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Great. All right, great. Thank you, everybody. My name is Casey Woodring from the Life Sciences Tools and Diagnostics team here at JPMorgan. I'm pleased to introduce our next presenting company, Azenta Life Sciences. Joined with me here on stage is CEO Stephen Schwartz. Azenta is going to give a presentation followed by a Q&A session. With that, I'll just give it to Steve.
Great. Thanks, Casey, good afternoon, everyone. I just wanna start with I'm here for the distance. I hope my voice will come along with me, I apologize. It's good to see everyone, and Casey, we're delighted to be here at the JP Morgan conference, we really appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to present. As Casey mentioned, I'm Steve Schwartz, I'm the CEO of Azenta Life Sciences. Azenta now is a standalone life sciences company for a year, we just passed our one-year anniversary as a standalone life sciences company. I would love to give you an update on where we are as a company, what we see shaping up for the near term, also in particular, what the long-term prospects are for the company.
We believe we're a growth company in a tremendous growth environment in just the earliest innings, and what we believe is a tremendous opportunity. We really like our position in a space that's being shaped today, and the leadership positions that we have, we think are in front of many of the demands that are coming from customer and from an industry in a science and technology space. I'll make quick reference to the safe harbor statement. We will be making forward-looking statements. You can see a more complete disclosure on our website, www.azenta.com. First, let me just introduce Azenta to you. For people who are not so familiar, we finished fiscal 2022, we're a September 30 fiscal year end. We finished another growth year in September at $555 million of revenue.
It was 8% growth year-over-year. When we back out a pretty significant COVID contribution, it was steady on the path that we've been on, a 17% organic growth ex-COVID year-over-year. We remain in position for strong continued growth here over the next several years based on a really solid portfolio of services and products. Balance right now at presence is services about two times that of products. I'll talk in a moment about a recent acquisition that balances the products and services 50/50. It's neither objective nor a target for the company, it just puts it into balance from the standpoint of how we're how their revenue is split. We made an acquisition that closed just at the start of the fiscal year, our first full day of the fiscal year, October third.
B Medical Systems added about 400 employees. Ex-B Medical, we're about 3,500 employees on a global base. We have an extremely strong balance sheet as a result of the sale of our semiconductor operations business, which closed on the second of February in 2022. It leaves us with $1.4 billion of cash, excluding $500 million in an accelerated share repurchase, which is just underway, kicked off in the middle of November. A little bit about Azenta, a little bit of our history.
We started just over 10 years ago as a semiconductor capital equipment company with two core technical capabilities, one in automation, the movement of semiconductor wafers in a particularly controlled environment. The other is we had the capability to create vacuum using cryogenic technologies with the mechanical means by which we could go to ultra-cold temperatures. We started in fiscal 2011, which is our fiscal 2010. We acquired a series of small automated biological sample storage companies. From there, we modified those designs with our strong engineering talent from the semiconductor side. We built the capability where we're the leader in automated cold storage. In the mid-1990s, automated cold storage was important for pharmaceutical companies handling chemical compounds. Once the genome was sequenced, the materials that were stored needed to be stored at colder temperatures.
Biological samples stored at -20, - 80 degrees Celsius. Now you see cells and tissue being stored below minus 135 degrees Celsius. Our heritage and history in extremely cold temperatures combined with automation put us into a strong leadership position as the number one provider of automated cold storage. As we were in this business, we recognized that not only did we have the top 20 pharmaceutical companies storing samples in our automated cold stores, we also understood that the same pharmaceutical companies that stored in our cold stores stored samples off-site for archival storage.
To be able to complete this workflow to participate with our customers, to be able to offer a value solution, a value-added solution, not just for the storage of samples on-site, but also off-site and traffic and the logistics, we acquired the number one independent biorepository company, BioStorage Technologies. By the time we got to 2016, we were a more complete sample management company, being able to help customers manage their live samples and their archive samples, and we were a $100 million life sciences business. At that point, we also understood there were other opportunities in and around this cold chain of condition, the management of samples, where we also could provide a biological interrogation capability, a genomics capability. We acquired GENEWIZ, four years ago in November of 2018.
World-class capability in genomic services, both for the reading and writing of genes, it enhanced the product portfolio immensely. We had the ability to store and manage samples, also to interrogate those samples and provide data back to customers. A very complete portfolio of capabilities. We continued to add small acquisitions to build out more capabilities, by the time we finished 2022, we were a $550 million life sciences company. The core of the capabilities we have as a portfolio is we provide critical but non-core capabilities to pharmaceutical biopharma companies into research institutions, where we can start by sourcing rare disease samples for them. We have a sourcing organization that allows us to go and find particular high-quality samples for their research.
