Hi, good afternoon, good morning, depending on where you are in the world. I appreciate your listening in. I'm Dave Windley with Jefferies Healthcare Equity Research, and we're here at our 2023 London Healthcare Conference, day two. I'm very pleased to have with us and to introduce Inotiv, which is a early development-focused discovery and preclinical, clinical, excuse me, development-focused CRO. And the company's CEO, Bob Leasure, is here to discuss Inotiv with us. I'm gonna turn it over to Bob, who's gonna cover some very high-level commentary about the company, and then we'll try to focus on some Q&A. So I'll turn it over to Bob. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, David. I think we have a slide presentation today. We'll just hit on a couple key points to this, leave more time for Q&A, and I think the slide is on the website, obviously, so we don't need to go through in detail. Do I have a... Okay, I see it. So Inotiv is a fairly new company. It's about four, five years old, and as you can see, over the last four, five years, we grew fairly rapidly. And in particular, in 2022, that was a culmination of about 14 different acquisitions. In addition, we've added about eight additional services we've been adding. So going forward, you can see in 2023, what we're really focusing on is how do we become one company? We were 14 companies.
Are we 14 individual companies, or are we really one company acting as one? So a lot of 2023 has been focused on how do we become one company. So we, how do we optimize these sites and integrate? We acquired over those times, 35 sites. We are consolidating down to 25. So we've now, as of today, completed the closure of 10 of the 11 sites, and I think, Monday we announced we have one more that we're in the process of closing. I think we've moved that scheduled time now to be done at the end of Q2 of fiscal 2023 versus Q3, and that is, here in England, the last two sites to consolidate.
In addition, over that time, we bought a lot of facilities who may have some deferred maintenance or what I refer to as lifestyle businesses, and they needed size in order to be able to compete and take advantage of the scale that you need to make money in this business. So during that time, we also completed expansions and so of some of our facilities and some services, so we could improve the margins, improve the capacities of our sites. Then through that, we also, as I said, we've added all the services so we can be a full-service CRO, and then we added the research models to the business. So you can't be a CRO without access and do safety assessment without access to research models.
During COVID, we identified that access to those research models, specifically large animals, could be a barrier to our doing safety assessment work. So we were able to acquire and become a research model provider. But basically, key things for us right now then, as I've outlined, the right size and the infrastructure, becoming one company, making our strategic investments, then evolving into how do we grow our market share, sales, market growth. We are a client-focused provider. We like to sell with science and with our scientists. And as far as our discovery and safety assessment business, we focus on the biotech market, where our science is appreciated, leading with the discovery and through the safety assessment. The research model, we do sell to other CROs, universities, government, and pharma.
We eventually now this year are focusing on also rebranding everything under the Inotiv brand, which will allow us to continue to cross-sell to many of the, many of the clients that we picked up over the, over the last 24 months. So 24, 36 months, we picked up 3,500 clients. How do we become one company and cross-sell all those services? Animal welfare has become a really critical issue in our industry and for us in particular. So I'll give you an example. Over this time, we have added people. We've added a lot of training. 10 of the sites we closed were breeding facilities. We significantly invested in those we have left, in the infrastructure and the training and the people, and we have more than doubled the amount of vets that we had two years ago.
So we've been able to really, I think, make a significant improvement in our infrastructure, our talent, our people, our training, and animal welfare. Workplace satisfaction is, again, very critical. There's a lot of training involved and a lot of time, and so having low turnover is very important. Two or three years ago, we had, you know, acquired companies that had 30% turnover. Right now, we're down in the low teens, single digits in some places. I'm very proud of the ability to... And that's usually just in the first year of somebody being on board. And then over the last year, we've been able to start making a lot of improvements on supply chain synergies. Just a little bit of where we are here.
