Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day two of the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference. We are happy to have Bruker here, and late surprise guest, CEO Frank Laukien, and Gerald Herman, CFO. Frank is just returning from Europe, and I think he wanted to start off with a couple of comments about his experience there and things that he learned.
Thank you so much, Evan, for having us. Good morning, everybody. Sorry to almost fall flat on my face. A few things that I would like to maybe set out there as an opening remark, and they relate to international conferences and events that happen to be in Europe. It is not about the European markets. One was a big NMR and structural biology conference in Davos, of all places, unrelated to the World Economic Forum. As you know, we have reorganized as of July 1st, and created the Bruker BioSpin Group that combines a number of technologies and applications, and most importantly, NMR with mass spectrometry.
That is very timely, or maybe we should have done it more before, but the opportunities there are really quite unique, and important, particularly in drug discovery, but also to our theme of having the best tools and the most informative data, even for foundation model training and all of that, with deep data that goes beyond the genome. Genome is important, it is foundational, but then what really happens at the phenome level. I am delighted to say that NMR by itself, it is a complementary technique. It is not, that is how you do structural biology, but you combine it with other vendors, Cryo-EM, or crystallography, which we do ourselves, so you do it at beam lines, and with NMR, and more and more also with mass spec, so-called cross-linking mass spectrometry, which is taking a big step up, and we have the right systems for that.
The combination gives you structural enhancements. It also very importantly gives you binding and dynamics, which is really crucial. Even if you have structured so-called globular proteins, they are not a rigid lock and you are looking for just the right key or the degrader or so. There is dynamics. When you stick the key into the lock, the lock closes around you. It is called an induced fit. For all of these things, NMR beautifully complements AlphaFold, not our product. Cryo-EMs and other technologies, and more and more also even for structural biology and the important protein interactions, mass spectrometry, our timsTOF platform and derivatives thereof. They are combining that and finding more niches also for mRNA drugs, whether RNA is a drug target or a therapeutic modality itself. NMR rules. It is the technology. The others cannot do it. It is very important.
Another field, the TIDES, which is often the larger peptides, small proteins, or nucleotides. Again, NMR has a very, very unique role, often in combination with mass spectrometry. We are really now under Juergen Srega's leader in that biosystems group, under Juergen Srega's leadership can combine those in pretty unique metabolomics, even glyco- and workflow solutions for drug discovery, or for training AI models with really deep and insightful data as opposed to just a lot of surface data. One more remark, if I may, because we also visited, and that happens to be in the Netherlands, in Leiden, in Europe, of course. We had our kickoff meetings of our MIMETAS acquisition or majority investment. We own about 90% of that business now. Why is Bruker doing something new? Do not you have your plate full? Yeah, but this is really, really important.
Every drug discovery conference I go to, they are talking about multi-omics and spatial and biology 2.0 or post-genomic biology, whatever you want to call it. They are also all very keen, in addition to animal models, which will not go away, and in preclinical work, to have these humanized microphysiological systems. Sometimes they are called NAMs, which stands for new approaches. NAMs are humanized microphysiological systems. We have been looking at that market of smaller companies for the last more than a year, fairly systematically. We have noticed that MIMETAS, we think, that we acquired now, has the best automation, laboratory standard automation, microtiter plates. They also have the most physiological value, we think, and they think, because it is membrane-free and does organs-on-a-chip without having a membrane that distorts it again. So it is an incredibly important technique.
It is only about a EUR 10 million business right now, but that could be a future EUR 50 million-EUR 100 million business. It will take some years. Also, it is very synergistic. It will pull in metabolomics and proteomics tools and some of our microscopy and maybe even spatial biology tools. It will often be at the lead because that is what biopharma looks at. By the way, it is essentially all consumables and aftermarket business, so we like that in our business mix. In biopharma drug discovery and development, and often will pull in additional Bruker and sometimes other vendor systems to get the most meaningful information out of these new approaches, NAMs, or humanized, not mouse, humanized microphysiological systems. I will leave it at that. There is other stuff, but those are two things that I thought would be worth sharing.