We bring samples in from the customer or from our customers who allow us to source samples. We put them into formats so they're findable, usable, automatable, we'll store these either in automated stores on site or stored in archival storage. Ultimately, we can retrieve those samples and interrogate them, perform next-gen sequencing or Sanger sequencing on them, and provide a complete capability of bioinformatics data back to the customer. This entire cold chain of condition, managing samples, precious samples for customers is a critical capability that we provide, and we're the only ones with this complete portfolio. It's a tremendous value-added capability for our customers. We think this strategically positions us in a unique and very strong space. The first of these trends is the sheer amount of R&D that continues to expand, the outsourcing of R&D.
By our measures for the third consecutive year, we anticipate that the number of outsourced samples from research will double over the next five years. That was true a year ago, it was true a year before that. We continue to see this momentum build and the management of billions of samples now has become an intractable problem for companies that need to do it perfectly, and it's something that we do perfectly as a core of our business. We believe that the cell and gene therapy market is just in the earliest days with tremendous growth potential.
The critical areas that we provide capabilities here really relate to the management of the samples and cryogenically preserving these samples to make sure that cells that are live and viable are frozen at a particularly controlled rate, are stored safely without any damage or risk to them from a temperature excursion standpoint. Most recently, we acquired a company, Barkey, that allows us to do controlled rate thawing in these samples so that they have been stored for a week, a month, a year. They're still viable cells when they come out. Managing this entire cold chain of condition, this capability in and around cell and gene therapy allows us a unique position in a market that we've seen grow 25% and 30% per year, quarter-on-quarter. I think everybody's familiar with the importance of the cold chain.
We see this expanding all the way from vaccines that are stored from 2 degrees to 8 degrees, and now all the way to cryogenic temperatures below - 136 degrees Celsius. Already, our automated systems work at - 196, we run the entire spectrum of cold chain sample preservation with a particular expertise from end to end, from critical biological samples all the way through the delivery of vaccines. Finally, the importance of a global footprint has never been more prominent. The fact that wherever critical life sciences capabilities are going on, the continuous and constant capabilities have to be provided for customers in every location. We're a global organization. We operate in more than 150 countries today, we're able to provide the same service in any country that we provide in any other.
For us, that's a critical capability, and for global customers that need to be able to depend on this capability, we have an established footprint, and we continue to make investments in that footprint so that we can provide consistent service. Just a quick note on some of the cell and gene therapy capabilities that we provide. As I mentioned, a few times we're a reliable sample manager at all temperatures across the spectrum, but in particular, uniquely, we do automated cold storage for samples at - 190 degrees Celsius, well below the glass transition temperature and safe for cell and gene therapy. In our genomics side of the business, we have a particular array of AAV sequencing and synthesis capabilities for R&D. The number of applications that we have in the earliest days of some critical research continues to expand.
This is one of the fastest-growing segments of the company. Finally, the addition of the controlled rate thawing and cryopreservation of samples is becoming ever more critical by adding Barkey capabilities to the company. We're now at the patient bedside. We've gone from a heavily R&D-focused capability all the way to clinical application and the treatment of patients. We're particularly proud of our presence in cell and gene therapy. You'll see us continue to expand capabilities both organically and inorganically in and around this space, serving cell and gene therapy, starting with our unique expertise and expanding to things that are critical for the safe and reliable delivery of treatments. The means by which we go about serving customers is truly unique. We start at the scientific end of the spectrum.
We have, in the genomics business, we have more than 400 PhD equivalent scientists who have conversations with scientists. We meet them as graduate students, as postdocs, as researchers at different pharmaceutical companies. We've been cited in more than 20,000 technical publications, and we pride ourselves in those introductions of the company to people who ultimately run companies. We're highly cited in scientific journals. We participate in a vast plethora of the molecular biologists are familiar with the Azenta and the GENEWIZ capabilities. All of the top 20 pharma companies store samples in our automated stores, and a vast majority of those also archive samples with us. The trust that we have from the time that we meet these customers from a scientific standpoint all the way through to the management of their product development and ultimately delivery of their vaccines has been critical.
