The 43rd Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference

Jun 6, 2023

Slides

Thanks for joining us for the management presentation. My name is Max Mock, and I cover Charles River here at William Blair. We're pleased to be joined this morning by CFO Flavia Pease. Before we get into the presentation, I want to mention two things. First, the breakout session will be held in Burnham A on the second floor immediately following this presentation. And second, I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures of potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. So again, very pleased to have Charles River here with us today. And with that, I will turn it over to Flavia. Thank you, Max. Good morning. Can you guys hear me okay? It's great to be here. Actually, this was one of the first conferences I attended last year when I joined Charles River. And I think it's a special conference with a growth orientation. A lot of times we attend health care conferences. And so this is an interesting, diverse group of folks, hopefully, in this room. I have to flash our Safe Harbor and Reg G there for a second. I won't let you read all of that. So speaking of being a health conference, excuse me, a growth conference, I'm going to assume that at least some of you here in the audience might be new to Charles River, might not know us that well. Hopefully, if I do my job, in addition to sweat you out in the next 30 minutes, you will have a better perspective of how our unique and differentiated portfolio offers what we believe is a compelling value creation opportunity. Who are we? We'd like to think that we are the scientific partner of choice to accelerate biomedical research and therapeutic innovation. What that means is think of us as sort of a one-stop shop, if you will, the sort of Amazon for the drug discovery and researchers, where they can get all their needs met. We work with our clients from the early stages of their drug development journey all the way through the manufacture of lifesaving therapies. We had sales of about $4 billion last year. I think you would not be surprised that most of it was in North America, given the concentration of biotech in the U.S. We believe that scale is a source of competitive advantage, and it makes us unique and a formidable player in the spaces where we compete. And our scale comes in many facets, whether it is the scientific wherewithal of more than 2,500 colleagues with advanced degrees, whether it is the fact that we have over 150 sites in 20 countries around the world, or whether it is the broad portfolio of clients that we serve, it really makes us unique. And that translates into results. We have discovered over 100 compounds, preclinical candidates for our clients. We do have number one market positions in several of the spaces where we compete. But perhaps what we are most proud of is the statistic there of us having supported greater than 80% of all the products that were approved by the FDA in the last three years. And the reason for that is it really aligns nicely with our mission of creating healthier lives. And it energizes and engages our employees with this mission of really changing people's health trajectories. Again, if you are not as familiar with us, I think this is a nice slide to tell you a little bit about what is unique about Charles River. First and foremost, we believe that this unique, differentiated, scientifically differentiated portfolio is really our distinguishing feature. It has been built over the years through M&A. Over the last 20 years, we completed more than 60 transactions. And it has allowed us to expand into new adjacencies, to add new capabilities, to get geographic footprint, as I said. And it really created what we think is this broad player across a variety of modalities and therapeutic areas. But it's not enough to be the thought partner for our clients. We also, I mean, we are in the outsourcing space, right? So we have to operate efficiently and effectively. We have to be nimble. And so that's definitely another distinguishing feature of our business. I think what is a little bit of a misnomer, if you will, is people tend to think that we are in a riskier space because we are earlier in the drug development continuum. And that actually, we believe, is not the case. The fact that we have a very large and diversified client base, as I just showed you, and the fact that there's still a lot of opportunity for outsourcing, I think makes it for a good, solid, and stable growth prospect for us. These distinguishing features have translated in strong financial results. You look at our growth between 2018 and 2022, top line CAGR of 15%, non-GAAP EPS of 18%, so very, very strong. We also generate healthy free cash flow. Over the last couple of years, we did invest to expand capacity through capital investments. And that put a little bit of pressure on free cash flow generation. But it was, I think, as a CFO, I would say a smart way to deploy capital because historically, we've done that more through M&A. And so as you can imagine, the returns when you build capacity organically are better than when you acquire it. Obviously, the acquisition came with other things like capabilities and new spaces. And then from an operating margin perspective, we also have a good track record of expanding margin. Last year was flat. I'll talk a little bit more about the impact of the CDMO business. We had some challenges there last year, which created headwinds both on the top line as well as the margin expansion. So I talked about us operating across this research and development continuum. And we do that with three segments: our Research Models and Services, which is, again, that one-stop shop for researchers to get all their models and services to