Yeah. No, great. Thanks so much. That was really interesting stuff. Maybe, I guess for me, the best place to start, maybe just on a recap of 2Q. I think EPS beat by a pretty wide margin, but organic growth was a little bit below expectations. Can you walk us through the puts and takes from the quarter?
Sure. I will take this. I would say generally speaking, the highlight of the quarter really was our EPS performance. We outperformed both the consensus and our own expectations.
We got a little bit of a boost from some tariff recovery elements, but nonetheless, overall performance at the EPS line was quite good. This is part of our broader program to increase our EPS performance and strengthen our operating margin. We seem to be doing very well, at least through the first two quarters, particularly driven by some of our cost-saving actions that kicked in in the second quarter in particular. Beyond that, I think the other highlight really was our book-to-bill, which is over 1x again. This is the fourth quarter in a row in which we have seen really good order bookings performance. I would say orders organically were above 10% growth on a year-over-year basis. There were a few other highlights in those orders. I think most investors are interested to hear that we really did see a bit of pivot in China.
Our order performance in China was up over 20% in the second quarter. We saw some really good signals for another quarter related to biopharma. These were also really encouraging signs for us. I know a number of our peers are also performing well in these areas. We had struggled, I would say, after a relatively weak 2025 performance in China, to see double-digit order growth is really encouraging. This was, especially for China, this was really broadly based across biopharma, across the academic side, and even in the semi space where we have a pretty good market position there. I think China looked good, biopharma quite strong as well, mostly in large pharma in the second quarter. Then we had a better performance excluding the U.S. in the academic and government research markets. That also showed greater than 20% order growth in those markets.
I think that what that shows generally at our level is that we have the right products, the right solutions for the right markets. It is taking a little longer, perhaps on the revenue performance to be reflected, but that is coming.
Got you. That is great. In terms of the outlook for the rest of the year, you did talk about a pushout of, I think, $20 million of semi orders.
Yeah.
You also have ultra-high field, I believe, in the fourth quarter.
We do, yes.
I think based on those two dynamics, you have a pretty big step-up into the 4Q implied guide, I think goes to about 5%. What are some of the underlying drivers that give you confidence in hitting that?
Well, I think personally, we've really gone through a lot of scrubbing after the pushout commentary that we provided in the second quarter. We got pretty good visibility to what our expectations are and the execution capabilities of our teams. We've done, I think, an excellent job on the execution side historically, especially for some very large fourth quarters in the past. With respect to the ultra-high field system, I think that seems pretty much locked in at this stage. So we have pretty good visibility to that. I think the same is likely true for most of our semi activity for the fourth quarter. As some of you may know, the fourth quarter for Bruker is not usually 1/4 . It is more like 1/3 of our total revenue performance. So we do have some seasonality built in there, and that generally has played itself out pretty well.
That is kind of the big picture for us.
Great.
It feels like while it might seem to some investors as a large or larger quarter on an organic revenue basis, it is not a lot of growth built in there.
You did comment on this. You said that the orders are there-
but it's taking longer to convert to revenue.
Yeah
relative to other companies, but also seems like relative to your own expectations. Why do you think that is the case?
I think a part of it is the mix. When you think about semi orders, for example, can take anywhere between 9 and 18 months, both in terms of production. I also think it's the timing of some of these orders. We have some orders that have multi-year elements to them, so they stretch out over multiple years and have to be delivered over those years. But just generally, we have complex instruments that we're building and producing. Most of those have to get moved into customer sites. Some of those sites have to have the right conditions in order for them to be accepted and-
But there is a bit of a structural element.
Yeah.
As our deep tech this year is, and we think next year and the following year, is so strong.
