolio plus good penetration in each region. All this together to make GENEWIZ a very strong, resilient business model. And no one does what we do and how we do it. Category one, unique position.
All right? When I talk about it, I'm very proud that in the last 14 years, we get better and better in terms of who we are and how we do it. So next, I'm going to move to where the opportunity is coming from in this highly dynamic market. All right? On the left, three on my left is $3 billion addressable market we're playing with, or we are playing in, and with less than 10% of share. This market, in the past decade to decade, is growing super fast, exceptionally fast. So our share is less than 10%, a huge runway ahead of us to gain share. On the right, current dynamics, what I observe, driving outsourcing trend. A few examples, why? First, end market, pharma biotech. The consensus, right? Spending cultures on CapEx and capital investment and operational efficiency use less to do more.
Think where it drives the direction. And the second is researcher, end user. We have 120,000 end users, and we are growing. So end user, with the cost to be improved for these Multiomics technologies, especially the highly sophisticated, complicated ones, the technologies, researchers do have better accessibility to those technologies that provide better data insights to them. Right? And the third one is AI. The buzzword AI, what does it mean to us? AI, to me, is for better data insights, better insights through analytics. And it reached the bar very high on data quantity and the quality. And the quality is very important for AI to work. And we are here to generate a big amount of data every day with good, reliable quality to our customers. So altogether, a lot of opportunities ahead of us for us to continue to grow and gain share from the market.
Now I'm going to share with you how. How? Right? This goes back to we have an Azenta overall strategy structure, and this fits in very well. Two levers: operational excellence, operational efficiency to drive profit from leveraging the new muscle, Azenta Business System. And also invest in top-line growth. Invest in three areas: Gene Synthesis regionalization, commercial intensity, and one-stop shop. Okay? Gene Synthesis regionalization. Gene Synthesis is a very high-profit business for us. And we're very good at the breadth of solution on Gene Synthesis. And our plan is to invest and bring it expanded in the United States, in North America, to be closer to our customers, to have better delivery speed, and to meet local demand. Okay? In the next few years, and we're under-executing this key initiative today. Second is Commercial Excellence. Imagine the big market for us to tap in.
Commercial Excellence actually like more feet on the street enables us to have better reach to our customers or potential customers, especially in those under-development, under-penetrated market or regions. Digital. Digital, as Alex mentioned, digital is very important to us. Digital transformation, e-commerce type of platform enables our customers to do business even more conveniently with us, more seamless, like order to cash, order to invoice management workflow. Right? So digital transformation. The third key initiative is portfolio expansion. We continue to look into the technologies, build our muscle in terms of bringing in more cutting-edge, complicated, or better Multiomics technologies to provide better data insights to our customers, especially in high-growth areas. Right? So in summary, clear strategic initiatives where we are going to invest and very strong execution, leveraging Azenta Business System and drive profit in the journey.
Altogether, very confident to continue to drive growth and profitable growth. Okay? This is how. When everybody talks to me, everybody says, "Ginger, you are so passionate." Why you are so passionate? Right? If you talk to my team, we are just like a team of alike, very passionate about what we do, very proud about what we do. Why is that? It's not only about knowing how to win, how to grow. It's more about, as a scientist background, it's more about real impact to people's life. That excites me every day. Have real impact. I can see it. So a quick example, a case study. This is a customer, the customer working on childhood disease that led to blindness. Customer is planning phase one clinical trial. Encountered challenges. They have a very long gene, 120 base pair gene, and they need to sequence through.
They need to have resolution to understand what are the sequences in order to make critical decisions. Traditional technology cannot do so. It's just too hard to sequence through, so customers turned to us for help, leveraging know-how and utilizing long-read Sequencing technology. We were able to help customers to develop the IC and achieved 99.8% accuracy on the sequences, and thus 100% enabled customers to make critical decisions with the resolution and visibility on each nucleotide on that 120 KB long gene, so we validated the IC for clinical usage as well. As of today, this phase one clinical trial is ongoing, and in addition, along the journey, we naturally became the first provider in this industry to offer this as a Commercial provider to many more customers who have similar needs.
So this is why we're so passionate about what we do every day, because we can make people's life better being part of a solution for this generation, next generation, and the generations to come. It's benefit the society. That's why the team is so engaged and passionate about what we do. Wrap up my conversation. Business resilience, how we grow, where to grow, and how we grow. Right? Three messages coming back. Category of one, unique position in the market and driving profitable growth through strong execution and efficiency, again, leveraging Azenta Business System. And invest in three key initiatives, three areas. Gene Synthesis regionalization to North America and Western Europe. And enrich our portfolio by bringing in more technologies, leveraging our know-how. And Commercial intensity. Commercial intensity.