This is an important chain, and it's the means by which we establish ourselves with customers and stay with them through their careers and through the life cycle of their research. I want to introduce to you B Medical Systems, the most recent of our acquisitions. We closed at the beginning of October. It's a company unique in capability, a little bit different from the mainstream Azenta, it requires a moment of explanation and something that's really got us enthusiastic about a tremendous opportunity. In the center of the photograph here, you see a vaccine cold chain box. This is literally a box that's used to store vaccine. There are more than 50,000 of these distributed around the world. They're powered by... the sunlight. They're solar-powered vaccine containers, they're distributed in the harshest, most remote areas of the world.
The way it works is the vaccines are delivered by Toyota four-by-four. A health worker goes out to this box, lifts the lid, takes out cold packs and vaccines, and goes into the bush, to the jungle, does inoculations of children for malaria or adults for particular diseases. It's a vaccine distribution center, and we think about it as 50,000 vaccine distribution centers. It's not just a cold box powered by solar, it has a GPS system associated. When you put this box down in one of the harshest environments where it's more than 100 degrees outside and 90% humidity, the box stays cold. We monitor the temperature outside the box. We monitor the temperature inside the box.
We have an indication signal every time the lid is open, every time the lid is closed, we know the precise coordinates of that vaccine cold chain box. For a guaranteed 10-year performance, that box will perform. It'll report every day the temperature. It'll report any temperature occurrences. It'll report its precise locations. The number one provider of vaccine data to the World Health Organization today comes from these 50,000 boxes for part of the vaccine cold chain system. It's an interesting business. It's a particularly rewarding business to be in, more than that, we think it's a toehold into what could be the next opportunity for the company. When we use those boxes to deliver vaccines, it's only half of the cold chain opportunity.
When a health worker is out in the field inoculating a child, at the same time, if they can draw whole blood, put it back into the cold box, back into the VCC box, and the next time the vaccines are delivered, to have these human health samples that are now cold and preserved in high quality transported back to an in-country biorepository. The opportunity is not just to inoculate a child for vaccine for malaria, but to rather provide an opportunity for that country to begin to work on human health issues that are for that country are particularly important. I think everybody's heard discussions around the importance of the African genome. This is an opportunity now to really get population studies done.
We see this as a really good business as it is and a tremendous future opportunity for us to exploit this cold chain where the hardest part of the cold chain's already been established. These cold boxes are already out in remote areas ready to be the first step on the return journey for critical biological samples. We're particularly enthusiastic about B Medical. It's a terrific team. It's a really good business and one that we'll continue to build upon, and we'll bring Azenta capabilities in any country where these blue boxes are located. A little bit more about the portfolio. With the addition of B Medical, I'll show you a pro forma look at the company, about an even distribution between products and services. Each one on its own is a pretty healthy business. On the services side, we have our sample repository services.
We store 60 million samples for customers in our various repositories around the world. On the genomics side, we do next-generation sequencing and Sanger sequencing, and we do more than 1 million Sanger sequences every month. Just to give you a perspective, we have 3,000 drop boxes around the world. When a researcher goes home at night, they put their samples in the drop box. When they come back and look at their computer screen in the morning, the data from that gene read is on their screen. It's a particularly high turn, high quality, high value service. On the product side, we have products that are related to formatting the samples, to storing the samples, to providing all the automation in and around the protection of these critical samples. Again, critical but not core capability.
We believe that we have leadership positions in each one of these segments and a particularly unique capability around the portfolio offerings that we can bring to a customer, bringing all these capabilities to bear to manage the critical aspects of how they manage their samples and how they interrogate their samples in their site. As we move forward, we continue to focus on being leaders in every segment that we're in, and particularly leaders in the offerings that we have. Our number one focus for the company, although we are quite acquisitive, our number one focus always is organic opportunities. How can we take the capabilities that we have and continue to grow by developing our own unique capabilities through innovative services and products? We're focused particularly now on driving margin expansion across the portfolio.
We now have mass and capability where we need to begin to deliver even more expansion of margin, both at the gross margin line and operating margin. We're gonna continue to be disciplined in the use of our balance sheet. We have our ROIC focus on all of the acquisitions that we've done. In the past 12 years, we've always used ROIC as a critical hurdle, and we've been tremendously successful, we think, with the values that we've added, the value that we've added to the companies that we brought to Azenta. We have a strong track record of growth, both organic and inorganic growth. Over the past seven years, we have a 35% CAGR. We are acquisitive. We've done approximately a dozen acquisitions, some whole companies, some small product lines.