31% DSA and 69% RMS. Our DSA business is growing faster than the RMS, so we'll continue to see that grow. As I said before, this is a little bit of our market, the CROs, large pharma, academic. 15% of what we're doing is right now in Europe. With the changes we recently made in Europe, you know, I'm starting to see some really good growth opportunities here in Europe, not only for our research model business, but also for our discovery business and crossover selling. So we're gonna have our first DSA salesperson and really selling discovery in Europe, starting just this month. Our annual revenue last year was $548 million, and we are, you know, a middle market player here.
There are a couple billion-dollar players, and there are very many small independent service providers, I call them, maybe running lifestyle businesses. But what we're looking at be a very high touch, service-oriented, company, and that's how we try to differentiate ourselves. Keys to our profitability, improving market now and going forward, improving market share. A lot. At one point, we were doing a lot. As we had a program, we, we sell entire programs. We were outsourcing a lot. We've been able to bring a lot of that in over the last 24 months. Completing our site optimization program this year, it's gonna be great to be able to focus on sales and market and less on the site optimization program.
So I think and leverage our cross-selling opportunities, which are significant, and then now we're in a position we can significantly reduce some of the corporate overhead costs. To just give you an idea, at one point, we put these companies together, we had 220 software programs. Eventually, we hope to be down to, over the course of another year, 120 software programs. Making great progress. Site optimization, this is a little bit of what we're going through here, and these are some of the sites that we have closed. And again, this is on the website if you want to look at it in detail. Two stars are the. You can see what we have, critical places we have left in Europe.
A lot of, a lot of investments over the last three or four years in our business to develop these services, develop this capacity. So $78 million between 2018 and 2022, and we were a fairly small company at the time. So you can see we've been building this for a while. Another, year to date through June, we are at $21 million, and I think as you... These are some of the new services that we are actually expanded into through that to give us a full service provider. This is really showing a little bit of the CapEx that we invested over the years as a percent of revenue.
And you can see in 2022, in early 2022, you can see the market starting to change, biotech funding change, and the, and the access to capital was starting to get more expensive. So we, we did pivot then, and we've significantly reduced our CapEx needs. And fortunately, we can do that and focus on cash flow. And so we brought those down in 2022 to 6%. I think year to date in, as of June, this was 4.9%, and I think going forward, we'll probably be able to reduce that to make sure we're not in a position where we have to, to raise any capital to, to fund our business. Results. Very quickly, again, 40%-50% of annualized capacity increase with DSA business.
This is significant for us because there's a lot of leverage in this market for us. So this is coming off a 2022 base. It was $100, say, $160 million. I think we have the capacity now at, after this month, as we're opening up our final sites, to probably run this up to $240-$250 million in sales. That's strong capacity for us. So I think we can maintain some growth if we can gain some market share. In the on the DSA, on the. And that is the really the DSA business. On the research model business and diet business, our site optimization program would probably take out a little over $20 million in overhead and in cost.
So looking forward to seeing those margins start to improve here going into 2024. And I think we'll probably also see some reduction, mainly in our legal costs and our corporate overhead spend into 2024. But I think, the DSA growth and margins and the growth in sales and the costs coming out of these others put us in a really good position for going into 2024. Supply update. We get often asked about the NHP market, and so just want to give a quick update. We are, and I have said in the past, we are significantly expanding our supply base outside of Cambodia. It's not an easy thing to do. We are requiring a lot of testing, a lot of auditing of the company, the organization, the records, the NHPs themselves.
It may take nine months to qualify and get somebody ready to, before we can. But I think that we're seeing now it's about 1 year into that process, nine months into that process, and we're starting to see some of the benefits. And I think that, across the board in the U.S., we may see, probably be able to start seeing more NHPs come into the, into the U.S. than we had before. Cash balance, this is as of the end of June. You know, we've significantly improved, but we're not using a revolver today. At the end of June, there was $22 million in cash. I think if you was at this conference this time last year, I think we would probably ended last year with $18 million in cash and $15 million in a revolver.
