Hi. Good morning/afternoon, folks. Welcome to the Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare Conference. My name is Erin Wright. I am the Lead Healthcare Services Analyst at Morgan Stanley. We are happy to have IDEXX Laboratories with us today, Chief Executive Officer, Mike Erickson, as well as Chief Financial Officer, Andrew Emerson. For board support and disclosures, please see the morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures website. With that, we will get started with our fireside chat. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having us, Erin.
Yeah. You recently had an investor day in Maine, that I was fortunate enough to attend, and you highlighted the innovation drivers. You reaffirmed the long-term growth targets, calling for 10% plus organic growth, 15% + EPS growth. Walk us through some of those key building blocks in terms of bridging to from, in terms of today's environment and what we are seeing with vet office visit trends and then the long-term growth algorithm.
Yeah. Great. Let me just start by talking a little bit about the year, and then I will talk about the building blocks and tie back to some of those things. So we had an exceptional Q2 and really start to the year. We have got terrific momentum in the business. Erin, we talked at our investor day about how we are in the very early stages of this broad-based innovation cycle playing out across really multiple different platforms at the point of care, in reference labs, and in software, supported by what we are doing commercially to help our customers adopt these innovations. We are seeing that flow through into double-digit growth, both in reference labs, recurring revenue, and in our VetLab recurring revenue. On that basis, in Q2, we took up our guide for the overall year, as you know, and just reflecting that momentum that we see.
When we are in this sort of dynamic period that we're all in, trying to manage signals and understand where things are headed, with IDEXX, we step back and look through that haze. To your point around the long-term view, it just reaffirms the conviction that we have in the strength of the sector and the long-term potential. We can see our way to the $45 billion TAM that we've talked about in diagnostics globally. We know that diagnostics are dramatically under-penetrated around the world relative to the outsized value that diagnostics create in the practice. Pets can't speak. It's diagnostics that give them a voice in the healthcare equation. We also know that diagnostics drives 80% of all the activity in the practice.
Our entire strategy as a company is to move that needle through what we do on the innovation front and commercially, and we've been successfully doing that now for decades. We measure that through the building blocks that you asked about. We've seen really robust new customer growth. Really, the core of our strategy is to drive volume-based growth through innovation and utilization. We've seen that across the sector, and we know that customers that adopt our IDEXX innovations grow faster. Sector-wide, we're driving about a 50-basis point increase in blood work conclusion annually, and that translates to about 150 basis points of CAG diagnostic recurring revenue for IDEXX. So, we build that up across new customer growth, innovation and utilization, and modest price, tied back to the value that we're creating in the practice.
Yeah, I think just to round out the financial model, obviously that recurring revenue growth stream really enables the rest of the P&L as well. We see high incremental gross margin drop through, when we look at the ability to continue to grow our recurring revenues. We benefit from scale. We're focused on productivity. To Mike's point, part of our growth algorithm is price, in which we're creating value through various different sources of value to our customers. Some of that's innovation, some of that's things like our software capabilities, and our really keen focus on making sure that we can deliver product to them when they need it, because these are medical services, and they're often looking at making sure they can manage their own patient when it comes into the clinic.
So that gives us a really nice, robust ability to reinvest back into the business and in R&D and our commercial efforts, and be able to deliver operating margin improvement over a long period of time, ultimately to achieve that 15% + EPS growth. So we see really significant opportunity and headroom for us both on the revenue top line, but also in our ability to continue to expand our margin profile and EPS.
Yeah, the high-margin drop through of that recurring revenue we always feel is underappreciated part of the story too. But in bigger picture, you have shown the ability to grow even in a down market. It is a question that I have to ask in terms of underlying vet demand trends. I think your guidance calls for, what, -1 .5% to 2% vet office visit trend this year. What gets this market to normalize longer term? How confident are you in that? Or does it matter in light of the innovation drivers that you're seeing and the growth that you are seeing in light of that?
Yeah. So to your question, we have seen this modest headwind to visit growth now playing out over multiple quarters, really more on the wellness side, as you know, Erin, which on the margin can be maybe seen as a little bit more discretionary than non-well. We have to step back on that, though, as well and maybe just again see the kind of broader arc through the ups and downs of the pandemic and the dynamic period since then. So if we compare where we're at today to before the pandemic, we have substantially more pets in the system, 22 million more pets through that period. And if you look at medicalized pets, also substantially more on the order of 8 to 9 million more medicalized pets. And we have a lot more visits as well from a total visit volume standpoint.