You see strong organic growth as well as contributions from acquisitions throughout. We did a significant acquisition of BioStorage Technologies. We got into the biorepository business. I mentioned GENEWIZ was at the beginning of fiscal 2019, the end of calendar 2018. Was transformative for the company. Allowed us another platform to be able to provide more value to customers. Since then, we've continued to add organic capabilities to the company and really drive growth by customer connection and the addition of significant number of customers every quarter. We're particularly proud of our ability to do acquisitions. We always talk about the fact that in the past 12 years, we've met more than 1,000 different companies. We're really selective about what we do. It's gotta be a strategic fit.
We've gotta make sure that it delivers the above our WACC within five years is our target. We give a bridge five to seven. We've never done an acquisition yet that hasn't met the model and the hurdle within five years. We do have some patients, if there's some that's particularly strategic, that we need to get done or in a competitive environment, it'd be five to seven years. They're all high growth, and there's tremendous profitability leverage from each one of these acquisitions. We've done a, we think, a pretty good job. We spent $1 billion in acquisitions to grow this business. Onto each one of the acquisitions, we continue to fund them to make sure that we can grow organically outside. We're not a holding company.
We're a portfolio company of capabilities, and if we bring an acquisition in, we have high expectations, not just for the performance that they had, but the performance they will have as part of Azenta. To date, each of the acquisitions has contributed as we had anticipated. A lot of talk around capital deployment. We sold the semiconductor capital equipment business. We closed it on February 2, 2022 for $3 billion. We netted just over $2.5 billion of cash. After that, we continue to look for ways to put that to work. We announced in the middle of November that we were doing a significant return of capital in the form of share buyback.
We committed $1 billion of share buyback, $500 million in the form of an accelerated share repurchase, which we initiated in the middle of November, and it's ongoing now. We've committed another half billion when that finishes, and we anticipate sometime toward the end of June, the second half billion dollars of share repurchase will commence. We anticipate that likely by the end of 2023, we'll have completed that purchase of shares. From an OpEx standpoint, typically 6%-9% of revenue, R&D 4%-6%, depending on programs and projects that are going on. We still have a strong cash balance. We've committed $1 billion. We announced an authorization for one and a half billion dollars.
At the end of that repurchase, x the cash that the company continues to generate, we'll still have $500 million of cash on the balance sheet for additional acquisitions. We're active in the market. We see tremendous opportunities. We just don't see tremendous large opportunities, That's why the repurchased the shares. Finally, just to give a summary, we're a highly differentiated, highly unique capability. We have competitors in every one of the segments. We have no competitors across the portfolio where we think we add tremendous value. This year will be in excess of $700 million at a run rate, mentioned on the balance sheet. We're in a very comfortable position from a balance sheet standpoint.
What we're particularly enthusiastic about is at this size with critical mass to be a global company, we can put more capabilities on top of this global network as a company and continue to build out faster with sales organization, with R&D, with global infrastructure, where we're established in countries, we believe this sets us up for tremendous growth. We're a $700 million company and something that's in the $12 billion-$15 billion of market opportunity. We got nothing but upside. Market share is small. We're aggressive going after it. We do see these as the earliest days. We look forward to strong growth here over the next five year period. We've got a really aggressive team going after it, strong capabilities that we're ready to go exercise. We're particularly pleased with the current position.
Again, thanks for the ability to be here. Thanks, everybody, for your time. We're delighted to have a chance to present to you.
Well, great, Steve. Now we'll shift to the Q&A portion. If anybody has a question, please feel free to raise your hand or submit one via the webcast. I guess to start, Steve, you saw stronger performance in your genomics business.
Yeah.
In the fourth quarter versus the third. Can you just talk about the trends you're seeing there, across NGS, synthesis and Sanger? you know, what are the key demand drivers for those businesses, and why do those customers, you know, choose Azenta?
Okay, sure. Thanks. A few things. We read and write genes, so that's part of our business. Uniquely, we do that as well. The three segments you broke out. The next-generation sequencing, we see that particularly strong. The amount of research that's done, the consultative capability we have, we see strong, persistent growth in that business, and we're getting close to a run rate of about $100 million a year. That's a particularly strong business for us, and it's broad. We see it across pharma, biopharma, and academic institutions. On the Sanger side, this is the reading of a single gene, if you will. This is a technology which is now getting to be 50 years old, and it's something that's gonna sunset at any time. We always hear that.