With that, overall, altogether, I mean, me personally believe and have confidence that GENEWIZ will continue to be a strong contributor to Azenta's future success on both top line and profitability. All right? With that, that concludes my conversation. I know everybody cannot wait for listening to the financials. So I welcome CFO, Mr. Lawrence Lin, to the stage. Thank you.
Thank you, Ginger. Well, my name is Lawrence Lin, and I'm the Chief Financial Officer at Azenta. I just want to start first by thanking everyone for joining us today. Really great to see everyone's face live here. Maybe just a quick aside on my background. I spent about 20-some years in the public arena, 18 at Danaher. And most recently, I spent about four years in private equity with a couple of operating companies owned by KKR.
And through those experiences, I got the opportunity really to spend time helping businesses around financial rigor, M&A integration, and most importantly, operational efficiency utilizing lean tools. And during my time, and John mentioned this, at Danaher, I got the opportunity to meet John. And John and I have partnered now for almost 10 years, working on growing businesses and, in a lot of cases, turning around businesses that had good bones but just needed an injection of leadership and process improvement. And so a little over a year ago, John gave me a call. And he talked to me about kind of what you all heard today, the opportunity at Azenta. And I jumped at the chance. There's no other company like Azenta with the financial profile that exists.
And so I'm excited to be part of this journey and thrilled to talk to you about the financial future of Azenta. I'm going to spend a few slides here recapping some of what you've heard today, because I think it's important, but through my lens. And then we'll talk about the financials. So a couple of key messages I'd like to impart. The foundation at Azenta is strong and getting stronger. There's momentum building across the organization, and we're leaning into that with a clear strategy and an operational roadmap. We see significant margin upside here. Now, the opportunity doesn't need a recovery from a macroeconomic perspective. We have the levers within our control to control our destiny financially. A big part of that opportunity is tied to expense discipline and process improvement that will impact favorably gross margin and G&A.
This is really just the start of our flywheel here. And last but not least, we're proactively managing the portfolio with a focus on optionality and value-accretive capital deployment, all of which is supported by our strong balance sheet and cash flow. So when I joined the organization a little over a year ago, I saw strengths, but also opportunities to take this business to the next level. We have a differentiated product or portfolio. The depth and breadth of our talent here is extraordinary. Whether that's in our bio repositories, our GENEWIZ labs, or in Gene Synthesis, our customers rely on us every single day. So what we've been doing the last year, we've been laying the foundation. John mentioned this, but it's worth repeating. We've restructured from a corporate to an operating company model. We put general managers in place in all our products.
The general managers have a P&L now that provides them visibility, but most importantly, accountability. We've enabled our sales force through putting sales leadership regionally to be closer and meet where the customers are. And lastly, we've changed our compensation structure. We've taken the complexity out. Now everyone's focused on growth, profitability, working capital-free cash flow. John mentioned this, but it's worth repeating. We're getting back to basics here. Right? So now we're pivoting to growth. And we've identified a couple of areas here on the slide. I'll touch on a couple of them. One of them is we're early innings on sales bundling. We've talked about this. We have consumables that have a fairly low attachment rate to our automated vaults, existing ones and future ones. We've got opportunities in service. We've got opportunities in GENEWIZ for sales bundling. Significant untapped potential there.
From an operational excellence perspective, we've really just touched the tip here of the beginning. We've executed on low-hanging fruit, so there's significant runway ahead, so the upside is this. While this work isn't easy, it's highly achievable. I am confident these initiatives will deliver meaningful improvement in our financial performance, so let's talk about the top line. John touched on the three growth factors. Ginger and Alex added more detail, but again, it's worth recapping here. First, we're going to scale our Biorepositories, our Advanced Biorepositories. We're going to add capacity to our existing Biorepositories. We're going to expand geographically. We're going to increase our automation. And we're going to provide more options for on-site and off-site storage for our customers. Additionally, we're investing in future technology here to really round out our portfolio. Alex talked about the standard vaults that will be modular.
Why is that important? Because it's going to create quality and speed. Additionally, we're going to round out our portfolio. Alex talked about the smaller vaults that we're going to offer. These two items will really start to read through in the back end of our long-range plan, but we're investing now. Secondly, Ginger talked about Gene Synthesis. We're regionalizing our Gene Synthesis business. What does that mean? We're putting U.S. production in place. That will provide speed of delivery, and we will be closer to our customer. On top of that, we are adding feet on the street that specialize solely on Gene Synthesis. That's important, and we're doing that now, and finally, we're pursuing technologies on automation to solve customer pain points and to provide quality delivery and costs to our customers, cost savings.
