Good afternoon, everyone. This is Rachel Vatnsdal with the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team. Thank you so much for joining me today. So, up on stage, I have the Bruker management team. As per usual for these sessions, it'll be 40 minutes, roughly half of that spent on a prepared presentation, followed by Q&A. And so, with that, I will pass it off to Frank.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Rachel. It's a pleasure to be here. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. I'm Frank Laukien. I'm the President and CEO of Bruker Corporation. Before we jump into the slide presentation, actually, I'd like to take a few minutes and just walk you through our soft pre-announcement from this morning. You may have seen our 8-K. You can also find the slides there. So, we announced about $970 million-$980 million of revenue for our Q4. That's about $10 million-$20 million higher than consensus and also than our own expectation. Keep in mind that we had sort of a monster Q4 of 2023 with 16% organic revenue growth. So, on top of that, we had muted expectations of being about flat or maybe very low single-digit growth would have been good.
This now suggests that we'll have about 3%-4% organic revenue growth in Q4 of 2024 year over year, despite the very strong comparison. So, that's good. This also implies about 15%-16% constant exchange rate revenue growth year -over -year, which is very strong. The implication for the full year of this revenue range also adds up to about 4% organic revenue growth for the full year, which isn't bad because probably the industry growth for the year 2024, we'll see how it all comes out, but probably -2%, maybe -1%. Depends how everybody reports now. So, again, well in excess of 2 to 300 basis points of growing faster than the market, also organically, and of course, much, much faster with constant exchange rate revenue. Finally, for the full year, it implies about 15% constant exchange rate revenue growth.
That's four years in a row with double-digit constant exchange rate revenue cumulative growth over the last four years of 70%. So, among the larger companies in our space, I think for four years in a row, I think we're the fastest growing company. What are the implications? We will give our Q4 earnings and our 2025 guidance in February, probably on February 11th. So, then we can dig into more details. The implications for 2025, where we are not giving guidance today, but we wanted to give you an outlook because we all come here to get outlooks and insights for 2025. In our slides, you will see later on that we are looking at constant exchange rate revenue growth in the upper mid-single digits. So, call that 5%-7%, and about half of that may be organic, and about half of that may be from acquisition.
5%-7%, again, a solid growth number. We anticipate that this is what is the assumption that goes into that. That's the assumption is a partial market recovery. If last year was down, we don't expect a snap back to, you know, 4% or 5% industry growth. Maybe that'll happen in the second half or in 2026. Our assumption for this is low single-digit market growth. Call that from anything from flat to 3%. That's consistent with our internal data. Of course, we're looking forward to learning more from other companies on this conference and when they give guidance. With low single-digit market growth assumption, which we think is reasonable, we expect to have higher than that organic revenue growth and about 5%-7% constant exchange rate growth.
Also implied, and then I'll go to the strategic part of the discussion rather than from this more tactical short-term things, but I know you wanted those numbers out of the way. We have given, and you will see in my presentation, that we are very committed. In the old days, I negotiated some things with Tycho, right? So, with you and Tycho, he had nailed me down on 110 basis points of margin expansion at the last earnings call. We are projecting 125 basis points of operating margin expansion or more. So, hopefully, that's the baseline for each of the years, 2025, 2026, and 2027. That's also there for our base implication for 2025. And that would translate, along with our growth, to about 13%-15% EPS growth annually, not just as a CAGR, but annually. That also gives you an outline of what we might be looking at.
Last but not least, and then I'll stop with the financial part, quite honestly. This should allow us, and we were very committed to that and remain committed to that since our May 2024 Investor Day, we said we want to get back to 19%-20% operating margin quickly by 2027, and we're very committed to that. We're solving for that, and our operating margin improvement supports that. It also means that for the first time with this transformed company, and this will bring me to the strategic outlook of our presentation, this transformed company in the past, yes, we did reach 20% margin, and we could have optimized that a bit further, maybe reached the low 20s, 21%-22%.