We always anticipate it, we don't see it. It's a pretty consistent low single-digit grower, it's the nature of what we do. It's one of those things that we do. We have 3,000 drop boxes around the world. Researchers want to measure a gene, they'll put those samples in the box as they go home. The van will come around. We'll pick it up, take it to one of our local labs. We'll measure it and they have the result in the morning. It's still at twice the price, it's a highly valued, high-quality service that we provide. The nature of the business, however, different from the science, the nature of the business is, it's a little bit difficult to get a 25-year-old PhD scientist to come and do 50-year-old technology.
Although this is in every core laboratory, it's something that people are doing less and less of. They can get a high quality, fast turnaround service from us. We love this business. I think over the last 10 years, as we continue to add these sequencers, we have refurbished units that we buy from customers who are getting out of the business, and we continue to satisfy that. The reason that we're a high single digits grower in this space is something that we do particularly well, and we think it's gonna sustain for a long time. The synthesis portion of our business is probably the softest of them. The activity is steady. Over the past year, we have not been at the 20-25% growth rates. We had logistics issues we discussed getting through some of the activities in China.
The business remains strong. It's not been the fastest grower, but we think we resolved issues, and we look forward to more growth in that business as well here in 2023.
That's helpful. Can you talk a little bit about the sample repository solutions business? You know, how that works, what types of customers do you serve there, and what's differentiated about Azenta's solution in that particular market?
Sure. There are a lot of biorepositories and a lot of them were started in the early 2000s. The genome was sequenced, people began to store biological samples. The nature of what we do is different from a lot of the biorepositories you find. We believe we're the number two in terms of size and samples, biorepository in the world. We do things different from others. We manage sample by sample. As opposed to selling cubic feet of cold storage at a particular temperature, the vast majority of our business for the biorepository is we can tell you exactly the location, and we charge the customer per sample per month.
It's a different higher value service, and now it's allowing us not just to go from automated storage, but we are now putting manual storage. We're now putting automated storage systems into our biorepositories for fast retrieval, for the ability for the customer to see their sample at any time. That's probably the difference. The other thing that I'll say is, five years ago, it really wasn't possible for large pharmaceutical companies who had 100 million samples in a collection to consider outsourcing to anyone because there was no one of the size and scale who could manage the samples the way they do.
The capabilities that we've been able to build, the mass that we've been able to build allows a customer to think about taking a 10 million sample slug and putting them into Azenta, into one of our biorepositories, and they have at least the same access, probably better access to their samples and knowledge of location than they do on their own site, and it's a capability that didn't exist before. The only place they could go was just a small biorepository firm, and I think the samples would have been unsafe.
The mass that we've built, the capability and proofs that we have with them has allowed us a different position and allows pharmaceutical companies now to consider outsourcing these vast collections to free up buildings worth of freezer space, to take down carbon footprint, and actually to manage their global collections a little bit more efficiently.
Consumables and instruments was the area of your portfolio most impacted by COVID-related demand. Can you talk a bit about how the business has evolved over the recent quarters, as that COVID-related revenues begin to tail off? You know, what are your normalized growth expectations for that business?
That's particularly important 'cause if anybody follows the revenue for the company, most of the COVID impact we had as a company was positive, and most of it came as a result of just a sheer deficiency of the number of molded plastic parts that people could get. We do vials and tubes, we do PCR plates. When COVID hit in 2020, just over $50 million of revenue came as a result of our ability to satisfy some of this demand for molded consumable plastic parts. That's 2021. In 2022, it was just over $20 million, and now we're baselined out. The amount of COVID-related consumables and instruments business now is particularly small. It might be upwards of $1 million a quarter. The growth rates here have been typically...
Ex-COVID, the growth rates have particularly been around 10%. We'd anticipate that as an opportunity continuing to go forward.
I'll pause here in case anybody in the crowd has any questions. Looks like we have one here.
Pricing.
Yes.
Can you talk more about the ability to drive pricing next year?
Sure. I'll repeat the question here. The question is, what about pricing? What's our ability to drive pricing in the coming year? It varies by parts of the business. I'll give you an example. On one end of the spectrum, the long-term storage contracts we have in the biorepository business are generally governed by master service agreements, which include the ability for us to raise price, and they've always included the ability for us to raise price on an annual basis, but not episodically, but at certain times of the year. In places where we have a highly differentiated product in the automated cold source, in the automated cryogenic systems, we're able to effect value pricing. There is the only place that you can get some of these capabilities.