Yeah
Semiconductor metrology gets the most attention, but the orders that we get for fusion demonstrators, via the BEST segment, or some of our defense or airport aviation security, more general.
Yeah.
A lot of these orders inherently, in semiconductor metrology, normally get orders 9-18 months before they want delivery for their new fab or their new research site. Some of these other contracts tend to be indeed two or three years older. So there is a bit of a structural element, as opposed to just expectations in that being the strongest, almost, in terms of orders. Those do not all. Most of that does not go into this year, right? It will help us in 2027, some even in 2028. So that is a bit of a new. Not a new element, but of course, deep tech being so strong for us is an upside in orders compared to our expectations on January 1st. We are delighted, but it is really working out extremely well. Yes, these structurally tend to have longer delivery times and sometimes are multi-year contracts.
Okay. Maybe we will stick to deep tech. That was a big part of the 2Q call. I do not know if I have ever seen you phrase it that way. Maybe I am just forgetting. Can you talk about what parts of your portfolio are part of this deep tech?
Yep
the business, how big it is, and maybe some of how fast that's been growing in recent years and what the outlook is.
Yeah. I haven't used that terminology. It's now more investors who, your non-life science stuff, Frank, what shall we call it? Deep tech's a fine term. It obviously has a meaning elsewhere in the industry, and it absolutely qualifies as very difficult, high barriers to entry. But when you're there, and if you happen to have the right market dynamics welcoming you, then there's other deep tech technologies where that makes sense. Semiconductor metrology is some. You either can look at it as a EUR 300 million or EUR 500 million business. Semiconductor metrology, more specifically, is a EUR 300 million business, but it's part of a EUR 500 million business. The metrology and surface solutions, part of the Bruker Nano group, that sometimes also they do compound semiconductor and research things, other applications of atomic force microscopy or white light interferometry.
They're not directly in high volume manufacturing, which is semiconductor metrology, but they're adjacent. The capacity part of that people are most excited, my God, isn't that going through the roof? That may be about EUR 200 million. So giving you three answers, right? EUR 200 million is the part that. only EUR 200 million is the part that people think, why don't you triple? But it's growing very fast, the EUR 300 million and EUR 500 million buckets in the concentric circles are also growing very fast.
Defense and aviation security, we secure a lot of the cargo coming in and the passengers that sit a level above it often, right, of very major U.S. airlines that you all fly all the time and heard of, but they don't like to use us to use their names, with explosives trace detection systems deployed at many of their, or essentially all of their international cargo hubs as they fly stuff internationally or back to the U.S. We're also securing more and more European airports. For some time, we've been in Geneva, some French airports, Frankfurt, the very big installation. I think we have something like 150 systems, explosives trace detection. But it's competitive, but our systems are better, more reliable, less false positives, which is really annoying. So we got into Zurich Airport, Brussels, Norwegian airports, Korean Incheon Airport, Saudi Arabia. So it's actually growing very nicely.
In addition, because of the instability, particularly in, well, the war in Ukraine, right? We are not selling into Ukraine, but we are selling to a lot of countries not far from those front lines, and they are beefing up, amongst other things, also, their chemical detection capabilities, and those have been very profitable orders. It is very deep tech because it is pretty unique stuff. Used to be maybe 1% of our revenue. It is now closer to 2% of our revenue and looks fairly sustainable that that probably will be EUR 100 million business in the not so distant future. Yes, high energy physics, and all of a sudden, all these enormous funding going into fusion energy.
In addition to the ITER project, which is this international project, been around for a while, we, via our BEST Research Instruments, have about EUR 200 million in orders, some delivered, some coming this, some coming next year, some into 2028. I do not know whether people have. If people who follow fusion energy, there is probably a EUR 10 billion, EUR 20 billion project in China. Of course, most of that will be Chinese only, but some of that, we actually. They need superconductors also from the West. Germany, over a multi-year period, is spending EUR 9 billion on fusion research. The U.S., of course, it is driven primarily by the capital markets. The U.S., I think the total funding that is gone into various magnetic confinement, tokamak stellarator, then we benefit lasers, then we do not benefit.