But fundamentally, only this transformed company with major organic investments in the transformation and then some inorganic elements to the transformation in the last two years, we now for the first time have a perspective and a platform where we think we can do another 800-1,000 basis points of margin expansion over an unspecified period and reach the mid-20s operating margin over time. We're not talking over decades, but we're not giving a specific year. So, that gets the tactical and near-term and medium-term financial parts out of the way. And then I hope to get to the more important part of my presentation, which is really explaining the new Bruker or the update of the transformed Bruker 2025 to you. We are aiming, as you know, for leadership in the post-genomic era, and we have transformed the company for that.
Of course, I would like to highlight our safe harbor statement and all the usual risk factors that you're familiar with in our SEC filings, and very basically, if there's one thing that you do take away, it is that we've been very deliberate and very strategic about our transformation, organic and inorganic. We have executed a successful multi-year transformation into a fast growth or growth-oriented industry leader with scale. I'll show you the evidence in a moment, and with very attractive margin, EPS growth, and free cash flow opportunities. Here are what we suggest are the key takeaways on our multi-year transformation. We have a track record. We have a management system, and we have a very experienced management team. Some of my colleagues are here. Others are not here, but are at work on performance execution.
So, for many years, we were told, well, you guys, you know, you're a little bit subpar. You don't quite have the scale. Well, we now have the scale of we've surpassed many companies that used to have more scale than us. We have attained scale. In the last four years, I think I said that earlier, we had a cumulative revenue growth of 70%. We're now, this year, we'll end up at about north of $3.35 billion in revenue. And that was, over those four years, a 15% constant exchange rate CAGR. Three years in a row, 2021 to 2023, with double-digit organic growth in 2024, with quite a bit of inorganic growth, and still very solid, about 4% organic growth. That's transformative. We also have done margin and profit expansion. So, this isn't just growth, growth, growth.
We achieved, factually, and there's slides in the back that I won't bore you with, but the evidence is all there, about 1,000 basis points of operating margin increase over eight years from 2014 to 2022. This went along with a 15% EPS CAGR during that time period. We have since then, especially in the last two years, invested very heavily. Our R&D investment is around 11%. Why is it so high? Why is it not at 6-7% more industry average? Because we have a historical opportunity at an inflection point between the last quarter century of genome biology and the next quarter century for which we are positioned, where genome biology plays a role, but I think it'll be multi-omic phenome biology, and I'll explain.
So, we're positioning, we have transformed the company not just for growth and margin potential, but really for strategic reasons to position ourselves as the leader for the post-genomic era. We have developed unique proteomics, multi-omics, and structural biology products. You know about our mass spec timsTOF multi-omics tools. You know about NMR tools, X-ray tools, et cetera, and then we have strengthened in key areas. Some of them were with small seed acquisitions a few years ago. Some of them were with the recent acquisitions, NanoString, et cetera, that I'll explain in a moment, so in the years 2023, 2024, when this was generally a risk-off environment, we went the opposite way.
We acted a little bit more acquisitive a little bit more like a private equity company with a publicly traded stock. But of course, we're not. We're really doing it for very strategic and what we think visionary reasons. We accepted a certain amount of margin and EPS dilution in 2024 in order to transform the company for much bigger growth and opportunities going forward, for breakout opportunities, not only in proteomics, which we could develop in part organically, but not altogether. I'll explain, and to get into important markets like spatial and single-cell biology. So, we strengthened these areas, and we've accelerated our transformation dramatically, as I'll explain. We also, while post-genomic era is fantastic, and we think it's the most important thing that you may want to remember about Bruker, we also leverage our very powerful technology and products portfolio for key areas in biopharma.
Used to be low teens, then it's about 15% of our revenue with NanoString, with the Beacon platform of PhenomeX, or the old Berkeley Lights, as I prefer to call it. That's going to be more like high teens, high 20%, or maybe around 20% of our revenue. We've expanded in infectious disease diagnostics, where we had the MALDI Biotyper. Now we also have molecular diagnostics with the ELITech acquisition. That's going to be about 15% of our revenue, very, very good aftermarket revenue and margins. And also importantly, the nanoscience or nano tools for semiconductor metrology, or as I would call it, the technology, the tech, not the software, but the technology that's underneath this AI revolution, which fundamentally is enabled by semiconductor lithography and metrology tools.