On the genomic side, it's more competitive, so the nature of competition is tougher. The elasticity there is different from other parts of the business. Point by point, business by business, we have the opportunity. We're able to take advantage in some places, and we're cautious in others.
Steve, maybe just on large automated stores. In 4Q, you reported another record bookings for that business. Can you talk about what's driving demand there? How should we think about the timing for these bookings to translate into revenue?
Sure. On the automated cold storage, we've been the market leader now since we got into the business. In particular, we had, Casey, as you mentioned, we had particularly strong bookings in the second half of the fiscal year. Two things. One, historically, people would put a large automated store in for a population biostudy for a rare disease study. We'd go into an academic institution at a university, at a government facility for population studies. You need large capacity. At the Tohoku University, for example, after the Fukushima earthquake, to study the radiation damage, they put large automated stores in because they had 150,000 people they were tracking, and periodically would take samples. Those are the kinds of studies that historically drove large automated stores.
What we've seen now recently, over the past two years, is a new vector, and that's the manufacturers of biological materials that people who sell antibodies or different things to customers, they put those in our automated stores to help manage their workflow, their manufacturing process, and ultimately the shipping. The logistics-Of cold biological samples that ultimately get sold to customers, people have modified their manufacturing methods. It's, it gives us yet another vector. In addition to the research and the biological sample collections, we can also use these things to run businesses. That's been a, that's been a new and exciting change for us that we anticipate will drive pretty strong growth here in the future.
Looks like we have a question from the first row.
You mentioned the stronger demand for the NGS services in Q4 than you were expecting.
Yeah.
Curious if you could talk about the drivers of that demand and how you see that sustaining into the future.
Yeah. I don't know that I could, I don't know that I could tell you that it's a specific area, but this is contract by contract. Typically, what happens is if we win business at a pharmaceutical company, we do deliver really well, we'll get a bigger project, or we'll get the next group in the same company. I can't ascribe it as much to a market move as the success we had proving it to one researcher and then to the next one, and to the next one. That's historically been the way we won the. All of the genomics business GENEWIZ starts with, it started with Sanger sequencing. They did Sanger sequencing for customers, and then they said, "Well, yeah, I can do that too.
How about I do some NGS for you? How about I do some synthesis for you? Same way the NGS business expands because of the success we had. Customers will try out a half million dollar project with us, give us a $1 million project, give us a million and a half dollar project. That's been our history. People who win it are out trying to win the next one too. Only because of the size, sometimes we'll find if we do a research study, we'll win business, we'll think we have a customer that's gonna keep going, but what they do is they digest the data for the next year, publish the paper, they'll come back. The makeup of the business is a bunch of these projects stacked on top of one another.
The activity is pretty vibrant.
Steve, maybe just going back to 4Q results. You know, on the call you discussed some changes to the go-to-market approach. Can you just remind us what changes were made there, and provide a little more color around that initiative?
Sure. I'll back up a little history for people who aren't so familiar. We launched Azenta as a standalone company when we split from the semiconductor business and sold it. A year ago, when we branded the company Azenta, at the time, up until that point, we were a confederation of 14 different acquisitions, each with their own sales force. We spent five years growing at 20% per year because these teams were out maniacally selling their products or the services. The, the addition of all those drove tremendous growth and tremendous excitement, but it also wasn't particularly scalable. As we launched Azenta, we also rebranded the company. We began to put account structure in, regional structure so we can manage this and also can we utilize some of the footprint we have of salespeople.
Frankly, I think we went a little bit too far too fast. We diluted some of the salespeople. I think we didn't have a complete appreciation for scientists selling to scientists on genomics. If they ever were gonna go sell consumables or sell some stores, we diluted some of their focus. It wasn't a wrong thing to do. It was an incomplete move for us. We, we changed the structure of our go-to-market, but we should have added more capability in as opposed to redeploying. We're in the process now of making those investments back in sales. We're highly confident that all the offerings we have are better than they were a year ago, services and products. The coverage that we have from a sales standpoint is now in place.
It's gonna take us a few quarters to make sure that everybody gets traction and new people are able to sell, to represent the company and sell the capabilities that we have. We don't wanna give up on the account structure. We don't wanna give up on the regional structure. We do need to add during this transition through $500 million-$700 million, what it takes to be a truly larger global company, and we're catching back up with that.
