Good morning and welcome to the KeyBanc Capital Markets Healthcare conference. My name is Anna Snopkowski. I'm an associate on the Life Science Equity Research team led by Paul Knight, and today I'm joined by the Harvard Bioscience team, Jim Green who's the CEO, and Jennifer Cote the CFO. Jim and Jen, thank you so much for joining us. We will start with a presentation and then we will turn it over for Q&A. The floor is yours, Jen.
Thank you, Anna. Let me just start with a quick overview of we have our Safe Harbor statements and forward-looking regarding forward-looking statements and use of non-GAAP. This is up on our website, so please feel free to take a look, and we'll keep moving forward with this. So our vision at Harvard Bioscience is to be the most trusted manufacturer and provider of life science tools to the leading academic research organizations, contract research organizations, pharmaceutical and biotechs, in the discovery, production, and safety and regulatory testing of tomorrow's life-saving therapies.
We have two primary product categories: our cellular and molecular products and our preclinical systems. Our revenues split approximately equally between academic and research, and the other 50% to industrial customers, which includes pharmaceutical companies, CROs, and biotechs. We'll get into some of the other details on the upcoming slides. Pleas e move to slide four.
This highlights some of the strengths and key reasons to invest in us. We sell innovative technologies with high barriers to entry. Our sales channel is supported by elite application scientists and service teams. This includes PhDs that are well-respected by our customer base, and when they call, when our folks call, they will answer. We've been focused on building a strong pipeline of products that position us for expansion into the industrial customer base, and we'll talk about that in a little bit.
We have a strong focus on building a lean operating platform that's driven improvements in our financial performance. If you go to slide five, this shows our revenue and EBITDA trend as reported during our earnings call on March 7th. The information in terms of our forecast is presented as it was. We're not reiterating our guidance, but it's here, and recent.
We demonstrate steady growth when considering the impact of headwinds of about $5 million of discontinued products, which were mostly complete in 2022. The impact of that was seen evenly over 2023. We had very minimal quantities in Q1 of last year, so you can see the steady growth there. Our primary takeaway on revenue, as we spoke about last week, is we're expecting weakness during the first half of 2024, primarily due to the impact of challenges in APAC and China. We're optimistic that things will start to turn around in the second half, but at minimum we'll annualize those headwinds.
We have an expectation that our new product order pipeline will start shipping during the second half of the year. We have three primary locations: one in the Boston area in Massachusetts, one in the St. Paul, Minneapolis area in Minneapolis in Minnesota, and then in Stuttgart, Germany. We also have a few satellite sites in China, Sweden, Spain, and the U.K. And with that, I'm going to turn this back to Jim, who's going to give a little bit of an overview of our customer, customer base, and then a little bit more of our products and our exciting growth strategy. So if you could proceed to slide eight.
All right. Thank you, Jen. And thanks everybody for, you know, dialing in and being a part of our team here and listening to our story and what we're doing with the company. We sell to three primary customer segments. Academic research is about half of our business, and historically, the company was primarily selling products and technologies into academic research. These are areas that have been key in developing new novel drugs, new compounds, new therapies, some of the new advanced things you hear about. Our technologies were used to create many of these new exciting drugs that are coming up, and also our products are used in creating many of the new things that are going to be on the way.
Some of the new activities in cell and gene therapy, you know, large molecule type drugs, drugs where you have to go through transfection to create a target. We're also very well known in cellular testing, and that's in using our MEA type technologies, our microelectrode arrays, and what's done at the cellular level. You'll see, though, also with the acquisition of Data Sciences a few years ago, we now have great exposure to much larger industrial segments in pharma companies, biotechs, and CROs. So CROs are now a big part of our business. You can see the name brand list of companies that we work very well with here.
We are considered the gold standard with our systems that are used for data collection, data reduction, the analytics, the report generation that's required to prove that you have a safe and effective drug prior to entering human clinical trials. Again, it's a list of who's who in this area. We're, again, very well known in this space. And then with biotechs and pharma companies, historically, we were known on the discovery side because researchers generally knew us from their times in academic research. So they knew of our technologies. They knew of our breakthrough products with BTX and products for electroporation. They knew of our leading, detailed cellular testing systems like with multi-electrode array systems and patch clamp and cellular-based systems. So we're very well known also in the pharma and biotech world. So if we go to the next slide.