So, right now, we're not using a revolver. We have $22 million in cash. We've been able to focus a little bit more on the cash through our operations and managing working capital, and I think we're fine as far as our liquidity. So, again, an experienced management team, but one that has been together probably now only two years, some of the people more recently. But as we come together, learn to work together, making a lot of great progress. So, very proud of what this team has been able to do.
I think, as I would, I would go back and say, and I, I won't go through the appendix there here, but about a year ago, I was here, it was a year ago today, matter of fact, that we got the Cambodian notice of the Cambodian indictment. I can even tell you what time of day that was, if you want. But it... And it did change our year, and we had a very big decision to make a year ago, knowing that, that, that we were selling NHPs, and we had a lot of margins from NHPs, and I think that concerned a lot of people and concerned investors, and I, I appreciate that. We had to make a very quick decision not to use our NHPs until we could confirm that they were purpose-bred. That was the first big decision.
The second big decision we had to make last year, I think, was: are we gonna continue to invest aggressively in our business and do the site optimizations? When you're shutting down these sites, that also costs money, especially these places in Europe. It's a lot of severance, a lot of moving, 'cause we weren't losing sales, we were moving this work to our existing locations, and before we could move it, we had to enhance locations. So it was, it was an investment of capital and an investment in severance and in closures and, and things of that nature.
We made the decision, and at the time, we also needed to manage cash, and people were worried, "How are you going to manage the NHP situation, and invest in the company, and shut down 11 facilities, and make sure you don't run out of cash?" And I understand their concern. We made the decision to go forward aggressively with the plan and accelerate it. You know, great team, I think we come out a year later, we now can achieve the margins as a result of the optimization and the closures. We did manage our cash extremely well during the year. I think it's something that can continue to improve. Really proud of what we have done and what we're setting up to do in 2024.
So with that, I will ask Dave if he has any questions, please.
Excellent, excellent. Thank you. If the group here has any questions, feel free to let me know. I'll start with Bob, just maybe your characterization, if you could, of the demand environment that you see. So looking at my model, your bookings sequentially improved a little bit in 2Q to your 2Q to fiscal 3Q. There's been a, you know, a lot of turbulence in the broader life sciences market. How would you describe what you are seeing at your company?
Well, we are a very small player in a very big industry, so us gaining market share makes a big difference to us. We have seen our safety assessment facility remain full all throughout medical. So for genetic toxicology, our safety assessment, especially for large animals, we've remained at fairly full levels all the way through. We've seen the backlogs go from 24 months down to 12, and I think that's probably healthy because we've seen our predictability go up quite a bit. So it's interesting, over the last two years, what we did see is an increase in backlog and a decrease in the conversion rate of our backlog on a quarterly basis. But then over the last year, what we've seen is a kind of a decrease in the backlog.
At one point, we were converting 35% of our backlog. It went down to 25%, now it's going back towards 35% again. So probably enhanced some predictability. We also are seeing a lot of cancellations because that backlog was so far out. As we've shrunk the backlog, I think we'll start to shrink, and it's not as far out, I think we'll shrink the cancellations. And I think that, you know, is something we're gonna begin to see. Another thing that way. I said at the end of Q3 and our Q3 release is that we had seen this year a decrease in our discovery sales year-over-year.
I believe I said in my Q3 release discussion that we had started to see a little bit of reversal in the discovery requests for discovery awards and discovery quotes and awards, starting in early July and late June. I believe that continues also. So we are seeing some movement. Now, is that we also built capacity in the DSA. We built capacity recently in medical device. We built capacity in Genetic Toxicology and Reproductive Toxicology. So these are things that before I will tell you that we didn't really even have salespeople for discovery. We now has initiated building a sales force discovery last March. We're now just initiating putting a discovery salesperson in Europe. We'll probably have three or four salespeople here by the end of the year in discovery.