These three growth factors are not only compelling, but also highly actionable, and we expect them to allow us to grow above market. So I'm super excited about our growth opportunities here, but I'm equally thrilled about the margin opportunity here. It's clear we have significant upside potential here to get us to an EBITDA percentage that is more competitive with our life science peers. As we've discussed in length, we're optimizing our G&A. Early innings, we're trying to drive better operating leverage. So when I look at G&A, there's many opportunities for improvement. So we're going to leverage the Azenta Business System. And let's just double-click into that. How is that going to happen? We're going to evaluate all the processes from finance, HR, legal. We're going to leverage technology where possible. And we're also going to reduce our dependence on outside services.
Lots of opportunity, and we're in early innings. Secondly, we talked a bit about our price optimization strategy. John touched on it. We talked about it a few weeks ago at our earnings call. We started with SRS and C&I, and John mentioned this. We've got room to run here. We'll be evaluating all our other businesses throughout the long-range plan. Where I'm super excited about is, again, the ABS tools on how we're going to be able to drive operational efficiency and gross margin enhancements across our manufacturing, our labs, and our back office. We started what we call lighthouse sites earlier in the year, and so we picked a couple of sites in SRS to really start deploying those lean tools, and John showed some of the examples of our early wins. I think of it from my lens. What is the business system?
The lean tools are really just driving common sense rigorously, reducing or removing complexity and embracing simplicity. The power, if you've never had a chance to sit down in a workshop or a Kaizen, it's extraordinary to see the power of a cross-functional team get together to solve a problem in three to five days. We have some untapped talent, potential knowledge that we're now embracing with our employees. The individuals at the Biorepositories, the labs, the back office, they know what's the opportunities. We're just tapping into that potential. And finally, we're expanding, again, our automation solutions to enhance our productivity. Whether our customers utilize our automated vaults in their facilities or they outsource to our Advanced Biorepositories, we see improvement to delivery and cost, both for the customer, but for also Azenta.
Similar to the revenue drivers, these opportunities are not only actionable, but well within our control, and I'm confident that these initiatives will deliver meaningful improvement in our financial performance, so as profitability has improved, so has our free cash flow. The team has been laser-focused on lowering costs, taking out the low-hanging fruit, and similarly, around working capital, just tapping some of the easy wins here already. You saw that with this from the slide around DSO down 10 days, and also, we're remaining, from a CapEx perspective, highly diligent. Actions will continue going forward, so look, we have $546 million in cash, and we expect to generate between $200 million and $250 million in cash cumulatively through the long-range plan, and we have really four levers at our disposal. First is driving productivity and gross margin. That's really the beginning of our flywheel, right? Then it's growth.
You see it today. We're investing in our SRS Gene Synthesis business. In M&A, we are closely aligning to our strategic filters that John showed and then financial criteria that I'll show you in the next slide, and then around the share repurchase. Today, you saw that we authorized $250 million share repurchase program. We've been actively engaging the board on capital allocation priorities, and authorizing $250 million was the right thing to do. Now, more to come here around when we initiate those purchases, but certainly it is something we evaluate all the time, so let me double-click into the M&A criteria. John already spoke about our financial filters. Let me talk a bit about our financial filters. I want to highlight again that we're going to be incredibly diligent about our financial criteria. We want our M&A targets to check as many of these boxes as possible.
While each deal will have its unique financial profile, our goal is to pursue acquisitions that have a strong organic growth potential in their own right, which can be further enhanced by revenue synergies with Azenta. Secondly, we want these acquisitions to be margin accretive within a short period of time or offer clear margin potential in the future. From an RRIC perspective, we want to see double-digit RRIC within three to five years, as well as cash accretion. So generally, again, our focus is on tuck-in acquisitions here. And we believe we have a strong pipeline of potential opportunities that meet both our strategic and financial filters. So let's get to the numbers. We talked a bit about our 2026 guidance a few weeks ago and earnings. And we discussed the underlying assumptions for those targets.
I won't be repeating them today at this time, except to note that there has been no change to our expectations of our targets for 2026. Now on to the long-range plan. Today, you've heard about the strategy and the bright future ahead. Let me round this out with financial prospects for the company. From a revenue perspective, we expect to generate revenue between $700 million-$750 million at the end of 2028 organically. This will provide a compound annual growth rate of between 6% and 8%. Nearly two-thirds of that revenue is expected to be recurring in nature. This will really provide us the ability for stability and resilience as we tap the profit pools of biotech and pharma. Third, we expect to at least double EBITDA to the range of $120 million-$150 million, reflecting a healthy 18%-20% EBITDA margin.