We tend to apply our technologies in a small number of very critical parts of the drug development continuum. You see us in academic research, and you see us in pharma companies and biotechs in the discovery side, research and discovery of where new therapies, new drugs, new vaccines are created, and then also where the way they're tested at the cellular level to make sure that these drugs actually pass the first sets of what you need to be able to do to show that the drugs are safe and effective.
We also are now moving, as you'll find out today, more and more into the use of organoids for advancing not just the development and the research in these areas, but also applying these more toward other industrial segments of potentially we see this getting to becoming, you know, very heavily potentially used in safety pharmacology and toxicology. And then you see us very much in preclinical testing with a small animal testing, in vivo testing, all the way up through large non-human primate testing that's required for any drug to get through and to be proved to be proven to be safe and effective prior to human clinical use. And then moving now also, you'll see that we're starting to get more and more involved in the bioproduction of some of these new advanced types of therapies. So on the next slide.
This is a high-level look at the areas of our core business. I like to think of our base business, which is easily in the 80%-90% region of our business. Our core business, when you think about, you know, what we do with, you know, being the leader in telemetry and data collection, this is one of our key areas. In fact, you know, data collection and telemetry, it's almost half of our business. It's clearly the majority of our preclinical business. There you'll also see in as our base business what we have and have been doing historically in electroporation and transfection, in developing new drugs and new therapies, and then in the use of our microelectrode arrays for advancing cellular electrophysiological testing at the cell level.
So again, looking, building off of our base business, and our base business, as you know, is growing. We're expanding our services. We're expanding new capabilities, new sensors, new implantables. But this business is highly profitable. This creates the gross margin and the ability for us to now invest and make the operating expense investments in the new very high- growth areas. The first high- growth area here that I'll talk about will be expanding to high- volume applications in the use of behavioral testing.
In a minute, I'll show you what we've introduced here this past year to now not only offer to our big CROs and pharma companies the ability to do the data collection through our GLP systems that are typically used or historically used for telemetry. We now are offering the ability to do high volume, multi-concurrent animal tests with behavioral testing and neurotype testing. This is a new expansion and a new growth driver for our business.
Another area of expansion is, now that since customers and companies have often used our BTX and our electroporation products for creating new drugs, we have now the ability to work with them to bridge them to bioproduction with using a newer configuration of our system that's designed for high volume production of a drug that was used and created in the discovery phase. So, brand new great area for us, very interested in applying this electroporation technology for transfection to bioproduction applications. And then lastly, we're investing in extending our cellular systems for using in vitro type systems. In other words, creating from our historically we were known for cell-based testing.
Now with the introduction of organoids, we're now becoming a leader in the ability to use electrophysiology type of evaluation of how the organoid is living in its life. Typically in the past, cells last maybe a handful of days during the testing phases. With organoids, we're finding that these organs are actually able to live up to a year. So it really expands the kind of things that we can do in research and what our customers can do in research with organoids. We're very much interested in applying those technologies toward different applications in our core areas of safety pharmacology and toxicology. I know we've got some questions that Anna wanted to ask.
Maybe we'll start with a little bit of the Q&A, because I have some more detailed slides that we can talk about, to give you a little more detail on some of these new areas. So, Anna.
Perfect. Thank you, Jim. I know that part of revamping the business in the past several years has been choosing which products and businesses to invest in and also which areas to divest. In making your business leaner, I was wondering if you could touch on what businesses you view as core. I know you just talked about moving into bioproduction, so maybe a little bit about that. But where do you see the future of Harvard Bioscience going, and are there any new product or part of your business you see a lot of potential in?
