Good morning, hello, and a warm welcome to everybody. Welcome to our second presentation of the Online Healthcare Conference. The second company presenting today is Evotec SE, in a nutshell, a leading drug discovery and development company. More insight, of course, can be provided by Mr. Volker Braun, who is the Head of Global IR and ESG. We are looking forward to your insights. Before I hand over, two quick notes on the housekeeping front. We will record this event, and you will be able to access it later on our research hub. We have 30 minutes for this presentation, including Q&A. In case there are questions from your side, please feel free to use the chat box on the lower right-hand corner to enter your chats. We will address them during the Q&A in the aftermath of the presentation.
With that in mind, I'll hand it over to Volker. The floor is yours.
Thank you, Holger, and good morning to everyone on the call. A big thank you to MWB for hosting this event. A lot to cover within 30 minutes. I will keep sufficient room for questions in the end. Let's get started with the front page. Actually, there are two pieces of information already here. First, the name Evotec, which stands for Evolutionary Technologies. That has always been a guiding principle to adopt whatever is needed in terms of modern technology. We do not have to invent everything in-house, but we apply every useful technology, which brings us closer to our goal, which is pioneering drug discovery. That is our North Star, most recently defined in our strategy review.
We want to be the collaboration partner of choice for large pharma, for small biotech, for every company in between, and also for fund foundations to get faster, better, and more intelligently to new drugs. Before we go there, just pointing to the cautionary language in the disclaimer, as you see on page two, there will be forward-looking statements based on the information we have today. Let's jump right into it. In a nutshell about us, what are we? Where do we position ourselves? We want to unleash innovation in drug discovery. We want to lead. We want to be not only a prolonged workbench of a large pharma or small biotech company. We want to be a partner. Sometimes there's even consultancy services as part of the offering. We apply, of course, AI-driven innovations.
As I said, every technology that brings us closer to our goal to develop the right drugs for the right patients sooner, safer, and smarter. We have, of course, a business unit, which I guess you're all aware of, which is just Evotec Biologics. Technologically, a leader in the field of manufacturing biologics based on a completely new approach, a paradigm-shifting approach with much higher yields, more agility, also capable to produce smaller volumes at attractive cost ratios. In parallel to that, we have started a program to do our homework after, let's say, 15 years since our last strategic review in 2009. Actually, now 16 years.
We've gone through a process where we redefined what is really core of our business, where did we maybe distract ourselves for some time, and where do we want to focus going forward, which also means that we will need to align internal structures more efficiently. There is a commitment to operational excellence. With all that, with the focus on innovation, we think that in the end, we can grow faster than the market, and we can help our partners to do better research in preclinical discovery and development. One number I would like to share with you is astonishing. It is $7.7 billion, which were basically sunk costs only in 2024 for the top 20 pharma companies. In 2024, clinical trials worth $7.7 billion were terminated by only 20 companies.
That tells how urgent the need is to come up with better ideas, better approaches right at the start. Because when you are in a clinical trial, by then, at least eight years have passed by. Then you find out that the approach that you've chosen doesn't work, and there's still too much attrition, too high failure rates, and there must be better ways. The only response to that challenge is innovation, technology, and not just execution of X amounts of experiments to find out in the end that trial and error is maybe not the best approach. What is required for that? Strong focus on a specialized area in our two segments. This is in drug discovery and preclinical development, the focus on preclinical work. The earlier, the higher the value creation.
Already on that very early stage, the fate of the experiment and of the project is set. We need to come up with better approaches, how to discover the right mode of action, what is the underlying root cause of a disease, what is the right disease model, do we have to rely on any models going forward, or are there more intelligent ways to do it? Then we choose the right modality. Only then we know whether it's a small molecule or an antibody or a cell therapy. This question comes second. First, we need to really understand the disease. Also, more and more, we need to identify patterns in homogeneous subpopulations of a disease area. Let's take kidney disease. In the end, the kidney doesn't work anymore. Patients are hooked to a dialysis machine or get a transplant.