And lastly, we talked about we expect to generate between $200 million-$250 million in free cash flow, which will provide us significant optionality for value-accretive deployment. So the bottom line is this. We believe these targets represent a very balanced but substantial source of value creation for our shareholders. And we're committed to delivering on this plan. So let's talk about the components of our revenue growth. We're making investments loud, and we're confident on delivering on this plan. What you can see here is we have multiple levers that we're pulling for growth. We're aiming for singles and doubles here. Certainly, there's a ramp towards 2028 as we're just really setting the stage now on our new product investment and ramping up the initiatives in SRS and Gene Synthesis. So let me put a finer point on this by walking you through the years here.
Let's go backwards. I've talked about this a bit, but again, worth repeating. Fiscal year 2025, we set the stage. We put GMs in place. They're now accountable. We have product managers. We've empowered our product managers to drive the business, and we've regionalized the sales team. As you walk into now, fiscal 2026, we've added feet on the street for our initiatives, and we are forward investing in R&D. On top of that, we've optimized price. The feet on the street and the price optimization you'll see start to bear fruit in the second half of fiscal 2026. When you get to fiscal 2027, you'll see the full ramp of that investment that we put in place. On top of that, you'll start seeing the new products start to launch at the back end of fiscal 2027.
This culminates in fiscal year 2028, where we start seeing the full ramp during the three-year performance period of all the initiatives that we've talked about today. Again, we believe these growth targets represent a balanced but substantial source of creation for our shareholders, value creation for our shareholders. So as I mentioned earlier, we're not just focused on growth. That's super important. We're focused on profitable growth. First and most importantly, again, Azenta is going to at least double EBITDA over the LRP. We're targeting to move our gross margins above 50% during this period. When we look at this, how are we doing this? Through volume, mix, recurring revenue. Our recurring revenue is traditionally higher margins than our fleet average. When you look at productivity, our business system is going to enable us to yield efficiencies in our bio repositories, our labs, our manufacturing locations.
When you double-click into G&A and procurement, let's talk about procurement for a second. In direct materials, we're early days here in direct materials. We've just revamped our procurement team to focus on key opportunities. We're streamlining our supply chain. We're standardizing purchases where possible. From an indirect spend optimization, again, we're early innings. We have significant opportunities in standardizing purchases, G&A, and in gross margins, and also really looking at outside services. We've got a whole lineup of workshops through fiscal 2026 just to look at indirect spend. So overall, you can see from the slide here, at the upper end of what we're looking at for Adjusted EBITDA, our assumption is to prove Adjusted EBITDA by 300 basis points annually, with two-thirds of that coming from gross margin and one-third coming from OpEx. The OpEx is slightly lower because we are continuing the flywheel to reinvest in growth.
Lastly, I'll wrap up where I started by reiterating that we're truly building from a foundation of strength. Secondly, Azenta is poised to drive meaningful profitability even as we continue to reinvest for growth. While we continue to do the first two, we have significant potential to deploy capital effectively for the benefit of our shareholders. We're really excited about the future. We're committed to exceptional performance strategically, operationally, and financially. Once again, thank you for your time today and your interest in Azenta. I hope you join us for our journey. With that, I'll turn the floor back to John.
Excellent. Thank you, Lawrence. Pretty excited, as you can see. We've got a bright future ahead of us. Let me reiterate why we think this is a good investment. First is around our niche product categories and proprietary ecosystem that nobody has in life sciences, tools, and diagnostics, whether that is in the public market or private markets. Second is around our ability to scale, continue to scale from our installed base. As Alex stated, we have thousands of instruments in the field today. We have a lot of opportunities around bundling and continue to expand on that installed base. Third is around above-market growth, continuing to drive outperformance to the market. It's been a challenging market in life sciences, but we're outperforming, and we're going to continue that momentum.
Around margin expansion opportunity, it's pretty rare in the small and mid-cap market that you have top-line growth opportunities, margin expansion opportunities, and capital allocation opportunities. We have all three in our hands today. We're very excited about that. We are coming from a place of financial strength. We have a balance sheet. We have a management team to execute on high returns on our invested capital. I'll leave you with this. You've got a management team that cares, and it's going to be focused on execution and driving performance for our customers, for our employees, and our shareholders. You also have a group of 3,000 employees that care every single day, and a lot of that you saw today. That's a big reason to invest in Azenta. With that, I want to hand the mic over to Yvonne. She's going to give us some instructions on what's next. Yvonne?