We've also grown our safety assessment group. We just recently added somebody for the chemical and ag industry, and we just recently added somebody in the medical device industry. I would tell you, a year ago, nine months ago, we didn't have anybody in discovery, chemical and ag, or medical device because we were out of capacity and our scientists were selling. So I think that we've added that capacity. I think we're hopefully, we can pick up market share, and I'm pleased with the momentum that we have to date. But not lost upon me, we do watch the biotech funding and do look at those reports and understand where we are in the market. But again, we're a smart player, and what can we do to improve our market share?
You mentioned you, you're expecting that decline in cancellations as the backlog gets smaller and gets perhaps firmer because it's in your term visibility. Are you seeing the cancellation activity moderate already, or that's still, you think, in front of you?
I think, yeah. I don't want to get too forward-looking here, but I think, you know, it's too early to say. I mean, it may be moderating, but I don't know. I think it's too early to say that's a trend. It can, you know, it can moderate for a couple of months, that doesn't mean it's permanent. But I just think people are now booking things knowing that they need to go forward because they're ready to go forward, instead of booking things knowing hoping they can go forward in two years. And people are a lot more secure about what they're doing.
We also are doing a much better job of communicating with our clients and making sure we understand what they're going to be doing and what they may cancel or not cancel, because it's critical to our scheduling.
How is of the business that you're booking and seeing coming through, how is the pricing on that? So, competitors that are also seeing their backlogs decline. You talked about adding significant capacity in different areas of the business. How would you compare pricing today versus where it was, say, six months or 12 months ago?
Oh, I would say that it's competitive. That being said, I think you know, it's a very fixed-cost business, a lot of fixed costs, as you know. As we have grown, I think we've been able to compete and I think see our gross margins improve. So, to date, I'm not worried about the pricing, where it is today. I think it works well for us. But it is competitive, and we can compete.
From a mix of business standpoint, you commented that DSA is growing faster than RMS. I think part of that is just the dynamics around the NHP supply chain. Within your RMS business, how do you expect the mix of business, or how is it evolving, and how do you expect it to evolve between small animal and large animal?
Large animals depend on our ability, and as NHPs, will be dependent on our ability to source and improve our sourcing. At the last couple quarters, I think I mentioned our Q3 call, our volume was down in terms of... Our dollars were fine, but our volume of sales of NHPs, numbers were down 40% over prior years. And as we improve our supply, I think that could also recover some next year. As far as the small animals, obviously, we just took down 10 breeding facilities, and the facilities we have left are much better, much more efficient. And I've recently, you know, been able to tour them, and I think there's a lot of...
We have a little momentum right now in the small animal business. That being said, I don't think it's a growing industry, the small animal business. I think what's growing there is the genetically engineered models, the service business. That's what we're really focusing on, and we've been able to improve some customer contracts lately. But I don't think that the small animal business has the growth opportunity. I think that's the important thing there for us is to eliminate the cost to really improve those margins.
Just looking over my shoulder here. On the NHP part, you, acknowledging your last answer, depending on the ability to source, you've tried to expand your sourcing networks. Maybe talk about that first, and then I want to follow up with your sourcing strategy. So first, how... Maybe talk a little more detail about how you've been able to expand sourcing networks.
Well, I think the barrier to entry into this industry has gotten much, much larger just in the short time I've been there. We have people in China and Vietnam, Cambodia, and all throughout Asia looking at what is going on. So we want to know what we're doing, what other people are doing, what farms are out there, who they're selling to. And then it's what are the governments doing? What's our government doing? What's China doing? What are the governments in those other countries doing? And then what are the regulations? And then you know, what is the ownership? You know, and then auditing, and then very thoroughly auditing, and then testing, to some degree, the NHPs.
And then, once you set up a contract, how do you quarantine, and how do you make sure that you're being very safe and secure? That is a long process and very involved, to visit the farms, to get to know everybody. But I think we got a very good team doing that. I'm really pleased with the progress they've made. We do have more suppliers today than we did before. We do have more sourcing than we did before. But we're going to continue to be very careful. And I think one of the things that's important, the world market has not changed. The world market is still growing, and the world market is taking Cambodians. Only we're not taking Cambodians.