So, on the nano tools for AI tech, and by the way, also for clean tech, we're not going to talk much about that. [They] are other areas why we are diversified in our opportunities and also diversified in our risk. Fundamentally, we don't have a legacy business. Our thriving core has enabled us to really pursue a transformative and hopefully visionary strategy. As a now fast-growing, at-scale, profitable life science tools and diagnostics company, we can and we do vigorously invest in the breakout opportunities, which I think are proteomics, multi-omics, and single-cell and spatial biology. Our 2027 goals, as I mentioned earlier during my introduction, are delivering greater than 125 basis points of margin improvement in each year annually and 13%-15% non-GAAP EPS growth, all of those without excluding currency effects.
By the way, in 2025, there probably will be a small currency headwind to EPS, so we may not reach the full 13%-15%. So, that's the overall take-home message, but I hope you'll continue to bear with me and let me take you through the story. Let me start with the acquisitions because they were very strategic, very well-timed, disciplined, setting us up for high ROIC and doing them without overextending our balance sheet. They are meant to accelerate growth to attaining scale of a greater than $3 billion revenue company and then establishing a base for the next 800 or 1,000 basis points of operating margin expansion to fundamentally enable Bruker to eventually, in several years, be a mid-20s operating margin company. So, we added to our life science and biopharma solutions in the post-genomic era. We entered very large TAMs.
You may have heard Srega this morning, so I think there are some very large TAMs in single-cell and spatial biology, proteomics TAMs. Some of them are a bit inflationary, but you know, anyway, it's an incredibly attractive market, and finally, we did it at attractive valuations with our high ROIC target philosophy that's somewhat unusual in this industry. I'll take you through some of these acquisitions briefly. I won't take you through PreOmics and diagnostics, but they're absolutely key for our proteomics strategy. We already did them two years ago and two and a half years ago for proteomics and multi-omics consumables, automation, software, and services. We are a full-fledged proteomics tools company, not just a mass spec company that has a proteomics application. Let me take you through the other parts of the presentation, and I won't talk about it here. It fits our hexagon. The hexagon hasn't changed.
What's under the hood has changed, but the hexagon, these being our Project Accelerate initiatives that pull up our growth and pull up our margin potential, that strategy, along with operational excellence, has really worked and delivered. So, with the most strategically, perhaps most important acquisitions executed and now managed and led by Mark Munch, my colleague who's here, of first the PhenomeX acquisition in single-cell biology with the Beacon platform and the NanoString platform, which we closed only in May of last year. We've taken a very big step in spatial biology. This has allowed us to enter the spatial transcriptomics market and also given us half of the reason why we acquired NanoString.
It gave us a big commercial and service and application support engine to also leverage for our previously existing CellScape spatial proteomics field, where we compete with Akoya and Bio-Techne, a little bit different from the transcriptomics, where it's primarily nano, sorry, I misspoke, 10x Genomics. As well as, for those who remember, our internal venture, something we in-licensed from Harvard Medical School three and a half years ago, is our Acuity 3D spatial genomics, something that we'll launch this year, which is a completely new blue ocean field where we look at 3D structures inside the nucleus, inside the chromosomes and chromatin structure, et cetera. So, we have the most comprehensive and we think highest performance portfolio of spatial biology tools.
We have the unique Beacon platform, which I think has wonderful applications in. We don't want to talk about that today. But in antibody discovery for very demanding antibodies and stable cell line development, essentially. I won't go into all the details, but we remain committed to making this business near break-even in 2026 and accretive in 2027. We're making incredible progress on the roadmap, on the strategy, on the management process, on cost out. And then you'll see some very exciting product launches. Come to AGBT, come to AACR, and just watch us. Why is spatial biology so important? I won't read through the reasons. I think it's become known in this industry. And there he is, maybe you should say it yourself, but I'll say it for you. Single-cell and spatial biology are fundamental to our understanding of disease in this new era of biology.