And if you take any one of those factors, just on a CAGR basis, they've been growing at or above the historical norm, again, through these ups and downs and this dynamic period that we're in. So we feel good about those things. But I think the bigger point that often gets lost in the conversation around visits is really looking at care, the demand for care, the intensity and quality of care that's happening in the visits when those visits take place. And that's, again, the core of our strategy is to drive that. On that dimension, what we've seen is this continuous expansion in blood work inclusion, in wellness visits, 50 basis points annually, growing inclusion, blood work inclusion, and wellness visits.
This overall step up that we've seen continuously quarter over quarter, we reported again in Q2 in diagnostic frequency and utilization, which is a very good proxy, again, for the quality of those visits. And when I sit down and talk to our corporate group, our large partners, this is a big focus for them because they understand that this drives their business model, and they want to grow this too. And so it's a natural point of alignment. And when you break down what are all the things that are driving this, IDEXX Innovation is playing a big role, but there are a number of really important underlying trends also. So we have these COVID pets that were adopted and are aging. And so if you double-click into the visit growth, we actually see positive visit growth, well and non-well, for pets over five.
That's that bolus of pets coming through. We also know that as pets age, just like people, they need more care. They visit more, but they also need more care in those visits. Not only that, it turns out that pets are living longer, which is incredibly profound when you look at the data. Just over the last decade, dogs and cats are living about a year and a half, 1.5 years longer. That's about a 12% expansion in lifespan. Because they require more care as they age, that translates to a 16% or more increase in diagnostic lifetime value. Then on top of that, we're seeing an interesting trend around the mix of breeds coming into the practice. That reflects consumer choice.
Consumers are opting into breeds like the Doodles, for example, and Golden Retrievers, breeds that actually require more care, and they realize that they require more care, but this is what they want. Between the age mix, pets living longer, breed mix, all of these factors drive a higher demand for care. As we dive into our incredibly large data set of not just practice management data, but now consumer data, what we see is a very high resilience around demand for care across every single consumer economic cohort. We know it's a dynamic time, and we know that people feel pressure in the broader economy, but when they have pets, they're spending on those pets, and that's true across every economic demographic.
Would you say, though, that even with an aging pet population, are you still going to see pressure on vet office visits, but it's just about the nature of the visit is just so different than it was before? How structural is this shift in terms of you're now posting high single-digit utilization metrics. Is that durable here, or do we see things shift back to the way that vet office visits were? Where do things shake out, and is it really just a structural shift in terms of the nature of each underlying vet office visit seeing higher utilization and greater flow through those dynamics?
Yeah. The nature of the visit keeps improving in quality, and that's translated into that higher diagnostic frequency and utilization step-up that we've seen quarter after quarter. The reason why we feel highly convicted that that can keep growing is because if you just look at today, what's the average inclusion of blood work in a visit? It's about one out of five visits get blood work. Wellness visits, it's about just over one out of 10, 13% in the U.S., and it's less internationally, about a third of that. When you consider the incredibly outsized role that diagnostics plays in the visit, that's a low number. Sometimes we ask, do we have a one out of 10 problem, or do we have a nine out of 10 opportunity? Of course, we see it as a nine out of 10 opportunity.
For us, the way that we focus on that every day at IDEXX with a tremendous amount of focus, wake up thinking about our innovations, things like IDEXX Cancer Dx , what we're doing on Catalyst, paired with a large commercial organization whose job is to support the adoption and change management of those protocols and innovations in the practice. That's what translates into customers using IDEXX innovations grow faster, that sector-wide growth of wellness inclusion of 50 bps that I talked about. That's why we see this long into the future.
Given those drivers that you're calling out, without necessarily giving formal guidance, you can if you want, for 2027, but how do you think about the moving pieces as we head into 2027? Should we anticipate still sluggish vet office visits with durable price innovation drivers continuing? What would deviate from your long-term projections?
Yeah. As you highlighted, we're not providing a 2027 guidance today, and certainly we're not updating our guidance for 2026 today either. But I think the clinical visit headwind that we have seen, we've highlighted even in our initial guidance that we expected that to be a decline in 2026. It's come in slightly better than that in the first half, and we're anticipating about 1.5% declines on clinical visits in the second half as part of our guided midpoint. There's obviously a range around that dynamic. But what we're really continuing to benefit from is a lot of the building blocks that Mike highlighted. We've launched a number of new, both transformational innovations with IDEXX and Cancer Dx, but we've also continued to add new menu additions to our core platforms.