allow them to discover new molecules. Our DSA, discovery and safety assessment segment, we are the largest global partner for outsourced drug discovery and non-clinical development and then regulated safety testing. And then lastly, our manufacturing solutions, where we do process development. We move from the clinic to commercial manufacturing. And then we do quality control testing for products. Last year, RMS was about 20% of our sales, growing 9% organically with mid-20s margin. DSA is the largest portion of the company with 60% of revenue. It grew. We had a spectacular year growing 17.5% and delivering also mid-20s margin. And the manufacturing solution segment is, as I talked about, had a little bit of an unusually slower performance. And it was negatively impacted by CDMO. CDMO is a space where we acquire a variety of assets in the cell and gene therapy space over a short amount of time in the middle of COVID. And it was more of an adjacency for us vis-à-vis some of our historical M&A that tended to be more in our core businesses. And we definitely hit some speed bumps there. The assets needed quite a bit of investment, some retrofitting in their facilities that had been reconfigured for COVID production. They needed to be upgraded to provide for commercial product. We needed to also invest in talent, capability. So it was a year of sort of internal focus as opposed to being in the market and selling. And we needed to do that to be operating from a position of strength, which we are now in. But that meant disappointing results in terms of growth, which put pressure on the growth of the segment as well as the margin. The margin on this business historically had been in the mid-30s%. So let me do a little bit of a double-click in each of the segments, RMS being the first one. Here, we have the number one share position in the model side, which is on the left of this slide, where we have over 150 different strains of models that are used in research. We have our services business that we offer flexible solutions to clients. And then the newest portion of this segment is cell solutions, where we provide primary cells and blood components for use in the development of cell therapy products. RMS is an interesting business. It was actually where and how Charles River was founded 75 years ago. And historically, it's been more of a sort of sleepy, low single-digit growth part of the business, always profitable, always a lot of free cash flow generation, but low top line growth. And it really has reestablished itself as a sustained growth engine for the company. And it's really been behind the services portion of the RMS, the S on RMS, as well as a geographic presence in China. In the services portion, I'd like to just highlight a couple of examples. GEMS, our genetically engineered models and services, this is where you take genes in or out of a model and you make it more human-like, to have more human-like traits. And it makes it for a much more effective model for the research, especially in oncology. Obviously, these are much more complex models. That's our premium. And so it's a great business. And then in addition to that, we started running and servicing the clients' genetically engineered colonies. So they themselves will do things to their models to knock genes in and out, but they want us to manage that colony for them. And so we have both the product as well as the services side of that business. And then the second one is CRADL, our Charles River Accelerator and Development Labs. Think of this as a turnkey vivarium rental model. If you're a biotech company that just got formed and you have no infrastructure, you just come to Charles River, you rent. It's kind of the WeWork of vivarium space. And so really flexible model. We started this business thinking that it was only going to be appealing to small biotech clients, but it really has taken off. And we now have some of our sites where the anchor client, right, the one that commits to a significant portion before we build, is actually a large pharmaceutical company. And so it's really been a tremendous business for us. And then finally, China. We've been there for 10 years, and it has been growing double digits for the entire period. We continue to do geographic expansions there. And it has done really well for us. Moving to our second segment, DSA. Here we have our discovery services business, where we actually help clients discover and characterize new drugs. As I said, we have discovered or helped discover 100 drug candidates for our clients. And we play both in the in vivo and in vitro space in discovery. And we have capabilities across all modalities and most therapeutic areas, with a particular focus in oncology and CNS. But we are really a broad player in discovery services. And then safety assessment, which is really the majority of the DSA segment. Discovery is about 15% of DSA, the remainder being safety. Here we have 40% share and substantially more than the second player. We are the undisputed leader in both regulated and non-regulated outsourced safety assessment services. And the portfolio of what we offer is very, very comprehensive, general and specialty toxicology, bioanalysis, pathology, safety pharmacology, DMPK, you name it, we do it. And speaking, I talked about the M&A strategy, kind of building this portfolio, distinguishing portfolio that we have. And here in DSA, it really exemplifies that. M&A and technology partnerships have allowed us to enhance our scale, add new capabilities, expand our geographic footprint. So it definitely has been a tailwind. In addition to it, the prospects for outsourcing continue to fuel the growth in this business. Discovery is only 25% outsourced. Safety is about 60%. But guess what? Safety was discovery at some