There has been EUR 10 billion or more, I think it is approaching EUR 14 billion, of venture capital that is gone into these companies, and they all need tools and gadgets and cryopumps and diverters. I will not even try to explain what that all means. But they need a lot of deep tech stuff. Some of that we are just very, very good at because we have practiced with ITER. So that is a delight. That had the, percentage-wise, very highest growth rates. But again, delivery times are somewhat longer. Margins will be very satisfactory.
Got you. How big is that energy research business of this?
That's about EUR 100 million.
EUR 100 million?
Euros. Yeah, little over $100 million.
Just under.
Almost all of their businesses are booming. There is some research-y stuff, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I will not go into that, but it has been a very big profitable business where they build accelerators or advanced physics research capabilities. Not all energy related, but booming.
Yeah. Since you ended there, you guys did put out a press release, I guess last week, with Atinary?
Yeah.
It actually made me just do a little bit of research and, to your point, I was shocked by how much fusion research is going on in the world.
Yeah.
How much money is being spent on it. I was just curious, I think most people think of having a useful application of fusion, not just research, but actually being able to create electricity and create more energy-
Yeah
seems, I don't know, like an unlikely thing to happen in most people's minds. I was just curious since you ended there, and where are we in that journey? What is going on in fusion research? Where do you see that business going for you? And what's-
Still very early innings, if you like. There's nobody who's generating fusion power today, and there won't be for another decade. But there's so much money going into developing these technologies. Pilots, those tend to be a little bit more research oriented. We focus more on the industrial demonstrators that want to show net energy gain. It's not a power plant yet, but it does net energy gain. Fusion has one of these idiosyncrasies. You've got to breed your own fuel.
Right.
The tritium. To do that, you need the most difficult technology, the tritium breeding blanket, and most companies kick that down the road. We, via RI, we're very much involved in a modular solid state breeding blanket technology that will be also essential. So in addition to supporting power plants that eventually will show up at the end of the 2030s, there's just so much investment and so many tools that go into that. In parallel to the many countries now reentering the nuclear fission world, right? The U.S. does it big time, France, other countries. Switzerland will have a popular referendum on it. Italy just said they'll go back into that. So that nuclear industry, that was a word that you never, ever use, right? Nor defense.
Right now, all of a sudden, nuclear, the nearer term being the fission, which we're not very involved in, but the fusion coming to supplement that because you need both, with the voracious demand for energy that we'll have. Of course, fusion eventually is the inexhaustible, should last 100 million years. There is no shortage of water or deuterium, and it's also the inherently safe technology, can never build a dirty bomb with it or the bad guys cannot use it for proliferation in any realistic scenario.
Got you. Maybe moving to AI, we've touched on this a little bit.
No, that's Atinary, that's actually the self-driving AI lab, yeah.
Yeah. All right. Maybe I messed that up.
Atinary is not fusion. Atinary is back here, a Boston lab.
Oh, yeah, you are right.
Yeah.
Okay. Maybe I mixed it up.
There is a lot of new stuff from Bruker, which is why we are here.
Yeah. Okay. AI, outside of semiconductor metrology, how should we think about your exposure there? Automation, digitization, et cetera. I did see you did write down the Chemspeed acquisition, I think, last quarter.
Which was, I guess, a little surprising just given how on trend it was.
Some moving pieces.
Yeah.
How should we think about your exposure to AI and there?
Chemspeed and Atinary are closely related, and I will explain. Chemspeed.
Oh, yeah, it was a little bad.