Okay, great. Thank you. I think let's go to slide 11. This starts to give you a view of our base business. And this is really the fundamental driver of the business, you know, going forward and allows us the ability to invest in the new expanding areas that we'll talk about in just a minute. On the left side of the screen, you'll see our world-leading GLP- compliant Ponemah data systems. Our Ponemah data acquisition systems, it's used for analytics, report generation, and it's a base platform for collecting the data and generating the reports for all of the implantable telemetry systems, telemetry devices that are required for monitoring the animals, the animal models, all the way through the cycle, up through and including non-human primates. So a large part of this business is software.
It's attracting the data, you know, assembling it. It's going through the analytics and creating the reports that are required by our customers to get their drugs through these preclinical phases. On the right-hand side, this is a well-known technology for us, with our electroporation technology, the BTX product. It's known for being able to transfect the most challenging types of cells. It's heavily used in the new generation and wherever there is cell modification required. Things like CAR T cell creation, cell and gene therapy is a big opportunity for us with this technology as we see going forward. CRISPR applications, electrofusion for monoclonal antibody creation. And then down on the bottom right is a look at our world's leading detailed microelectrode array systems. These MEA systems, again, we are the leader on it.
You'll see us in all the academic environments, academic research. You'll see these systems in pharma companies and biotechs. And this is what's used for electrophysiological testing of the cells when they're in different types of test environments. When you're applying different types of compounds to the drugs, you want to see how they react. So this group here on this page is what I see as our base core business. There are a couple of other products that I would say are part of this, but this is areas where we're investing very heavily. So if we go to the next slide. Yeah, I talked about it moving and advancing into high- volume commercial use for high- volume behavioral systems. This is a technology that we introduced. We introduced first at Society for Neuroscience last November.
We also then really introduced it very heavily to the CROs and the pharma companies here at the Society of Toxicology. We were asked in working with one of our very large customers, could we since we were a leader and well known for our automatic infrared tracking capability for monitoring, you know, smaller animals during the entire phases of neuro testing, could we organize or design a system in a way that you could go instead of use instead of using one animal at a time, it wouldn't be able to do up to 100 animals simultaneously. So this is basically the first of a new line of products that we introduced. We showed this at Society of Toxicology. We're getting a tremendous amount of interest in this technology.
As you can see, the ability to do 100 animal models all at the same time lets the CRO or the pharma company or the large lab for that matter really efficiently go through large volume testing with basically an automatic lights- out type of configuration. We benchmarked this system using a sub with a 50 subject test set. We're able to show that we were able to get cycle times reduced by over 50%, which meant overall throughput ability for the customer to get two times the throughput. That means if they're applying this employs this capital properly, they should see this as an opportunity to double their revenue just with this type of system with the efficiencies that you get with it, in addition, lowering their overall operating cost of operating the system.
So this is an example of taking technology that we developed in academic research and then applying it to much larger industrial applications like this, where now you have a large capital purchase. You have consumables. You have services that go along with it. So you really start to bring recurring revenues into this product line stream. If we go to the next slide, I'll tell you a little bit about what we're doing with electroporation. And as I've said, we've been very well known and you know we're one of the original inventors of electroporation for transfection for you for creating and changing molecules for changing you know stem cells for creating the basis of many of these new drugs that you're just now starting to see.
Since what we found that is if customers were using us for the creation of the compound, that it made sense for us to offer them the ability to bridge that development into the bioproduction. So we recently have offered and changed the product, adapted it for bioproduction. So now that it's CGMP compliant, if a customer uses us to create a new generation drug, they can now use us to go into biomanufacturing of that drug. A great new opportunity for us. And in fact, just this year, we I figured the first two or three years we needed to prove that we had a compelling product. We've done that now. You know, and one of the cases in point is one of our large pharma customers who adopted this technology about a year ago.
As of now, they're already up to about $1 million a year of consumables for this new generation of bioproduction for this particular therapy that is now in production. Again, great it shows that proves the point that if somebody uses us to create a drug, then they can use us to actually manufacture the drug. And the last slide I'll highlight is what we're doing with our advanced MEA systems. And you're going to hear more and more about organoids. We, since we were the leader in being able with our microelectrode array systems, the ability to measure what's happening at the cellular level, that was, you know, again, that's something that's all part of the whole process of drug creation and drug testing.