point, right? It was only 25% outsourced. So there's headroom in discovery. And even in safety, I think now, especially with some of the large clients that started doing work with us, some that still had infrastructure during COVID, they were back to partnering with us and really saw the thought partnership and leadership that we can add in addition to the efficient outsource modeling that we provide. So I think there's potential for that to continue to grow to 70%-80% outsourcing. And then these businesses are very synergistic between themselves, right? You start with discovery and you have to move to safety before you get to the clinic. That's another unique feature of us. The other players, some that have strengthened discovery in the market, don't have the safety capabilities and vice versa. We are a little bit unique there. The last segment is the manufacturing solutions. Again, here we have three businesses in manufacturing solutions. The first is our microbial solutions, where we offer fast and efficient detection and lot release testing. We have three market-leading platforms there with Endosafe for endotoxin detection, Accugenix, and Celsis. 70% of the revenues in this part of the business are from consumables. Think of it as a sort of razor-blade model. Once you get the equipment installed, you have that revenue stream. We like that dynamic there. Biologics testing, we support the safe manufacture of biologics. We do anything from lot release testing, characterization. We do actually sell cell bank manufacturing for clients. And then the newest part of the business, as I mentioned, is the cell and gene therapy CDMO. Our primary expertise is in gene-modified cell therapy. We have a site in Memphis. That's the predominant preponderance, excuse me, of the business. But we also have capabilities in viral vectors and plasmids. And really, the hypothesis or premise of getting into this cell and gene therapy space here is the opportunity to vertically integrate the value chain for our clients. We were already doing other things, obviously discovery and safety, but especially the testing portion. And clients started coming to us and saying, "Can you actually make the product for me as well?" And not just make it in the clinic, but can you make it all the way to commercial? And so we're now, I think, in a much better footing. We created these three centers of excellence, and the business is doing quite well. The tailwinds for this segment, similar to what I talked about in RMS and DSA, are in microbial, for example, the rapid testing methods where we have a proprietary technology. It's only 10% penetrated. So a ton of headroom for growth there. And then you look at cell and gene therapy, which are going to fuel the growth of both biologics and the CDMO businesses. There's over 3,000 compounds, and two-thirds of them are preclinical. So there's a lot of work for us to keep doing. Even sometimes we get the question, "Well, do you really think that cell and gene therapy as a modality is going to work?" They're going to keep trying. There's 3,000 of those shots that go. And quite honestly, our businesses, whether they work or not, we get work done for them. So just going to flash this slide here. It's an example of the broad capabilities in discovery across all modalities and how we built that over time. At some point, maybe 10-15 years ago, we really didn't have a discovery business. And we did the Argenta and BioFocus acquisitions, getting sort of our toes in the water in small molecule discovery. Then we sort of expanded into large molecules and antibodies with Distributed Bio. And not only could we do the discovery work now in biologics, but we also could do testing given our biologics presence. And then you look at cell and gene therapy as another modality that we are now even more fully integrated, right? Being able to do the non-clinical development, the testing, and the manufacturing, as I said, with the acquisitions of Cognate and Vigene. So you've been hearing me talk a lot about this M&A strategy as being the means to which we form this portfolio of unique and differentiated scientific capabilities. M&A will going to remain a top long-term priority for our capital deployment, but it's not the only tool in our toolbox. I wanted to talk a little bit about a couple of other strategies that we use with strategic partnerships and our venture capital relationships. The strategic partnerships, they're technology partnerships. They are primarily focused in the discovery space, where there is still a lot of cool and new technologies being evaluated, and none of us really know which one is going to make it, so to speak. And clients want to try new things, right? We want to offer them new things. Instead of us trying to develop all of those ourselves, we partner with emerging technology companies and form collaborations, strategic partnerships. We distribute their products, make them available. It's a win-win. For us, it allows us to screen where the scientific puck is going and skate there. For them, they get access to our client base, right? Which they themselves, if they're trying to build a commercial infrastructure to promote their technology, would cost a lot. So it really works well because it limits the upfront risk for us, but it gives us line of sight to a lot of what's happening in the market. We have about $110 million deployed and about 20 partnerships that are going on. In the venture capital space, this is a little unique. People would say, "Well, why are you doing this?" We started 15 years ago as an LP in some funds. And the premise is that by establishing ourselves as a known player in this space, as these VCs are forming new biotechs, they're going to refer them to us, right? Why would you work with somebody