We have almost 80,000 Catalyst instruments across the globe, and we've added around five new innovation menu to that instrument install base over the last three years. So we get continued benefits of that as customers adopt these new menu benefits, whether that's cortisol or pancreatic lipase. We highlighted that we have proBNP coming here in October. So a number of new innovation, new elements that really benefit clinicians' understanding of the overall pet health, that we see rapid adoption of in that install base. So we have a number of innovation drivers that we're really continuing to be excited by, that we've publicly announced, and we have a really robust menu of options there, too. The other component that I would highlight is we've continued to invest in our commercial or our field-based employees, which are really the core customer engagement engine that we have.
In particular, we've seen strong double-digit growth in our international regions as we continue to broaden our customer base as well as just partnership, really changing behavior and mentality around how to use diagnostics globally, which is a key part of our overall strategy, to Mike's point, on expanding the utilization. A number of factors that we continue to be excited about, but when time is right, we'll continue to highlight 2027.
Mike.
There's really three ways that our innovations translate into the utilization growth that you're asking about, to kind of build on what Andrew said. When we come forward with entirely new categories like Cancer Dx, completely unmet need, we'll probably talk a little bit more about it because there's 25 million dogs out there that are at risk for cancer, and there's been no solution. That's a whole new category, and when we bring through a breakthrough technology with highly accessible pricing like we've done, we basically create all that volume, both for our customers and for IDEXX. The second type is we come into a category like cytology, where there's 150 million of these being done all around the world, and we're able to address that in a transformational way within IDEXX inVue Dx, starting out with blood morphology, ear cytology, and now fine needle aspirate.
We can take out all the manual work, a much better quality diagnostic, and we take the volume that's being done, and we enable them to do more, and then we also translate that into IDEXX volume. We're growing together there. The third way is, as Andrew mentioned, as we keep adding new menu into our existing platforms, our customers have their existing workflow, they get the benefit, and then that grows for them and for us, too. We can draw a straight line between the investments we're making in innovation and how that drives volume growth for our customers and for IDEXX.
Let's talk about innovation. You're rolling out FNA on IDEXX inVue Dx right now. IDEXX inVue Dx has tracked well above my expectations in terms of placement trends to date. What I care more about is that consumable flow through. Where do we stand now in terms of that 35- 5,500 range that you initially kind of targeted? Are you within that range with your existing install base, or do you ramp to get there? Is that inclusive of FNA as well?
Yeah. We've been exceedingly pleased with IDEXX inVue Dx, the reception to it. It's one of the most successful launches, new product introductions that we've had in the history of the company. We focus on the quality of placement. We focus a lot on that utilization number, as you know, Erin. What we're seeing is we're very comfortably within that range with the $3,500- $5,500 per instrument in recurring revenue. That's really at these very early stages, I should say, of fine needle aspirate, FNA, being rolled out, still controlled launch, on track for the end of year broad availability that we talked about. We see headroom to that. The reception has been exceptional. It hits the mark. As I was talking about cytology, every practice around the world does cytology. They have a microscope. They do it.
It's a very manual process, very technique sensitive. IDEXX inVue Dx is paradigm changing because it takes the slide out of the equation. All that manual effort and subjectivity is gone and enables a really high-quality diagnostic. In the case of FNA, you're looking for, generally, this is a dog coming in, let's say, with a lump or a bump. The question on the pet owner's mind is: Is this cancer? It's a pretty high-stakes question. Is this cancer? Today, we know that there are 12 million FNAs being done around the world, but that represents 10% or less of all of the lumps and bumps that are coming into the practice. The reason why it's so low is because it's really hard to do these. It's hard to make a slide and do all the steps, the multiple steps to stain it and dry it.
It's 25 minutes or so of work, and then you've got to read it or you send it into the lab, and that can be expensive. With IDEXX inVue Dx, it takes all that effort out. You get a real-time result right there. What we're seeing is with the customers using FNA and IDEXX inVue Dx, they're doing twice as many lumps and bumps. By the way, at an 85% lower cost. This is a great example, again, of our innovations are driving volume-based growth in the practice, transforming how care is done.
As Mike did highlight, the $3,500 - $5,500, we're in that range today, but we always said that that does include the launch menu, which was inclusive of FNA. We feel really good about where we're at with the instrument, reoccurring revenue. These are really large categories that we'll continue to ramp over time. Yet we also know that there's a number of extensible new options that we could also put on this platform in the future, and that's the way we tend to think about these innovations. They're really platforms that we can continue to innovate on. There's a really large economic value associated with this platform, and we continue to see, again, a robust innovation roadmap ahead of us.