What we've done now is we've adapted this technology to have what we call a mesh configuration. And the mesh is if you look on the lower right-hand corner, just to the left is an actual organoid that's growing around one of our mesh sensor units. This mesh sensor has the ability it's actually measuring at a with a pitch of about 200 microns. So very deep detail. We're measuring what's happening with the cells at that point. So what's happening if you imagine instead of having a handful of cells that live a few days and you're testing to see how the cells are performing, you know whether they're cardiac cells you want to know are they depolarizing properly, you want to know if there's been cell death.
But once you go to an organoid, now you're not just talking about a couple of days of life. We're talking about up to a year, we're seeing with organoids. We have a researcher working with neuro organoids that's now able to show over a year's life. With that, with neuro, they're able to show healthy brain tissue, and they're able to measure and actually detect epileptic brain tissue. So you can see, you know, many different applications for this kind of technology. This Mesh that you see down below actually sits inside the well that's on the right-hand side of what you see down below, and that becomes the Mesh organoid chip. That chip then goes inside of a reader, which is just above it. And that's. This is a technology we've had.
We've been, you know, a leader for years for actually developing the acquisition of what's happening within the cells. Now we have this technology is adapted to measuring what's happening inside the organoid. So the organoid can now be sitting in a well. You can perfuse the organoid with solutions to keep it alive so it can live for a long time. Now you can start to see how the organoid is actually surviving. What we're finding with neuro organoids is that the neuro organoid actually grows around this what looks like a scaffold, even though we've got the sensing inside of it. So we're now able to tell are the neurons firing properly? Are they strong enough?
We can actually measure and see the development of the neural network as it develops within a live, basically a live, portion of brain. What's happening at some of the research sites is they're able to take, for instance, in the University of Texas, they're looking at good brain and they're looking at brain that's epileptic. They're able to now, as you might expect, move on towards seeing how their a particular person's brain organoid, how it affects or how it responds to various compounds.
So now you can really start to get more, you know, you think about the basis of personalized testing to take an organoid, create an organoid of a someone who's in maybe late stage cancer, see how their brain operates if it's the good part of their brain under a compound, and then also the diseased part. How does the compound give you the effect that you're looking for? We see this as something that's going to open up a whole new set of capabilities. Our focus is to support initially with academic researchers.
We're working with them to make sure that the research they're doing helps us migrate and transition this technology, not only for academic research in things like, you know, Alzheimer's and epilepsy and cancer, but to apply this more broadly to have it be an in vitro type technology that can be used in the preclinical testing. Because that's our sweet spot. It's preclinical testing. So when I look at a market like this, you know, you can imagine a point where instead of having to use large populations of small animals because you've only been able to do cell testing for a few days, your next step is to go to large populations of small animals. So our vision is, could we now offer an in vitro version of a specific human organoids?
Or you know typically we know our researchers would maybe use their own they would grow their own organoid, but use our system, as I would say, is the intel inside of these organoids to be able to measure and to see how they're doing and to provide an ability to do to find out if certain compounds are going to fail. You want them to fail fast, and then you want to apply the next compound to the testing cycle. And most people in this space, I mean, the rough knowledge is that about 10% of new compounds actually make it their way through the full cycle of preclinical testing. And that means that 90% of new compounds fail before they get to safety pharmacology and get actually able to get through the toxicology testing.
So this potentially could be a way to dramatically improve the throughput and to fast to figure out which compounds shouldn't even bother going through this type of type of testing, and then let the pharma companies lead with the compounds that are most likely to succeed. So I know that's that's a mouthful, but you know we're real interested in how this is developing. This, I think, is the in the long run, this is going to be something that that could change the way the way research is done on on cancer and new drugs and the way the way testing is done to validate these drugs. So Anna, I know you had maybe you had another couple more questions.
Yeah. So while we're on the topic of Mesh MEA, I was just wondering, is this consumable-based? Like you have the Mesh platform.
Does that kind of last the entire customer cycle when they're running these preclinical tests? Or like, how often do you have to ship these mesh platforms to the customers?