Period and amen, obviously very, very important. The most strategic move we've made. We've also greatly strengthened our infectious disease biology business with the acquisition of ELITechGroup, a primarily European and Latin America sample-to-answer molecular diagnostics business with over 400 installed systems. It was immediately accretive. It grew the way we expected it to grow. As a leading indicator, very excited that we placed another 145 instruments last year. We thought we placed 100 to 120. So, that's going well. Once they're all at full speed, that bodes well for growth of that business next year to again be in the upper single digits or low double digits.
We even find some opportunities now to get into the syndromic panel market by carrying our previous Bruker LiquidArray syndromic panel panels over into this sample-to-answer world that will be, in terms of affordability and ease of use, would be game-changing. $170 million business growth, as I said, and that's, by the way, an 84% consumables business, and it was immediately accretive. Juergen Srega, who's not here today, who runs the CALID Group, says that with the ELITech molecular diagnostics and our leading MALDI Biotyper franchise, we are now a formidable force in infectious disease diagnostics. A little bit new to all of you, because it's come together in recent years, is our new strategy coming out of the BioSpin Group that takes next-gen lab automation and scientific software and digitalization of the lab for AI deep learning capabilities as a new strategy element for Bruker.
We acquired Chemspeed in Switzerland in March of 2024. That business has immediately outperformed sort of anticyclically what we expected from it. Even pharma companies that cut programs and reduced headcount and did site consolidation invested in automation and productivity last year, to our delight. So, this whole business enters another $7 billion market size, which is for the market for lab automation and lab software. The vision here is really foundational automation software and lab digitization, which is in its infancy, tools towards the AI augmented self-driving, or sometimes called lights-out labs. Very, very cool, a little different from what you know from Bruker, but along with multiple software acquisitions over the years that go hand in hand with that, that's not that far from approaching $100 million in revenue to where it will be needle-moving.
By the way, since half of that revenue is software, it'll also have extremely good margins. What's next? Let me first reflect a little bit on the last 25 years, the age of genome biology. Before the pandemic, China was the major growth driver for this industry. We all rode the wave. It's wonderful. It's been the main reason for our fast growth and valuations, right? Biopharma, fantastic, always very good. Then, of course, a major R&D bolus, 2020, 2021, with a bit of a hangover after that. Minor innovations and replacement cycles created value, attracted money. They will continue to do that, but I think bigger swings and bigger new insights will be valued.
Yes, it was the genomic biology ushered in by Bill Clinton and Francis Collins announcing the draft human genome in June of 2000 at the White House that made for many a very valuable genomic company, whether it's a leading NGS company or whether it's companies that then use these NGS tools for content valuation. The focus was a bit exclusive on gene-centric research, on reductionism, on mouse models. They will be foundational, and that's all good, but there is, I would argue, 80% of biology you can't just get out of the linear sequences. The metaphor as a genome of a blueprint of life or the book of life, we think is incorrect. We think it's a misunderstanding. Much more fundamentally, it's a dictionary and maybe perhaps a dictionary and grammar set for life.
But there's a lot, I would argue, 80% that for most non-monogenic diseases, you're not just going to get out of genomic tools. So, what's in the future? What is the next 25 years? It's great because in 25 years, you won't remember what I predicted, so I can make some bold predictions. So, after the stimulus, China's key role and driver as a driver is unclear. Will it be? Anyway, I won't speculate it. The range of outcomes is enormous, from geopolitical risks to it remaining the powerhouse in terms of growth to it growing perhaps more typically with other growth rates. We think the U.S. will be the growth driver for the next 10 years, and our strategy is accordingly. Biopharma R&D, very attractive. It will rebound, but at rational levels.