Yeah, if you look at what we did on the Catalyst, and Erin, you know this, over a decade, we expanded the economic value of the Catalyst in our customers' hands and for us by two and a half-fold. That was a combination of menu innovation, supporting utilization, all of these things. That's exactly the type of thing that we see in the future for IDEXX inVue Dx as well.
I think we saw a 25% uplift in consumables volume for every upgrade for Catalyst. Yeah, significant. I think for FNA in particular, you're already hitting the mark where I remember at IDEXX SediVue Dx, I don't think we hit the mark right out of the gate in terms of hitting that consumables flow through. But for FNA or for IDEXX inVue Dx, you already are, even without that broader FNA launch. Why is it more of a measured launch still? It's still on track, I think, as you just said, for year-end broader launch. I guess anything else to comment on in terms of the early feedback on FNA?
Yeah. This is our standard launch process for any new platform. I think maybe the one sort of nuance here to appreciate, when we roll out, let's say, a new slide on Catalyst, customers have Catalyst, they have their workflow. Through our software, we're able to push out that new capability. They just have to order the slide, and they can use it the next day, and they love that experience. Each of the applications on IDEXX inVue Dx is like a new one of those platforms. You think about ear cytology, blood morphology, and then the third platform within a platform now is fine needle aspirate. This year alone, we've rolled out multiple, upwards of four new red cell morphologies within the blood morphology category in IDEXX inVue Dx.
Now that customers are trained on that and they're using that, we can just provide that over the software, and they love that experience, and they get all that additional value. As we're rolling out fine needle aspirate, again, it's like a new platform, so we want to make sure we nail it, that we get the customer experience right, the training right, all the components. This also has the opportunity for customers, should they want, because again, high stakes cancer, if they want one of our pathologists to look at it, they just press a button, and the image is usually just sitting there already for our pathologist to take a look. So we want to make sure we nail all of those things, because the long-term value creation tail on these is very compelling.
Just like we do whenever we roll out a new platform, we have this controlled launch process where we make sure we nail all those details. That is what our customers expect from IDEXX, so that is what we do.
Presumably all the future platform additions to IDEXX inVue Dx would be in a similar format in terms
Yep
of being able to quickly onboard.
That is exactly right.
those and would be upside to your $100 million in consumable flow through.
Yes
potentially.
Yeah. As we continue to expand the platform, we think we have a lot of headroom to grow it.
Okay. How are you going to launch two boxes at the same time? In terms of rolling out also MultiQ Dx. MultiQ Dx, we don't know what it does yet, but presumably is the best way to characterize it similar to IDEXX inVue Dx in that it's really replacing a lot of manual tasks? Is that the right way to think about it, and how should we think about the rollout? I think we'll hear more at VMX in January.
Yeah. We announced we're having a special event at VMX in January in Orlando. We're very excited about that, and we'll share more about MultiQ Dx and what it does and the category that it's in. Today I won't go deeper other than just to make clear that it's in a category of diagnostics that is very important at the point of care, and it's totally complementary to today what we do with our VetLab suite, and we fully expect that it will be paradigm changing in that category. MultiQ Dx, just like IDEXX inVue Dx, just like Catalyst, just like IDEXX ProCyte One, is designed and manufactured at our state-of-the-art facilities in Westbrook, Maine. We'll talk more about it in VMX. I think the nature of what it replaces and all those things varies from instrument to instrument and category to category.
I'll probably put it there, and we'll talk more at VMX.
I would highlight, though, again, we have a whole suite of analyzers and reference labs and software all designed to really work with the same customer base. So our whole commercial model and the investments that we make towards our commercial model are really designed to continue to be able to sell that whole suite. It's not one instrument or another instrument. We're really looking to bring this comprehensive package and partner with our customers across the globe. And if you look at some of the metrics we've shared, we've done a really nice job at continuing to bridge those categories where a single customer isn't using just VetLab or reference labs. They're using both, and they're using the broader suite.
That's a key part of how we tend to think about working with our customers, having them believe in diagnostics, and then helping them find ways to incorporate that into their practice on a medically relevant basis. So a key part of our commercial model and the investments we make are really targeted around that, and it's part of what leads to the type of growth profile that we've had.
Okay. Yeah, I want to get to that because especially with IDEXX Cancer Dx. But separate from MultiQ or sort of separate, I guess, fecal is still an in-house gap in terms of your offering. How do you think about the current reference laboratory offering? Is it sufficient for what you need today?