Great. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Wow. I hope you all are as excited as I am after hearing that. Thank you to the management team for sharing a lot of the growth opportunities as well as margin opportunities that lay ahead. So we'll take a 10-minute break. Let me just check watch. Let's try to be back here at 2:35 P.M. if that works. And then we'll start the Q&A. And I'm sure that's the most interesting part of what you all are looking forward to. So thank you so much.
We're super excited to get started with our Q&A session. So we have our panel back up on the stage. So for those in the room, we have folks stationed over here to the side. So if you have a question, please just raise your hand, and they'll bring the mic to you. And if you could state your name and your firm, that would be great. And just as a reminder to those participating via the webcast, you can submit a question online. And we'll look forward to taking those questions as well as far as time permits. So with that, why don't we just get started? Great.
Great. David Saxon from Needham. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Great. Well, thanks so much for hosting today. It's been super interesting and helpful. So my first question is just around kind of the two business units as they stand today. I mean, the company has tried in the past to cross-sell across the two businesses. So what's your view on that potential over the LRP? I guess, do you have the Commercial model ready today to execute that, or is that kind of stage two or three?
Yeah, David, thanks for the question. The way I would think about the two businesses is more around we're tapping into the outsourcing trends and less about the synergies between the two businesses. I think it's been a distraction for the company in the past, and I think the way we're viewing it today is really we're focused on driving performance within those businesses. There's more potential in driving focus around Commercial bundling within those than there is on cross-selling. Now, I don't want to minimize that. In our biorepositories today, we send about 1%-2% over from our biorepositories into Multiomics today. If you look at the trends around that, Europe is in. They rely more on their biorepositories for some of the testing than the U.S. does. Maybe it gets there in three-to-five years, but it's not an area of focus for us in particular.
It's not contemplated as part of the long-range plan either, David.
Great. And then just on capital allocation, maybe for Lawrence, first, just a quick update on B Medical, if you could. And then the initiatives around expanding biorepositories and the footprint there, what amount of CapEx does that require? I think you're around 6% of sales in 2025. Where does that go over the LRP, and how far does that get you in, I guess, expansion? Thanks so much.
Yeah, I'll take the CapEx question, and then I'll pass it to John on B-Medical. For CapEx, you're right, David. We have about 6%-7% right now contemplated in our fiscal 2026 model. And that's similar profile to fiscal 2025. What I would expect to see in the fiscal 2027 to 2028 is that we'll moderate closer to about, I'll call it 3%-4%.
Great.
Medical, we're on target by the end of the year.
Hello, this is Matt Etoch from Stephens. Appreciate y'all taking my questions. And I'll reiterate David's comments on the quality of the presentation here today. Just to follow up on the SRS business, can you just remind us of the number of samples you currently have in storage and what portion of those would be considered active? And then can you just give us or refresh us a little bit about the economics around storage versus transaction?
Sure. 60 million samples today. The activity of those, are you referring to how many times we retrieve those?
Yeah, like what portion of samples are retrieved pretty frequently versus those that are not?
It depends on the life of the sample. So if it's newer, meaning years one through three, we're very active in retrieving those typically is what the data says. All right. The economics of that is very attractive, as you know, with 80% recurring. Our contract life is 7 years-25 years. It's very attractive. We call it kind of the eighth wonder of the world in our business right now. We're going to continue to invest in that. But that's the way I would look at it. If you think about this, you've got to think about biorepositories from archival versus high throughput and retrieval. We have all of those capabilities in our hand today, and we're going to look to optimize both segments of that.
Appreciate the color there. And just looking at the presentation, I think you highlighted 100 million samples by 2030 versus 60 million today. So I think that would suggest low double-digit growth for that business versus what I think was probably mid-single-digit growth for the last couple of years. Alex, I appreciate your comments and all the growth opportunities in front of you. But can you maybe dive into how you plan on re-accelerating that growth moving forward?
Sure. You want to talk about organic potential? And I can speak to.
Yeah, absolutely. So thank you for the question and remembering the numbers. That's great. We're really excited about our growth potential here. What we're looking at is the diversification of what we store and how efficiently we store it within our space. And so it's also deepening those relationships that we have with those existing customers on their new studies, on their new trials. So going deeper, as we talked about kind of with the outsourcing trends that we're seeing and with the market tailwinds that we're seeing, those relationships that we have are going to go deeper and become even wider. And so the capability and the ability that we have to tap into more sample pools and more opportunity is just increasing with those relationships that we have. And it's going to allow us to pull in more faster.