Yeah, Chemspeed, we took a GAAP write-off there because of some legacy contracts that were inherently. We kind of put them in a bad bank eventually and said, "Look, we want to negotiate and get out of those because they're holding us back from pursuing the lab in the loop, automated software driven, digitized AI labs, self-driving labs," with the help of Atinary and others who do it themselves. We kind of accepted that some of the contracts that we actually acquired long-term, some of them we're renegotiating, some of them we're canceling, and that's why we took a write-off. Chemspeed, however, is strategically very important and well-timed for us. We want to kind of liberate ourselves to focus on the good stuff, which is automated labs, digitized labs. A lot of our SciY software goes in that.
Then we're working with partners that sometimes do it in-house, like LILA here in Cambridge. Absolutely amazing. There's other West Coast and other firms that have. Some of them have very big, deep tech, Jeff Bezos-type funding, et cetera. We did make one investment. It's a minority investment. It's pretty strategic in Atinary. They're focused on medicinal chemistry optimization with a self-driving lab. Their agentic AI capabilities are much broader. We're already discussing proteomics and metabolomics and other stuff with them. But initially, they started with the key traditional Suzuki reaction and Heck-Buchwald type of medicinal chemistry actions that even though they've been around for a while, they have an infinite number of possibilities.
Using agentic AI to basically do now in a week, to do what a grad student used to do in five years for optimization, uses Chemspeed automation, uses an inline little NMR from us. They also use some other automation, some Agilent mass spec and so on. It's not all Bruker, but it's a lot of Bruker. They have this self-driving lab, agentic AI leadership, which would, if we wrote it, we just don't have the. Nobody has the time. You've got to be fast, right? Working with them, and that's why we took a strategic minority in them, so we can also roll out that concept for some of our other workflow solutions for pharma and industry, where we think agentic AI with a discerning lab in the loop, mostly equipped by Bruker measurement equipment, and a lot of automation and software makes complete sense.
This is quite important. But no, we didn't buy the whole company or something like that.
Because there's also many others that are similarly or better funded sometimes that want to do it themselves and say, "Yeah, we like Bruker, but we don't want the agentic. We don't want Atinary. We want our own agentic AI self-driving lab or capabilities." It's obviously a burgeoning area, as you can imagine. I think it puts actually a bit of a. So many things going into AI investment, I think, has put a little bit of a damper in investments in our industry in tools. So people say, "Is AI good for tools or not good for tools?" I think it'll be fantastic for tools once some of these basic AI frameworks are set up, and there's a lot of investment that I think net net distracts a little bit from the investment in tools this year at the margin.
I think as they then are ready and have their infrastructures, they need the best and deepest and highest resolution tools, and that's where we're so well positioned.
Okay.
That's another big driver. I think 10x and some other companies have highlighted that similarly, where we're actually very optimistic that that demand and industrial and biopharma will really pick up for the tools that you need to create or validate your foundation models.
Got it.
Atinary, another trajectory much closer to our core business and completely tied in with Chemspeed. We opened at Chemspeed, a second European lab for them in Basel. That is where Chemspeed is located, and that is where a lot of the biopharma industry is located.
Great. Luvata was the other one. That was the fusion company.
What is that?
Luvata.
Oh, yeah.
That's the one.
Oh, exactly, yeah.
Yeah.
They're a Finnish company and a partner company. We often compete with them in the MRI industry. As we look at the sheer volume of what will be needed by fusion, magnetic confinement fusion, that may dwarf what's used by the MRI industry in superconducting materials. We actually engaging with our friends. Hey, in that case, our unique RRP technology, it's a conductor that's being used at CERN in our own NMRs. It's a higher current, technical conductor. It's very crucial. We have it at the right time. Nobody outside of China has it. We have it patented, but we may need it to enable normal competitors to really just provide the total bandwidth and capacity for the world's fusion plans if they all come through.
Got you. You just made a comment in the previous answer, the previous question, that you think that at least in the near term, you think that some of these budgets, I guess, are being reallocated from life science tools to traditional life science tools stuff to AI.