Great, great question. Well, we already have the MEA systems, and they're used heavily you know, throughout the world in academic research, in pharma companies, in biotech companies. If you look on this slide, you can see that the chip itself is the consumable. Today, you would buy a standard single- well MEA, and those are fairly low- cost. You know they're a few hundred dollars a piece. But you have to also have the system. The full systems, these typically sell in the $70,000-$80,000 range. They have the acquisition. They do the processing. They do the data collection.
They also, you know, we offer the software applications to allow you to understand and to target what you're actually testing, whether it's cardiac cells or neuro. So it was natural for us to adapt this to now be able to use our same basic system and upgrade it to be able to support organoids, which is a whole new level of testing, a whole new level of supporting research. We're starting now to move these into a small number of academic researchers. We expect they'll never another block to start going out over the next couple quarters.
And then you'll start to see these show up in not only just academic researchers, but we'll be working with a small number of pharma companies, biotechs, and CROs to prove that moving to organoids is going to provide an entirely new way to more efficiently do the research for new drugs and then do the testing for these drugs.
Perfect. And then I know you mentioned that your sweet spot is kind of that preclinical stage. But I was just wondering, we've seen a lot of activity with the FDA and approvals and drugs moving down the pipeline. So maybe where do you see yourself moving down towards the clinical development? Is that kind of a growth opportunity for you?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean, even in academic research, we are now being approached for this technology to be used for actual clinical outcomes. There are universities and researchers who want to, you know, they plan to take, you know, biopsies of, you know, late-stage cancer patients and test, you know, specifically, you know, how does this work on this particular patient's lesion. And if you think about it, this is kind of the basis of what personalized medicine is designed to be, what is actually developing here. Now, historically, you know we've not focused on the clinical applications. You know we are again, our wheelhouse is the preclinical and what we see in really advancing and making it more efficient to create to get the drugs through the creation and through the validation phases.
But that being said, certainly there'll be opportunities, and I'd be certainly open to working with somebody who wants to really go into the clinical space and work with them on more of a teaming basis or a licensing basis to provide the base capability for someone or a company that really wants to go out there and make the investment to go after personalized type of clinical applications with this. And this is clearly it looks like something that could be a very nice fit for that.
And what would that look like? Like what would that look like in the clinical space? Would you just send them the same technologies, or would you kind of come out with new product launches?
Yeah, that again, we'd have to figure that out.
You know, look, you know, I spent the last 25 years or so on the clinical side of business and in large clinical laboratories for the kind of tests that takes place for like this, you know, today. So this is the kind of thing that I think could be a very interesting alternative, I guess, adjacency. What I'd have to make a decision on is do I, but you know, ideally it would be an in vitro type device that would be designed to be able to do these highly specialized tests. Again, they would typically start in academics, and then you know certain types of clinical companies, you know, have the interest in going out and to developing these kind of capabilities.
I would give at this point, you know, at this point, I would probably really only commit to more on the licensing of it and maybe the supply of the chips and the reading systems. I don't see getting into the clinical space for us, but it's just a little too big for us. Probably it's a lot too big for us, but it is something that we can maybe play a part in helping enable this happen.
Perfect. And then moving into your margins, I was just wondering, I know a focus is making your business highly recurring and maybe expanding your recurring revenues from 35% to the 40% plus range. So how would the recurring revenue play into your margins?
Yeah, well, if you look at almost all the new products we've introduced, they all now are designed to be adapting technologies that we developed during the academic phases and in the research phases and now adapting them to much higher volume industrial level use. So the newer systems, as they come out, you'll see that they are designed to require and they go to customers that need, you know, installation services, field services, calibration, consumables. You know, an example here with the Mesh MEA, this chip is the consumable. And you know, the simple chips that sell today for a few hundred dollars, I mean, this is a whole nother level of a consumable. But still, it is a consumable type system. So we're talking, you know, razors and razor blades.