Maybe one thing to add, Matt, here. Certainly, when you do the math on the volume, that may not contemplate the price. So we are going to grow at a higher pace than what you just mentioned. Right now, Matt, from a we talked about organic opportunities. We also look at some inorganic opportunities we have in hand specifically in our biorepositories today.
Matt Stanton from Jefferies, maybe just to zoom in on two of the buckets on the revenue bridge. First, the growth initiatives you talked about, biorepositories, digital, Gene Synthesis. Can you just talk about your confidence and line of sight into some of these bigger areas of that bucket and then any investments needed? And then also on new product introductions. Sounds like that's more of a late 2027, 2028 story. But with the focus on C&I and Multiomics, just talk about some of the items you're most excited about and what you and the team are doing differently today versus prior around R&D.
Sure. Let me talk about our roadmap specifically in C&I and stores and autocryo. Our investments in R&D have been anemic the last few years. We've now started to aggressively invest in R&D. So new product development, of course, Lawrence talked about that, is going to be coming later on. C&I specifically, it's around workflow optimization and handling samples and increasing throughput for our customers. So you saw some of the instrumentation today in the biorepositories. We're coming out with next-gen of that. Again, very anemic in terms of our investments in the past. The teams are really excited about those investments. They're in now. Stores and cryo, automated cryogenic and automated vaults and stores is really hard. So we've got decades of capabilities there, and we're investing behind this pretty rapidly. One of the things you saw is why are we doing that?
The amount of data that's coming out in research is physical in nature because companies are wrestling with the fact that, do they want to store gigabytes of data, or do they want to store samples? Because they don't even know what's in a lot of those samples today, and so what we see is the need to continue to invest behind this. We're doing that in modular stores, smaller stores, a lot of those, Auto Cryo units. We're really excited about continuing to invest in there. We haven't invested in a very long time from that perspective. We're the market leader, and then C&I and around some of the tubes, so if you have to think about this, if you've ever been in an Amazon warehouse, our stores and vaults are like warehouses, so it's warehouse management systems for our customers.
Standardizing the boxes or the units in those, meaning the vessels, the samples, is really important. We're investing behind consumables as well. I would expect all of that, as well as on GENEWIZ. There's a lot of other services we invest behind in terms of being a one-stop shop because our customers want to do business with one partner at a fair price, and that's what they're continuing to do there. In SRS, it's expanding those product capabilities in which we offer different solutions for. In SRS, we do have other services that you saw in the lab today with transportation and those sorts of things. We're investing behind that as well, so I hope that gives you a good sense of where we're investing.
Matt, maybe just add to this. One of the things that's unique about Azenta is we have the capacity to not only invest, but also generate almost 300 basis points of Adjusted EBITDA, and so certainly we have the ability to utilize, get the productivity, as well as really optimize G&A, so I think that's important.
All right, thanks. And then on the regionalization of Gene Synthesis, maybe just a bit more color in terms of investment required here, timing and cadences that are in flight now. And then I guess just a little more on how that helps you. It feels like you have a pretty good line of sight and confidence around meeting local demand, improving turnaround times. But just talk a little bit more around the initiatives there. And then Lawrence, maybe if you could just talk too about being able to protect the margin structure as you move capacity into the U.S. and into Europe as well on Gene Synthesis.
Sure. So Gene Synthesis specifically is really around automating that complex segment. About 80% of that can be automated today. That's in our hands today. And the 20% you need some know-how for. So that's really important in terms of how we're investing behind synthesis. We're really excited about this. We do very well in our synthesis business. It's very high margin for us. We're very profitable, and we're going to continue to invest behind that.
Yeah, yeah, Matt. Part of that CapEx that we talked about is exactly what John talked about, right? Is being able to automate a lot of processes as we regionalize into the U.S. The other portion that I may not have touched on, and it's important, is we spent a lot of time on the business system kaizens and workshops in SRS in fiscal 2025. We are just starting that at the labs. So the combination of automation and optimization of the labs is still something that's still to come.
Hi, thanks, guys. This is Mackenzie. I'm here for Vijay Kumar at Evercore ISI. First question, I know you talked a little bit about pricing, and you've already implemented a few strategies. I was just wondering, could you talk about over the LRP, what areas are you targeting first? And any quantitative color or any sort of details on how you might approach customers or different segments with your strategies?