It's not going to go back to the levels that were these boom levels after enduring the pandemic. Nanoscience, I know this is a life science conference, but nanoscience tools are absolutely key to enable the AI technology advancements. It's software, it's LLMs, I get it, but underneath, there is nanotechnology that requires nano tools. Genome biology is foundational. It's becoming more ubiquitous. It's becoming more affordable. That's a wonderful tool, and I will say it's a fraction of the story, so the medical research and biopharma will require deeper functional biology insights, and they will come from proteomics and multi-omics, from spatial and dynamic longitudinal context, if you like, single-cell structural interaction biology will be very important, and finally, and this doesn't directly affect us, but indirectly, I think human tissue and organismal biology, in addition to reductionism, will be important again.
The terminology I've chosen, post-genomic era, defines you by what you know, by something else. If you want to be more positive about it, I think we're looking at the next 25 years in the age of the multi-omic phenome biology, and I think we're well positioned and perhaps uniquely positioned for that. This vast complexity, almost overwhelming, of phenome biology, which, by the way, will all need the confluence of AI to tackle that. It's a timing. The confluence is wonderful, but it creates enormous opportunities for this industry, and we think for Bruker. Proteomics and multi-omics are central. Spatial context and single-cell biology are a must, and structures, interactomes, and function are key. Here's my quote. I won't take you through that slide. That's more for your quiet reading on the flight home or in the evening.
But we think we appreciate the complexity and the opportunities of this phenome biology. And as I'm saying here, and I might as well say it, Bruker has transformed itself for leadership in the post-genomic era, and our differentiated life science tools enable the exploration of the remarkable complexity of biology and disease. So, with that, Bruker is built and transformed for the future. We're not just looking through the rearview mirror, hoping to snap back or whatever that might be. We are and have pivoted to higher growth. We've shown this four years in a row and to higher margin opportunities. We now think we have the opportunity to get to the mid-20s, which we didn't have before. Built on a thriving core. I won't repeat what's in the thriving core, but it's summarized here. And then entering these very large TAMs with strong secular tailwinds, literally for decades.
Proteomics and spatial biology are breakout opportunities. We're at an inflection point of those. We are going to be leaders or co-leaders in that space, and we've transformed our portfolio for leadership in this post-genomic era. I think I've given you enough evidence of our management process and the disciplined entrepreneurialism that drives that. We've talked about our preliminary soft preview and pre-announcement on Q4, so I won't repeat it here. We continue to look for financial transformation goals, organic revenue growth, CAGR on 200-300 basis points above market. We achieved that for four years in a row. We're looking for the upper mid-single digit constant exchange rate, 5%-7% growth next year with low single-digit % market growth. We're aiming as a highest priority, perhaps financially, to return towards that 20% operating margin. We want to do it pretty quickly by 2027. We're sticking to our guns there.
And then for the first time, we're positioned to drive to the mid-20s operating margin over time over the following few years. It won't take all that long. And so, with the tongue in cheek, what is it? What's in your wallet? I think that's a Capital One card. I've plagiarized from that and called it what's in your portfolio. Here is just a summary of what we've talked about already and how we've positioned ourselves in terms of financial and strategic setup. And my esteemed CFO, Gerald Herman, concludes that our dual strategy works and visionary growth investments and operational excellence together position us for rapid margin, EPS, and free cash flow growth. And with that, I thank you for your attention and turn it over to Rachel for the Q&A. Thank you very much.
Perfect. Thank you, Frank, for that presentation.
So, I wanted to first start off with some of the announcement you gave us on the Q4 pre-announcement. Obviously, you beat on revenues. You talked about solid bookings within BSI. So, can you provide some more color for us on what drove the quarter, but also what did you see from an orders perspective, especially relative to Q3?
Thank you so much. That's a good reminder because we didn't talk about orders. In the pre-announcement, we talked about solid. I know you love this. I know you want numbers, but you know we're not announcing Q4. Solid Q4 orders meant for us a sequential improvement of our book-to-bill ratio. It was sort of a 0.95, 0.96 in Q2, went to 0.97 in Q3. We're probably going to end up at 0.98 in Q4.