Literally, there are more than 50 reasons why a kidney can stop working. We need to be more precise on identifying homogeneous subpopulations so that they can receive the right therapy. A positive effect of these approaches is that we can already during clinical trials find better ways to include responders into the clinical trial and to exclude non-responders. That eventually then should lead to higher probabilities of success, which is the second effect of a more precise approach. What is needed for that is, in the first place, more precision. It is also true that Evotec has an offering and will always continue to have an offering, which we call the CRO Essentials. We are a contract research organization where we offer chemistry, synthesis of molecules, high-throughput screening, tox testing in a standard way.
We always combine that, and we see that then over the years when the collaborations progress with our partners. Most of them start small, ask us for a more standard service, but then the appetite for more sophisticated technologies and approaches is growing. We apply more and more our own proprietary technology, which distinguishes us from competition. We have, over the years, spent a sizable amount of own R&D money to come up with own technologies, own platforms. Access to these platforms is only possible if our partners are also willing to share the upside. It is not just the fee-for-service business, which you would find in the CRO Essentials part. I come to the commercial model in a second. It is also then sharing upside based on milestones. Hopefully, at some stage, we are not there yet, but that is the model.
In case of commercial success, when a drug comes to the market, so that we can also benefit from royalties when the marketing phase starts. These technologies, these own platforms in particular, it's a large set of patient data, molecular patient database, where we have samples from more than 25,000 patients meanwhile, which we analyze not only the genomic profile, but how is the genomic information then translated into the proteome, how is the transcriptome, how is the metabolism. A very holistic approach on a single cell level. We can go down to single cells and look into these cells, what is really the underlying root cause of disease. As I said, access to that sophisticated technology is only possible also via success sharing. We can model the disease in a dish. We do not necessarily rely on animal models in Alzheimer's and in neurodegeneration in particular.
One example here, in layman's terms, if a mouse forgets where the cheese is and then you apply something, then sometimes the mouse finds the cheese again and sometimes they don't. That doesn't tell anything about how to translate the finding into a human being. We have developed neurons and networks in a dish. When you then apply a potential drug candidate, you see immediate impact. Do the neurons, do they fire, are they upregulated or downregulated? Is there no effect at all? Is it even toxic? Right from the first day, you get information based on a human model. Longer term, we think this is of higher predictive value and should also be then rewarded accordingly by our partners.
Talking about the business model, and I alluded to the CRO Essentials, which is still a sizable amount of our business today, which was about two-thirds, maybe five years ago. It's now below 50%, but it's still sizable. That's really standalone deals based on fee-for-services, access to our technologies, high-throughput screening, high quality. We do experiments only once, and then you have a robust and reliable result. Our partners don't have to come back, which you sometimes find with cheaper offerings in the first place. If you then get stuck while the quality of the experiment or the outcome is fluctuating and you need to repeat it, the question is whether then the saved money in the first place was really well spent if you have to come back for a second experiment. High-quality outcomes.
As I said, we go up the value chain, the deals get more integrated, the research campaigns become longer over several months or even years. The various steps needed throughout preclinical research are interlinked. We can manage programs more efficiently and by that gaining more time since we have everything under one roof. The premium segment, so to say, is then really applying our own technologies and platforms and developing new drugs in collaboration with our partners, not on behalf, but together with them. Therefore, we also share the upside in our drug discovery and development segment. Moving on to just Evotec Biologics, what we have today is a validated technology called continuous manufacturing. We manufacture biologics, antibodies, and similar molecules on a continuous process. No discrete setups where you grow cells. They start expressing antibodies. You harvest everything.
You separate the cell from the antibody. If you want to have more antibody material, you have to set up a new batch in large scale. Our process is smaller scale, but we harvest literally antibodies every day. Maybe not the same yield per day, but over a period of up to four weeks. That in the end leads to a tenfold yield per initial batch. Therefore, obviously, much smaller unit costs per gram. That makes it so appealing also if the end markets get smaller. When we talk about precision medicine, which I mentioned at the beginning in kidney failure, the example that I used, by definition, patient populations get smaller. Peak sales might get smaller as well.
However, with this approach, in case the antibody is the right modality, we can still help our partners to have very appealing cost positions and therefore being very competitive also if the batch size is smaller and the end markets are smaller. Where is this heading to? We have spent a lot on CapEx for setting up two manufacturing facilities, one in Redmond in the state of Washington, one in Toulouse. If we want to manufacture more, we would need to add more capacity, invest more. We defined in our strategic review that we want to make use of the innovation of the technologies also in a smarter way, that we do not only grow via setting up new JPODs, new manufacturing facilities, but also by capitalizing the technologies we have.