Well, we have an incredible offering in our reference labs, IDEXX Fecal Dx antigen. We just added pin and tapeworms to that this year, and that is on a string of innovations and expansions to that platform that we have made over the years. We know that it is superior to what has been out there in terms of fecal floats. It finds up to 2x more infections. Because it is looking for the proteins rather than trying to find fragments of eggs and other types of debris, it is the only approach that is actually correlated back with actual infection versus things that could be masking or masked as infection. It finds more, it finds it earlier in the process and our customers really rely on that.
It is one of the most adopted areas, and when you look at wellness diagnostics, we focus a lot on blood work, but incorporating fecal testing into wellness is a well-established pattern in North America, with a lot of headroom still to grow there, and then we think opportunity around the world as well.
Okay. IDEXX Cancer Dx. Is it right to assume that IDEXX Cancer Dx is driving meaningful market share gains across the reference lab for you? I think you gave some stats around 20% of the IDEXX Cancer Dx customers are not actually primary reference lab customers at all. Well, one, why aren't they? That should be, I would think, an initiative initially when you are going in there with IDEXX Cancer Dx and how quickly can you convert a lot of those customers, and it seems like this could be a meaningful share gain driver for you.
Yeah. We are just exceptionally happy with what we are seeing with IDEXX Cancer Dx. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, this has been a gaping hole in terms of the portfolio of options out there, particularly for general practitioners, also for specialists. Maybe just to frame that, I mentioned 25 million dogs are at risk for cancer around the world. one in four dogs will be diagnosed with cancer. I have lost two dogs in my family to cancer. In both cases, by the time we knew what was going on, it was too late to take action. It is heartbreaking, but that is an all too common story amongst pet owners, and there just has not been a tool set. With 25 million dogs at risk, it turns out in the entire developed world, there are less than 600 board-certified veterinary oncologists.
There's just no way to meet the demand for care in oncology and cancer without arming general practitioners with tools like this. Cancer Dx is a total breakthrough from a testing platform standpoint. We rolled out with lymphoma. It can find lymphoma up to eight months before there are any clinical signs with incredible performance, 99%+ specificity, 79% sensitivity. Performance that matches the most sophisticated liquid biopsy tests in human medicine that cost upwards of what, $800, $900, $1,000 and take a week or two weeks to get results back. This is a test that we intentionally priced at $15, one, five, $15, and an equivalent price around the world when it's paired with a blood work panel into the IDEXX reference labs.
The strategy really is we want to make sure that dogs are getting access to the care they need, and then we understand the emotional pull of this is one of the most common questions that comes into the practice. The strategy is to support broader adoption of blood work with that. That's what we're seeing happen. I mentioned at our Investor Day and on the Q2 earnings call that we had a large corporate group in Australia, went all in on including Cancer Dx themselves at no additional charge as part of their senior dog wellness program, and it's driving higher enrollments and higher utilization. I'm really excited to share now that we've had another large corporate group, this one in Europe, that's made the same decision to do that.
At Investor Day, we announced that we're expanding Cancer Dx from lymphoma to now be a multi-cancer panel, adding mast cell tumor and hemangiosarcoma. These are three of the most common and most dangerous cancers, covering 40% of all the cancers in dogs. By the end of this year, we'll have all three of those, and we're sticking with the $15 price point. When I shared that recently with one of our partners, a CEO, I think his jaw hit the table when he heard that. We're excited, and we want to make sure that we're supporting accessibility to this, and that's driving all the interest, Erin, back to your question.
20% of the customers on Cancer Dx are customers who have been using somebody else as their primary reference lab, but they're breaking their protocol and breaking whatever agreements they have because they are putting their patients first, and they want to have access to this innovation. We certainly are seeing really high levels of new customer growth in the reference labs around the world that tie back to many things, the service level that we provide, things like Fecal Dx, the broader platform. Cancer Dx is absolutely contributing to that. 70% of the runs, by the way, are being done with blood work in the IDEXX reference lab. The strategy of tying it to blood work pull-through, we know is working. We're in the early stages of this.
We're going to make cancer history in pet care, and you can tell I'm a little passionate about this because it's personal for a lot of us and we're really focused on this huge opportunity ahead of us.
You're making some commercial investments into the second half. What exactly are those? What does that entail? And then also, when do you take a step back and think that obviously you're seeing the growth to support it, but just stop spending and let it drop through in terms of cash flow?