Yeah, certainly. Nice to meet you, Mackenzie. For fiscal 2026, we talked about C&I and SRS. And as you all know, and John talked about, particularly in SRS, we have contracts between seven and 25 years. Now, what's important here is a lot of that contracts, we really did not optimize or take advantage of those contracts, meaning they have pricing built in. So certainly now, with some of the process improvements we're taking, there's certainly opportunities there. Additionally, as you look at C&I, there's certainly those options as well. We instituted a price increase in October in our consumables and instruments. As I mentioned during kind of the prepared slides, we are certainly looking at all the other businesses and looking at what is possible. But again, to John's point, this is a shared equity around what is, one, equitable to the customer, but also advantageous to Azenta.
That's helpful. Thanks. And second question, I think, Lawrence, you also mentioned that you plan to at least double EBITDA. I was just wondering, are there any levers to the upside? And how are you thinking about maybe bracketing what that could look like by the end of your LRP?
Yeah, certainly. And I touched briefly on it. But I think if I would look back, and let's take fiscal 2026 as an example, right? Two-thirds of that opportunity in margin expansion is going to come from our gross margin. And that's through ABS. That's through just direct material, just, again, basic blocking and tackling. We're not doing anything sophisticated here, but just focusing, right? And then one-third is going to be around optimization of G&A. And that similar profile should go through the balance of the LRP. Now, I think, like I said earlier, the macroeconomics, anything outside, all this opportunity around margin is well within our control.
Could I squeeze in one quick other question? On the Multiomics, I know you said you were also planning to expand into new modalities. Could you talk a little bit more about where you plan to expand as far as proteomics, single-cell? Is this somewhere you're focused from an M&A perspective? And is this customer-driven, or is this really focused on internal research you guys have been doing?
So I'll let Ginger talk about that, but let me tee it up. So it's a bit of both. I mean, it's always based on customer demand, of course. Right now, we have all of that in our hands from an organic perspective.
Yeah, the area where we're going to invest and expend, as you mentioned, proteomics is very exciting, a market area that customer has more demand than before, and you can provide better data than before, data insights for customers to do their research. Proteomics, single-cell, spatial, and cell gene therapy market or protein engineering. These are the areas we're going to invest and increase our portfolio in order to provide better data insights for our customers. Thank you.
[Maria], there's, I think, Brendan.
Hi, Matt Parisi from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Regarding the scaling of biorepositories, are the biorepositories you would be targeting more regional one-off sites, or would there be more grouping, like a smaller grouping portfolio of biorepository sites that you'd be looking into?
Right now, our lens, are you speaking organically or inorganically?
Inorganically.
Yeah. Right now, we take our view of expansion in biorepositories with kind of the following lens. First is around this hub and spoke, okay? As you know, we've got a big hub here in Indianapolis. We think there's a big opportunity to expand that into the West Coast and have a hub out on the West Coast. We also think there's opportunities in Europe as well. We've got a facility in Germany today, and we're going to continue to expand that in Europe. It's a bit of both in all candor. So that's the way I would think about it. Sure.
Yeah, thanks, guys. Brendan Smith from TD Cowen. Maybe just one high level on M&A. I appreciate all the color for kind of the criteria you're looking for. Do you have kind of a goal or expected cadence over the next few years? Is this one to two deals a year or something like that? Or is it really more opportunistic when it comes to timing of all this? And maybe I'll save my next one for Ginger after.
We struggled with sharing our thoughts on this because we didn't really want to box ourselves in for obvious reasons. Because I think the organization has got to get our legs underneath us from an M&A perspective, and we've got to get credibility back from a market perspective here, and so one of the reasons we're not sharing kind of what that cadence looks like is we don't want to be forced into capital deployment. We want to be very thoughtful about how we're deploying capital in the four areas that we spoke of directly, Brendan. Maybe Brian, just to touch on the size and scope. Look, we've got 60 possible targets in our pipeline, and it's significant, and certainly, they're all in different stages, but to John's point, right? We will be opportunistic where we can, but certainly, there's a robust pipeline.
Okay, quick, if I can squeeze another one in just on the Multiomics segment. So you guys, I appreciate the market breakdown color. I think you had 23% Gene Synthesis versus 77% Sequencing. And then actually within synthesis, I think it's at 9% blended market share in the, excuse me, with Sequencing and synthesis together. So I guess the first question is really, is that 23-77 synthesis Sequencing, is that kind of your sweet spot? Is that where you think that's optimal for you guys to be operating at? Do you want to go up or down in either segment? And then do you have any kind of additional clarity on that? Is it that blended 9% between the two? Do you have a sense of where you fall in Sequencing market share versus in synthesis market share? And kind of same question, if that makes sense.