I think when you look at bioproduction, I mean, that's a perfect case where something in the past that would have sold maybe to an academic researcher or to a discovery team in a biopharma company, they would have bought a system like the ECM 2001. You know, it's a $25,000-$30,000 system. It would come along with maybe another $30,000 a year of consumables. Well, I mean, when you go into bioproduction, like the large deal that we talked about with a large pharma company, this is around three or four systems, and it's pulling through, you know, $1 million worth of consumables. So that moves the needle. You know, we're at somewhere in the neighborhood of 35% recurring revenues today.
There's no question with these new products coming out and our focus on industrial customers that this is going to move up fast. This is going to very quickly move into, you know, into the 40%+. You know, I target to at least to get to 50% on the recurring side and to move this company more toward razors and razor blades where we have a unique technology and a compelling offering, and then customers will use our consumable to help us really sustain the growth of the business over years.
So then is that kind of those recurring revenues, is that those new products are those what's kind of going to drive your EBITDA margin targets and your gross margin targets in the coming years? That's right.
I mean, certainly there's always the option in many businesses to have lower cost initial systems and have them bring through a very high priced, a very profitable consumable. You know, I kind of like doing both. I like the initial systems to meet my gross margin targets or at least be close, and then for the consumables to certainly be, you know, well above the margin targets for the net business. The high gross margin we have with us at, you know, 60%+ and with the operating leverage we have now, the cost reductions we've taken, that lets us make the investments in these new high growth areas. At the same time, it helps us, you know, continue to pay our debt down and get our leverage ratio where it needs to be.
Because with the leverage ratio we're moving toward, you know, by the end of this year, beginning of next year, we're going to be in a position to look at what are the right kind of technologies or capabilities we want to tuck in and add to our portfolio to build out a very strong portfolio going forward. So it all comes down to, you know, solid recurring revenue growth, strong gross margins, and strong delivered EBITDA margins.
Perfect. We touched upon margins, but just in terms of growth, executing your plan going forward, once all these products are in place, what's kind of that sweet spot, that your dream growth rate for the long term?
Well, I mean, I think of the base business itself should be growing, you know, above market. So in that kind of 5% or 6% region.
And then I look at adding, you know, start just by adding behavioral to it, that and that becomes part of the base business. You know, that should be adding a point or two right there. And then you look at these other new very high growth areas, you know, they could easily be, even though they may be on a fairly low start today as far as revenue, but the growth prospects are very large. So, I mean, I would certainly be targeting, you know, an excess of I'd want to certainly be into the double digits. How far into the double digits we get would depend on how fast some of these new areas grow.
But the basic business of, you know, adding getting the right kind of services and consumables, that certainly gets us, you know, well into, you know, a good high single- digit growth rate and then throwing, you know, these new areas on top. It's kind of hard to tell just how much faster that, you know, we can grow with that, but certainly they're going to push us into the double- digits.
Perfect. And then I think we have time for one more. But have you been looking into any M&A opportunities going forward? I know a lot of your strategy is growing organically internally, but maybe just your thoughts on the M&A environment.
Yes. Well, I mean, I was very clear up front that, you know, I didn't want to even be looking at M&A until we had fixed our house, until we had completed building the platform that we have now today. I do feel like we're in that position now. You know, in spite of COVID and all the headwinds that have come and gone, you know, we focused on getting our overall cost of organization down. Our operating leverage now is strong. So, you know, we're now at that point where we not only would we be in a position with the capital structure to do M&A, we have a platform that we can acquire onto.
You know, I'm a believer that if you're going to do M&A, it's got to it can't just be buying something, but it's got to be something they bring to us and something that we bring to them. And the platform has to work. And it's not just cost reductions and cost synergies. It's revenue synergies. And that means picking the right technologies to bring into the portfolio. So it should be it should it has to be designed to drive to continue to move up the growth rate in the business overall. So revenue synergies are number one. Cost synergies are nice, but being in a position to start doing that here by the end of this year, it really I'm very happy to see that we're able to start doing that now.
We now know better where we should be targeting bringing in some of these new capabilities.
Great. Thank you so much. I think we're all out of time, but thank you, Jim. Thank you, Jen. Thanks for everyone who joined us in the audience. I hope everyone has a great day.
Thank you.
Thank you, Anna. Good job.