The cells that we have, the cell culture media, and also the licenses which we create or the technology which we created can be monetized via licenses, which would be then a much more capital-efficient way. The ambition is to become more capital-efficient, leaner, asset-lighter with a much better return profile going forward. The markets where we are in, the characterization of that is that we talk about outsourcing. Outsourcing in preclinical research, the share here still is roughly 15% only. That compares to about 40% in clinical trials. The organization, the project management for clinical trials is often outsourced to a third party. Early-stage drug discovery, here the share is still fairly low, but there are good reasons to believe that this should grow faster.
On top of the underlying R&D budget growth, which is rather resilient, at 3-4%, we should see an increasing share of outsourcing. Underlying growth of our addressable market is somewhere between 5-7%. We think, based on innovative technologies, we should outgrow the market. When we talk about biologics and continuous manufacturing, continuous manufacturing is not really visible today. We benefit from underlying robust growth for antibody manufacturing. The share of antibodies as a total of therapeutics going forward is expected to grow at double-digit rates, more than 10% going forward. If we then replace existing technologies with continuous manufacturing, there is an extra layer of growth potential also for just Evotec Biologics. For both markets, there are good reasons to believe that we structurally can outgrow the market.
These are the technologies I already alluded to when I talked about drug discovery. Multi-omics market expected to grow faster than 20%. Biologics, more than 10%. AI and R&D, way more than 20%. Also cell therapy, where we are also active, expected to grow 20%. These are markets where we are active. These are the underlying drivers for superior growth in the long term. What we see near term, however, is some challenges. You saw the financial performance of Evotec over the last 18 months, not really satisfying to our shareholders. Believe us, we are also not happy with that, but we feel that we do our homework to be better prepared for the next wave to come. However, 2025 is a transition year.
Our drug discovery and development segment still sees muted demand, in particular from small biotech companies, where our target group, so to say, the very early stage seed financed or Series A financed companies do not receive material amounts of the funds that are coming in. The venture capital industry sees decent inflows, but they spend money more selectively and in particular into biotech companies with late-stage assets, late phase two or even phase three, which is not our core market in the small biotech industry. On the other end of the scale, the large pharma companies, that sector has seen a number of significant restructurings over 2024 into 2025.
Seems that this is coming to an end, but this is in particular a market where we focus on the more integrated and strategic deals with success sharing going forward, which are by nature deals which have much longer lead times. It takes a bit longer to generate that business. That means that 2025 is still a transition year and the first year where we implement our new strategy and improve our internal structures. That leads to the guidance that we've articulated in April, revenue growth somewhere between 5-10%. Our Q1 numbers were on track with shared R&D or the discovery business doing a bit, yeah, generating a bit less than anticipated, while just compensated for that. The mix of the two segments is on track to reach that guidance and also the respective EBITDA goal of $32.50 million. What are the levers?
I mentioned it midterm. It is above market growth. Sorry, I was a bit too fast. The commitment to operational excellence, and that is not just a buzzword. It is really about savings, incremental $50 million savings on top of the $40 million we have generated or are starting to generate based on the priority reset, which started last year. Better monetization of the technologies and assets of just Evotec Biologics. I mentioned that. There is also upside, additional upside from our partnered asset pipeline, where the non-risk adjusted number, it is important, non-risk adjusted potential till 2028 is $500 million. Of course, you know the business model in our industry. It is not just Evotec. It is the entire industry. There is a lot of attrition, a lot of failure. The risk adjustment is up to you how much of these milestones and royalties will eventually then really materialize.
The statistics tell that there should be a contribution also coming from that part. One word on the operational excellence and the savings exercise going forward. The target is $50 million till 2028. I think it is fair to say that most of the levers have been identified. We need to bring up our cost of goods. We still have overcapacity to some extent. It is a deliberate choice. We need to have the scientists in place once the demand picks up again. Of course, this is well below benchmark, and that needs to improve. The same holds true also for the ratio of SG&A as % of revenues. The measures we are taking should unfold over 2026 and 2027. We are not talking about the hockey stick and promise that everything will be right by 2028.