The world market is still expanding in terms of capacity, and in the U.S. is where we had the shortage, until we could figure out how to do a better job buying from the world market and reduce our dependency on Cambodia.
Right, and presumably, like, the Cambodia, as a country and the largest supplier, as an individual supplier, were a big portion of the global volume, I think. And so their, I guess, theirs are being redirected. But in terms of... I guess, the question that is burning for me is, these other markets, be it Indonesia, Vietnam, you know, China has largely been shut off, but how much source is available in those places since we know that the reproductive rates in those animals are low?
Well, it will not be enough to replace, still for us, what we had two years ago, but it could be better than it was in the last nine months.
On the cost takeouts, the $20 million is a familiar number. You've talked about that number before. It seems like that's consistent. I think you said you'll begin to see that come out and see margins expand in fiscal 2024. Just maybe a little bit more clarity on timing is... I think you've taken a lot of those costs out, but they're not benefiting the P&L yet. Is that the right way to think about it?
Well, they didn't... We didn't see a lot of the benefits as of the end of June.
Right.
Okay, I think we're probably about 83, 80, 75, 80% through, and I think the rest of those will come out as we complete the Hillcrest expansion, and then move Blackthorn into Hillcrest, and then we have some additional contracts moving into Hillcrest. So I think those will be completed. You know, we'll start to see those results in Q3 of 2024. So but, a lot of the other things are in place, and I think as we said in the release made a couple of days ago, we now have we had extra facilities that we've now been able to sell as a result of completing those closures, and they, those facilities are now under contract, and some have already sold.
How would you, So coming back to a little bit different angle on demand, I think most of your client base is biotech. Have you, and you've, you've mentioned adding a number of salespeople, are you directing them in a different portion of the client audience?
Very well. We've added salespeople in discovery, as I said. And then we've added a medical device salesperson, which we didn't have, and then we just added recently somebody to sell the ag in the chemical market, which for Genetic Toxicology, Reproductive Toxicology, and some of those sites is, you know, in North Carolina, that is... They can do a really nice job in those markets. We had explored those markets before, and we had been selling those markets. We just didn't have a salesperson committed to selling into those markets. So I think those are opportunities for us.
Asked about pricing, asked about discovery. What about your ability? So, in terms of NHP activity in your DSA business, you talked about that being pretty small and that your DSA, I'm sorry, your NHP... I misspoke on that. NHP activity in your DSA business, if I didn't say that correctly, your imports, even as they've been impacted by the regulation of NHPs, has still been enough to supply your internal DSA, NHP activity-
Yes, we have-
-cannot expand.
We have more than enough to take care of our own internal needs at this time. And we have good sourcing to take care of many of our customer issues. We've actually also expanded our customer base through this period. So we're expanding our supplier and our customer base. And one of the things that's much different right now today than where we were a year ago with the NHP business is last year, we did have a lot of NHP margins, and we didn't, we were not getting the margins yet from the small animal business, the diet business, and the DSA business. And we needed to make these transformations through the year to be able to enhance those margins.
If I talk about those margins, you look at those numbers, and we go from, I think, 165, 160, 165. We gave guidance towards the DSA business being $180 million this year, and I hope to ramp, move that up to closer to $200 million next year. If you look at that growth and you realize that we're gonna go from the mid-35% to the high 30s% in margins, and then you take out that cost, you can see that there's a pretty significant improvement in margin dollars from those transformational issues. That will also reduce our dependency on the NHPs. So it's great if the NHP margins stay the same, but if they don't, I don't think, you know, I think that we're gonna be fine without it.
Right now, you know, as we continue to improve our supply base and improve our customer base, you know, those are things that we will try to maintain. We did a good job of that last year, but I would like to reduce our dependency on those margin dollars, and therefore, that's why it was important we improve the small animal business, the diet business, and the DSA business.
Got it. I think that probably takes us to time. So-
Thank you very much.
Thank you.