One of the objections we put in on the earnings call, last quarter was that we're gonna continue to make those investments and that our objective was by the time we got to the end of 2024, we'd be in the, at least in the low double-digit growth rates again on our path toward, you know, consistently exceeding market growth opportunities.
Curious on your perspective on the cell and gene therapy market, if biotech funding has had any impact to your business there, and then ultimately how your portfolio supports the needs of those customers?
Yes. Ultimately, we haven't seen it just 'cause we can't detect it in terms of some of the funding. I will say the capabilities we have seem to be in high demand. This is still a 20%-30% grow or quarter-over-quarter, and it's mostly at the research and science area that we have. We anticipate that as more cell and gene therapies are approved, the Barkey thawing devices will become more prevalent, and the footprint there is different. Those are clinics and hospitals. Right now, it'd be tough to us, for us to know to ascribe it to some of the funding as we're engaged at the research level, and we still see high quality research going without pause.
That's helpful. I guess on B Medical Systems, in October, you completed that acquisition. How do you see that business fitting in with the rest of your portfolio and the avenues of expansion that it enables?
A couple things. One, just the engineering capability they have with the knowledge of the temperature and the precise location. We can use that for other products that we have. There are synergies to be gained there. The vaccine distribution. We had a vaccine distribution business as well. We store vaccines for army reservists, for example. We deploy those to the 150 high school gymnasiums on the weekend so that reservists can get vaccinated. The thing that we think, though, is the most interesting and most important is to, as I mentioned earlier, to use those B Medical local boxes, the vaccine distribution centers, as collection sites, if you will, on the return trip for biological samples.
It'll take us a couple of years to build that out, but we do think that holds tremendous promise to bring Azenta capabilities in and around an existing footprint from B Medical.
Just wanted to hit on a couple capital allocation questions. Just on the $1.5 billion share repo and $500 million ASR that you announced.
Yep.
You know, detailed on the presentation. Can you just talk about the thought behind these and, how does that impact your M&A strategy?
At the time we separated the two companies, we're gonna stand up two public companies. We announced in May of 2021 we're gonna stand up two public companies. At the time we're trying to structure the balance sheet to have $500 million on the life sciences balance sheet, so we thought that would be adequate, and we'd been in the M&A market for a long time, and $500 million was gonna be good. We were gonna put some debt on semi and stand up the two businesses. Lo and behold, as things transpired, the private equity firm came and bought the semi business. We had a lot more cash than we'd anticipated. A couple things happened. It didn't necessarily bring more opportunities.
Didn't mean those are things we should have acquired. Easy to spend $2 billion, hard to spend $2 billion on things that were going to be strategic fit. We continue to believe that $500 million is an appropriate amount for us to continue to grow the company. We also had a share price that we thought the shares were particularly undervalued, so we couldn't see a better investment than our own shares in terms of spending that money. When we finish with billion and a half dollars of spend, we'll have... Without the cash we generate, we'll still have $500 million of cash to put to work.
We think the M&A pipeline is really good and we're not in the business of managing cash, our thought was we give the cash back to shareholders. If we came out a year from now, a year and a half from now, and we had a billion and a half dollar deal that we wanted to do, we believe that if the shareholders thought we'd manage the business responsibly, that we'd be able to get that funding and get that agreement to go ahead and with that acquisition. That's the theory behind it. We think it's adequate right now, and responsible management will allow us to do something bigger if it comes by.
Maybe just to follow up on that M&A point, can you talk a bit about your acquisition criteria and how you think about which areas you might wanna add to the portfolio?
Sure. It's always strategic first. We're rigorous about getting the return on invested capital above the WACC within five years. To date, we've been pretty successful. In terms of capabilities, we want to continue to add anything that's adjacent, you'll see us do. Adding the Barkey capability was natural on the backside of cryogenic storage to have the thawing from cryogenic temperatures to the vein. We're particularly interested in expanding some of the capabilities we have from a genomics standpoint. You've seen us talk about proteomics offering. We look at gene to antibody, gene to protein. Anything from a data informatics side, we think provides more value to customers from the samples that we hold. Those are the areas where you'll likely see us trade mostly.
Adjacencies to what we have today and anything that enhances the next level of value from a data informatics standpoint.
Got it. Well, looks like we are bumping up against the end of the session. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you, Steve.
Yep.
Enjoy the rest of the conference.
Thanks.