Let me give you some color around how we think about it, and then I can hand it over to Ginger in terms of how we're expanding in those areas. So we want to continue to grow our synthesis business. It's highly profitable for us. It is biological manufacturing, and we want to continue that. We're pretty excited about the investments we're making around that specifically. The uniqueness of Multiomics is the fact that we do have Sequencing. And so we do have Sanger. Sanger is never going to go away. We've spent a lot of time with our customers, and it is declining, yes, but it's not going to go away because there is a need for it in the market. We're going to continue to invest in Sequencing. Our customers want to see more of that and offering other ancillary services around that.
That gives us the ability to continue to invest in synthesis. I would expect that to grow over the coming years.
Yeah, just a couple of things to add. You asked 23% of Gene Synthesis right now versus Sequencing, which is like two-thirds or three-thirds of the total pie. To me, both will grow. I cannot predict what percentage in the latter, but you hear our excitement about expanding our synthesis because it's a highly profitable business for us. We have a lot of opportunities in the United States. We hear from customers. I got a lot of customer excitement about regionalization and that they have accessibility to synthesis locally. So I'm really looking forward to growth, but I couldn't project the percentage because Sequencing will grow as well. 9%. 9% breakdown, but both. I don't have the exact breakdown, but both is just like in this market, as I mentioned, both will grow, and our Sequencing grow very well right now. Yeah.
I'll take one from the webcast. So John, this one's for you, please. Could you provide some additional color on the types of opportunities that make the most sense in this current business environment in terms of M&A?
Sure. Thank you for the question. And there's really three areas in which we see a lot of opportunity. And first is around biorepositories and scaling our biorepositories. We've talked about that, but we have in our hands today is organic and inorganic. We're very excited about our inorganic opportunities there. Second is around really in synthesis. There is some opportunities in our hand around synthesis from a technology perspective and from a business perspective. We're also pretty excited about those. We have both. We sit on both sides of that, organic investments and inorganic. The third one is around our automated stores. And a lot, I would say the lion's share of that specifically is organic. Inorganically, the way we view kind of the automated solutions business is there are some instruments out there and some consumables that we're pretty excited about from an inorganic perspective.
It's less so on the store side and more so on the C&I. High margin products, high returns. Our lens there is continue to invest in recurring revenue, high margin, and high returns in those areas.
Great. Thank you, John.
Sure.
Any questions in the room? Other additional questions that you'd like to?
Hi, yes, Matt Parisi again. With the shift in Sequencing from Sanger to NGS, what would be the ideal mix that Azenta is targeting? And that would be like mix of Sanger to NGS kind of like so we can back into a margin for the Multiomics business within the Sequencing.
Let us come back to you specifically on it and on what that breakdown looks like, but let me just speak at a high level. We're now kind of viewing we viewed Sanger as kind of this separate part of our business. I would think about we're putting Sanger into Sequencing because Plasmid-EZ is in that right now. Our Plasmid-EZ business has doubled, and it's growing rapidly. It clips the decline of Sanger, and so it's been really important for us to take really, we pushed the teams pretty hard and said, "Let's stop making it. This is no longer a hobby. Let's build a business around this," and so we've done that specifically in Plasmid-EZ. That's the way I would look at it from a high level. In terms of the numbers, let us come back to you on that. We'll do that one-on-one, okay?
We're getting close to time. Any final questions in the room? David?
Hey, Zach Rosensock from Segall Bryant & Hamill. I was just curious if you could give more of a ballpark of the opportunity that you couldn't address in the U.S. business for synthesis before you regionalized. Is it a $20 million opportunity that customers were like, "Hey, unless you're here, I won't do it," just so I can understand why you're so excited about that as a growth driver?
Yeah, you know I think a lot of this is underpinned by a lot of the geopolitical dynamics right now. And we're not quantifying it publicly, but I can tell you we view the opportunity as substantial, which is why we're investing behind it. If you think about the other players in synthesis today, we're very profitable, and we've protected that margin. We've protected that margin because we have the ability to synthesize in highly complex sequences as well as simple. And so we're a lower volume, higher margin business, and we want to continue to invest behind it. I think, Zach, the opportunity is pretty substantial for us. I think the board sees it that way, the management team sees it that way, and we're pretty excited around investing behind it.
Great. So I think that's going to wrap up the Q&A session. I want to thank everybody for putting questions out there. But John, maybe pass it back to you for some final thoughts.
Sure. We're thrilled you're here and you're interested in Azenta. I hope that we were able to clarify the opportunity with the company, our product portfolio, and more importantly, the management team that's going to execute against that. Thank you again for your time. We really appreciate it.