Well, we see a really, really reliable return on our investments into expanding our commercial model. We've done something like 16 of these expansions in the last five years. To your point, we shared on our Q2 call and Investor Day that we're advancing incremental investment in the back half of this year, expanding in four countries, Spain, France, South Korea, and also Canada, as well as some targeted additions here in the U.S. We're doing that for two reasons, really. One, it supports this broad-based portfolio of innovations that we're bringing forward. Tied to that is a deep understanding that when we're in the practice, when we're present with our customers, working with them side by side, that supports higher adoption of these innovations.
The innovation, whether it's an instrument or a test in the lab, the way it works better together, as Andrew described, ultimately comes back to incorporating that into protocols in the practice, getting the workflow right, making sure that they've thought through. They set the price, but that they've thought through it correctly, and that that's all into the practice management software, and all of that has to be tied together, and that's what our commercial team does really. They're change management agents supporting our customers, and we see that higher level of adoption and pull-through when we're close to them. We've done that in North America and different parts of the world.
We're not yet at that kind of level of loading that we want to be at, so we continue to find those opportunities, even in North America, kind of tuck in and get closer to customers. As I mentioned, we see a very reliable return on these investments, so we're going to keep doing them.
Yeah.
Yeah. To Mike's point, I think the commercial model itself really starts with the opportunity that we see in front of us. We see significant opportunity within the sector to continue to expand the use of diagnostics. As we look at each of these individual regions, it comes back to customer proximity to spend more time with our customers and really help them understand how to use this, share best practices, incorporate it into their clinics effectively. So we want to make these investments. It really helps support the top line growth algorithm that we have, and it's reinforcing, where we can continue to deliver really strong operating margins while investing back into the business. This year, our guide is for over 32% operating margins on a comparable basis, and I think that alone is quite a solid number.
But again, we've committed to the longer term 50 - 100 basis points of average annual improvement over time. So it's something where we try to find this balance of continuing to invest back into the sector in an appropriate way between R&D, research and development, as well as our commercial model, to fuel that long-term opportunity, while still delivering really strong operating margins, as well as free cash flow generation that we deploy back into both our business as well as back to our shareholders.
Okay. Two things then kind of related to that. One, I guess anything to think about in terms of quarterly progression that we should be aware of into the second half from a modeling perspective, and then two, just capital deployment. You're obviously investing significantly in AI as a force multiplier for you from a diagnostics perspective, and new technology that you're launching on that front, too. So how do we think about are you where you need to be from an M&A perspective in terms of do you need to go out and buy more in terms of technology assets or otherwise?
Why don't I take some of the question around technology and AI, and then Andrew, you can kind of round it out and talk about capital deployment. We see a tremendous opportunity. When we go into the practice, when I go into the practice, there's still a lot of friction, the kind of complexity of the caseload, the rising demands from clients. All of those things factor into it's hard to do the work in the practice. Then also when we talked about things like blood work inclusion, we've seen in our own software how very simple things like including prompts in our pet owner engagement software, Vello, prior to the visit around, "Would you be interested in blood work in the visit?" Then sharing that to the doctor drive incredibly outsized improvement in inclusion and receptivity in the visit to doing those diagnostics.
Over and again and again, we see how software and configuring software and the addition of AI personalization has a really meaningful role in driving expanded care and diagnostics. Customers using our software relative to using competitive on-prem have about a 500 basis point higher level of blood work inclusion based on all those things. We see this as still early days to do that well and with AI adding personalization, automation of workflows. We talked about our investments into clinical decision support and providing real-time intelligence tools, and we certainly are open to innovations outside IDEXX as well when they fit the mission. But our overall convergence of software and diagnostics and AI comes back to that core mission that we have of driving expanded care. Then I think we're almost out of time, but maybe you can hit the capital.
Yeah. Just echoing what Mike highlighted. We have an ongoing active process where we're always looking outside our four walls for assets that really fit our themes and our principles as a company. When we find those, we're willing to make that type of investment. But it really starts with our organic growth strategy. Those would be to help augment and continue to strengthen our asset base overall. Then excess capital we tend to redeploy back to our own shareholders through share buybacks.
Quarterly progression?
In terms of quarterly progression, again, we're not updating any guidance today, but on the Q2 call, we did highlight that we expect at midpoint revenues in line with the implied second half range. From an operating margin perspective, on a comparable basis, we anticipated 20 - 50 basis points of expansion in the quarter. So that gives you a sense for how we're thinking about the progression quarterly.
Awesome. Great. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Erin. Thank you.