I think this year that is some of that. Much AI investment is happening in industry and biopharma. This year, I think I don't have data to prove that. That's a little bit more of a color and conversational feel, where people say, "Yeah, this year we're investing in all that, whatever, agentic AI or something, infrastructure, and I'm buying one NMR from you, but then next year, I need a lot of tools to do something with that infrastructure and validate my models or actually inform them." Because right now there's a lot of data for training, but it's a lot of what I call surface data, and they really want to deep into proteoforms or into what really is important in biology. It goes to all these deeper and higher resolution tools we're doing.
I think that's what they'll want to train and train their models on. Because if you only train your models on just genes, excuse me, or just protein groups, then maybe you're catching 20%, 30% of biology, but then you'll miss a lot. They'll want to go deeper, which I think really bodes very well for our strategy of measurement instruments. But yes, I think this year that slows down the recovery a little bit, but I think it will turn into a big net positive in hopefully as early as next year and into the future because you really need to validate these models. You can't just skim the surface with 20%- 30% of the insights.
Okay. Maybe move into proteomics.
Yeah.
It sounds like you think that will also benefit from AI.
Very much so.
People understanding structures of proteins. I think you were being very competitive in proteomics with timsTOF, and I think after some competitors brought some new products, maybe there was a little bit of share shift there maybe last year. But you've also come out with new products, which I think have been pretty strong. Can you just talk about maybe some of the dynamics within proteomics? I think Waters is also coming out with a new product at the lower end, so just maybe what you're seeing
Yeah
in that business.
Yeah, perfect. Great way to then probably end. Let me peel that onion a little bit, Evan. Proteomics is now becoming more multifaceted. The traditional proteomics where you get a protein group, which is like an average of a protein group, maybe 30 different functional proteoforms that physiologically or sometimes in disease biology may have very different role. This so-called bottom-up proteomics, and also often inherently the affinity-based, like an Olink or what SomaLogic, now part of Illumina, are doing, or an Alamar. These are the affinity-based non-mass spec proteomics tools. They look at proteins and protein groups in solution. They can differentiate the proteoforms. They cannot generally see glycosylation , certainly not at depth and scale. That's growing nicely, especially as it goes into large plasma biobank. First LDT diagnostic application is going well.
We had a bit of a market share setback there when the Astral came out. Beautiful instrument. We have, in part, recovered that with further improvements and also leveraging our bottom-up proteomics tools into immunopeptidomics. Very important immuno-oncology, chemical proteomics for targeted protein degrader chemistry and others. We are back, but we had a dip there. Then really important, and someone unnamed in this industry started coverage on Nautilus, which is a non-mass spec technology, smaller company, that is very much focused on proteoforms. I love proteoforms. Our timsTOF Omni goes exactly into that proteoform, seeing the 10- 100, on average 30 different proteoforms. That is where the rubber meets the road. That is where you have physiology or pathology or disease. Being able to do that at depth and scale, the timsTOF Omni is very successful.
A EUR 1.5 million instrument, gets great uptake, half of that right away into biopharma. There were some market estimates that actually sounded reasonable. There are some really big numbers, CHF 75 billion for proteins. I disregard that. I do not know how people can add that up. But for us, the proteomics market may be eventually being an EUR 11 billion opportunity, and the biggest opportunity of all that we have, I think that is about the right order of magnitude, and that the proteoform, which is still in its early days, that may be an additional EUR 3 billion opportunity. I think those numbers feel about right, and we are absolutely leading and way ahead and with a blue ocean. There is just nothing very competitive in that right now. We are so far ahead in performance, and people are adopting that because it is really important.
Ultimately, that is what you want to train your AI on because now you maybe understand 65% of biology instead of 35%. It is still complex, but that is 10 x up. That is why proteomics look at the different layers.
The new one we are leading in, the other one, the traditional one, we have very nicely recovered and have very competitive instruments.
All right. Thank you so much. Our time's up. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.