The only reason why we're not quite at 1.0 is because we overperformed on revenue. So, yeah, it may be a forgivable sin, but that's all pretty healthy. That kind of all supports that we think we are in a gradual market recovery as well and has given us enough confidence for this preliminary outlook of 5%-7% constant exchange rate growth for 2027. I will add. I had a footnote, but I just wanted to add that verbally. We also saw Chinese stimulus orders. We had just less than $5 million in Q3, and then we had just under $15 million in Q4, which is good. We think most of these Chinese stimulus orders are likely to come in the first half of 2025 and then benefit our revenue and P&L in the second half of 2025 and 2026.
It's actually good that that's split over two years. I don't want one bolus here and then a tough comparison. It's good that it's split. So, that's also adding up nicely. And indeed, we had real. And it's exactly, Rachel, coming in for high-end, high-average selling price, high-performance tools, big NMRs, mass specs, big microscopy, and others, very specialized high-end systems for academia and academic medical school research. So, nice evidence that this is really happening.
Great. Maybe just sticking on that topic, China, since you bring it up already. You spoke a little bit about how China has been the key growth driver the last few years. It's been really beneficial, especially for Bruker's portfolio, but a little bit more lack of visibility as we go forward for the next 10 years. So, walk us through what's embedded in your current mid-to-long-term targets within China and how are you thinking about the importance of that market going forward?
Yeah, some of that is obviously a very good topic, not only when we give guidance for 2025 in February, but we would anticipate an investor day probably in Q3 of 2025, where we then would update our three-year outlook, 2026 to 2028 at that time. And I think this will be a bit of an inflection year for China, where we'll demand trend when you subtract out the stimulus effect. That's wonderful because there's going to be a couple of years of stimulus. And maybe not unlike Japan in the old days, they tend to have a special supplementary budget every year. And so that on top of anemic growth, you had some pretty good growth after all.
But China is very difficult for me to predict right now. I mean, from a geopolitical disaster around Taiwan to it coming right back and being the growth driver of the world, it certainly is very committed to innovation, to biopharmaceutical, to life science research, to it being more in line with the growth of the industry, but maybe not pulling it up as much as the last 15 years. These are all viable scenarios. So, I've spoken to China experts. I'm not necessarily one of them, and they give me that full range of scenarios as well. So, the answer is I don't quite know, and I don't know that it's knowable at this point.
Yeah, understandable. Maybe you mentioned geopolitics.
So, we're investing in China, and we're also doing things that are particularly favoring the US market and the European markets.
Yeah
We do both.
For sure. You mentioned geopolitics kind of brings us to the election that we had in the U.S. a few months ago. I think that's a topic that many investors have cared about. One of the things that we've been asked frequently about is just NIH funding. Obviously, you guys have some exposure there. Maybe it's not quite as much as some investors had thought. Can you kind of level set us on expectations of what is your current direct and indirect exposure to U.S. NIH funding? And also, what are your latest expectations on that?
As I said, I think during the Q3 earnings call, Rachel, I thought there was some hesitancy in buying decisions, even in academia before the election, and of course, also some nervousness by investors.
Now we know that had there been a blue incoming administration, maybe more IRA price controls for biopharma would have been a concern. With the incoming red administration, there's more of a concern about NIH spending. I'm moderately optimistic because I think under Trump 1.0, he was not a big fan of big budget increases for NIH, but there was a bipartisan effort then of perhaps aging senators and congresswomen and congressmen to fund cancer research and neurodegeneration and autoimmune research and NIH research anyway. So, it was actually pretty good. The new CDC, FDA, and NIH leadership and HHS leadership under Making America Healthy Again will have some other focus, not all research. I think the war on cancer will continue and we'll still be interested in Alzheimer's disease, but there'll be some other reallocation of budgets and priorities. We all can guess what they are.