You should see first effects of this program already by 2026, which is part of the story why we eventually think that by 2028 or on the way towards 2028, the average revenue cradle should be somewhere between 8-12%. The EBITDA margin, if you benchmark that with companies in our industry, it's not super aggressive to assume that it should be above 20% by 2028. With that, I stop here and would provide some room for Q&A.
Thanks so much, Volker, for the insights. I know it's a difficult company to explain in 20 minutes, and I appreciate you doing a good job and giving us some insights into Evotec. We have a few questions that I would like to address. Let's start out with a very specific one. Evotec BRIDGEs, is that still part of the future business model? Is the question.
The BRIDGEs, which is the collaborations or the triangular collaborations with a financial sponsor, with us as the operational platform and universities, that is a model also going forward because this is a valuable source of new ideas. It is beneficial for all. It is efficient for the financial sponsor. It comes with reliable outcome. The universities, university labs, they run their experiments on an industrialized platform. It is really robust data that is generated, which then can be presented to pharma companies. That is still a source of new ideas going forward, yes.
Thank you. Impacts, RFK's downsizing of national healthcare and the impacts, and if that also has the cooperation with the FDA seen compromises because of the changes going on in that space?
Yeah. Okay. Direct exposure to NIA budgets is less than 2%. Actually, it is about 1%. Not really moving the needle.
Of course, also some customers are affected from that. Here anyway, we see a reluctance spending among smaller biotech companies, which is one of the main reasons why we are subpar in terms of revenue growth and margin development in 2024 and also 2025. It remains to be seen how it plays out. There is stronger dependency on venture capital money. As I said, inflows for venture capital are actually quite robust. They are higher than pre-pandemic levels. One number here to share with you. In the U.S., venture capital inflow was about $20 billion in the first quarter, actually same number in 2024. That compares with $17 billion in 2019 and $16 billion in 2018. We are better than pre-pandemic levels, but the spend is different. The amount of money not spent is piling up.
At some point, someone needs to pull the plug, and then there will be more money flowing into that industry again, compensating maybe for the cuts in the NIA budget.
Thank you. Royalty is something that you're aspiring to collect going forward, up to $500 million until 2028. Is that included in your forecast, or is that a potential upside to your revenue forecast?
That's upside, and I need to be a bit more precise. It's milestones and royalties, and what you will see until 2028, it's predominantly milestones which have an impact on our earnings profile. Royalties will kick in later, but that's already today, obviously part of the non-risk adjusted package. We have earmarked some contribution from milestones, but way less aggressive or more conservatively than we used to in the past. We applied normal industry attrition rates and then discounted it twice.
Cut, made a haircut by another 50% to that number. Therefore, there is a small contribution included in the 2028 forecast, but definitely below 10%.
Thank you. How does, and I'm actually going to read this question, how does Evotec differentiate itself technologically and commercially from new tech-driven AI-based competitors?
Now we're mixing up things a bit. The tech-enabled biotechs, I think that's the new buzzword. In the end, they strive for developing own portfolios and then partner that with large pharma. We are basically the open platform, which supports these companies. We support companies with maybe less developed AI capabilities, but we also support and collaborate with large pharma. We are the open platform, while the others are closed shops dealing only with their own projects. I think that's the main differentiator when you talk about these tech-enabled companies.
All right.
Another very specific question, probably with a quick answer. Will there be a capital markets day this year?
Short answer is yes, very likely fourth quarter.
Thank you. The last question is, if the person understood it correctly, it seems like you're focusing on larger projects, but potentially fewer projects. What are the risks that you associate with that or the risks that you anticipate?
I wouldn't call it a risk, but what I already said, it's longer lead times. Timing of these projects is maybe a bit more difficult. Also the development, the revenue contribution over time might be not in a linear way, but it depends on the stage of the respective project and the number of the projects. Other than that, no change in risk profile as opposed to a fee-for-service project.
Thanks so much. Time is flying when you're having fun. It's 10:29.
The next presentation will be aap Implantate. I just posted the link in the chat in case you're interested in joining that. Volker, thanks so much for your time and the insights that you shared with us. If you don't mind staying on the line for a second more. To everybody else, thanks for joining. Of course, thanks for your interesting questions.
Thank you all. Thank you.