else if you have a trusted partner that is a co-investor with you? So that certainly has materialized, and 10% of our revenue is coming from these VC portfolio of companies. But I think the other added benefit is it actually gives us a seat at the table and knows where the VCs are investing. Where is the scientific innovation going? What new technologies are coming? And then we can adjust our portfolio of offerings to make sure that we're prepared. And when you get a 30% annual return, it's not too shabby either. So I'm not complaining about that. In addition to M&A and partnerships continuing to evolve and form our portfolio, I think the other big lever for us is going to be our digitization efforts and technology transformation. This is a space. It is very regulated, and it has been in place for a while. So a lot of things are still manual, and there's a lot of white space in how we operate with our clients. And you all know that saving a couple of months in the drug discovery timeline can be really critical. And so while this is going to drive savings and efficiency, it's more about how you can enhance the engagement model with the client. And I'll just cover a couple of examples. In this customer engagement model, we launched our new customer portal for safety, Apollo, where clients now have access to timely, secure, and personalized data. So if you're a researcher, you can, instead of having to call somebody, email, "Can you send me the results?" Everything is available for you to look daily if you want. You can see all the milestones of how your protocol is developing. In our products business, we're focusing a lot on e-commerce initiatives to make it a very smooth buying experience for them. But in doing so, we get a lot of insights from the customer buying pattern, right? And so we are able to target our marketing efforts just like Amazon targets us. And so it makes it for a much more effective and engaging interaction. Then we're using AI and computerized modeling in drug discovery to enhance the study designs and with that also help with our three Rs efforts, replacement, refinement, and reduction. Getting the usage of models to be more effective. I talked a little bit about this when I was giving you the Charles River Investment Thesis, right, as a misnomer. Again, we are early in the discovery and development continuum, but we have a very large and diverse client base. A lot of people in today's world, especially with a lot of noise on biotech funding, they tend to over-index on the exposure that those funding dynamics or macroeconomic inflation, interest rates can have in our business. In reality, we actually play in a way that actually offers stability and sustained growth. 2,000 biotech clients last year. Our top 25 clients represented 30% of our revenues. But guess what? Those top 25 clients, they're all large biopharmaceutical companies that are very well funded, that have no concerns on them being a going concern. And the largest client is less than 3% of our revenue. And more importantly, those capital market-dependent public biotechs, those with less than two years of cash, are only 5% of our business, right? So it's a very small portion of exposure, if you will. And you look at last year, even though there was all this noise about biotech funding, we added 673 clients. That's more than we added in the previous two years of the biotech bonanza, right? And you can say, "Yeah, but I bet some also went bankrupt." But that's the normal churn of our business, right? It's not like biotech went to a halt last year and we weren't able to get new people to give us business. So in addition to how we are unique and differentiated, I think the other exciting thing is the markets in which we play are very robust. We look at the total addressable market of $20 billion. I told you that we did $4 billion of revenues last year, so a lot of headroom for growth. And we believe that the market is growing or is going to grow a 10-plus%. So I think it offers a nice growth prospect for the company. Obviously, our commitment to corporate citizenship is really important because how we do business is as important, if maybe not more important, than where we do business and then the results that we deliver. And it's all about providing an environment for our employees that is supportive, that they feel cared for, engaged. It's about how we invest in our communities and how we care for the environment that we all live in. And so we try to operate in the highest standards of leadership and integrity in everything that we do. I'm going to quickly flash here the Q1 results. We had a very strong performance in the first quarter, and you can see the guidance for 2023. We tightened the range a little bit. In the bottom, we raised it. It is a wider range than normal. Those of you that do know Charles River know that there's some supply chain uncertainty in the NHP world, so that made us have a wider guidance range than normal. So in closing, I hope that I did my job in the last 30 minutes, and I left you with a better appreciation for what we believe is a strong opportunity for value creation. And it's really supported by, we believe, the strength of our scientific breadth and unique portfolio, as I've been talking about. It's going to be enabled by this digitization transformation and the impact that it's going to have in our business and how we interact with our clients. They will drive efficiency, agility, speed, but it all is enabled by the almost 22,000 colleagues that we have that bring their heart and soul to work every day and really creating those healthier lives for all of us. So thank you. And I guess we'll go to the breakout session, and I had a minute to spare. Perfect timing. Yeah. So again, the breakout is in Burnham A.