I don't need to go into that, but I think the overall level of funding for NIH, I think, will be healthy. I do anticipate, and we kind of baked that in, that there is continued uncertainty what this all means, so we baked in that there might be two or three quarters of hesitancy on government spending and, of course, also in academia spending their NIH dollars and their philanthropic dollars. I don't think this will pause orders, but we've built in that there will be some continued hesitancy until we can all figure out what the new NIH, FDA, and HHS leadership implies and how the new congressional bipartisan or not funding proposals for NIH will look like.
I'm actually somewhat optimistic, but I think there'll be some hesitancy for two or three quarters, and we try to take that into account in a hopefully still very reasonable outlook for 2025. That's my read, and now I'm reading tea leaves, and this is not something I'm qualified for.
It's all helpful. Maybe just in terms of your prepared remarks around the post-genomic era, one of the areas that you highlighted was spatial. You recently announced the spatial biology division to support this. So, could you spend a minute talking about some of the innovation that Bruker has done within that spatial market, and what can we expect from a product launch perspective this year?
Mark, would you take that one? Is your phone not your phone. Is your microphone on?
Yeah, sure. Prior to the May 7th close of the NanoString, we had acquired Canopy Biosciences, and we did a pivot. They didn't have an instrument. We know a lot about instrument development, so we developed a CellScape. That's a pretty leading platform in spatial proteomics. We had that kind of already launched and out on the market. We had a venture that I founded with a couple of postdocs out of Harvard called Acuity Spatial Genomics. We now call it Bruker Spatial Genomics. It's actually a different form of spatial. It's looking at the 3D genome.
So, at a single cell level, but at a single nucleus level, looking at the two meters of DNA that we all have in every cell, but how is it organized and how does it relate to just dysregulation that causes overexpression of RNA or under-expression of RNA? So, those were two things already there. And then, of course, we acquired NanoString. So, we've now put those all together in one business that now has a common sales force, common marketing organization, marcom, service organization. So, we've got, I think, as you know, as we took cost out in the NanoString acquisition, we also got these positive synergies. And some of the positive synergies we got is, of course, the CosMx volume post-acquisition has actually been on the rise. So, that's factoring up. But we also got lift in the CellScape platform. So, that's been exciting now.
Now we have this kind of fit-for-purpose set of platforms that, because not everybody's trying to do the same research problem, that we now have optimized platforms for a number of variety of research needs in spatial.
Perfect. That's helpful. Maybe then just on 2025, you talked about how you expect at least upper mid-single digit constant currency revenue growth in 2025 based off of that low single digit market assumption. You also alluded to over 125 basis points of operating margin expansion. Can you just walk us through some of the puts and takes there, especially on the margin line? What are some of the levers at play there that we should be considering, whether it's FX that you mentioned as well?
Yeah, this is without FX. We just never make any predictions. We just take the 12/31 exchange rates and model those because, again, if you look at the expert opinions, you get a whole range going up, US dollar going up further or coming down. So, we don't know. We don't speculate on that, and we don't use it in our predictions. It does require margin improvement in our acquisitions. There's margin improvement potential on Chemspeed, also on ELITech. And then in particular, of course, also in the single cell and spatial biology, that's where the biggest swings are, and Mark's making outstanding progress with his management team of the spatial biology, the Bruker Spatial Biology Division. There are also positive synergies, new products, new technology synergies, commercial synergies that he's alluded to. We're also taking some further cost out and OpEx out in terms of our core business.
So, it's not only, hey, the new acquisitions, go fix them, but also, well, we'll support you in doing that by taking some cost out, which we have last year and continue to do. So, we'll be very, very constrained and frugal, if you like, on the OpEx side. And that's not directly related to the P&L, but more to the cash flow. We also did so much CapEx investment in recent years for productivity and for capacity that we think we're also pretty much all set for the next 10 years. I'm getting the ominous red light here. So that I think we can bring down CapEx quite a bit for further fast free cash flow generation. And I think you'll see some evidence of that already in Q4.
Perfect. That's great. And with that, we are out of time. So, thank you, Frank and management team, and thank you, everyone, for joining us as well.
Thanks.