Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (TMO)
NYSE: TMO · Real-Time Price · USD
448.08
-1.29 (-0.29%)
May 22, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT - Market open
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Investor Day 2026

May 20, 2026

Rafael Tejada
VP of Investor Relations, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2020. Let me begin by covering the agenda for today's session. Marc Casper, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, will begin with a company overview. We will transition to the company strategy section of the presentation led by Marc, Gianluca Pettiti, Mike Shafer, and Jim Meyer. We will take a short break towards the end of the company strategy section and then return to hear a few examples of our growth strategy in action led by Mike Shafer. After that, we will transition the presentation over to Jim Meyer and learn more about our exceptional financial outlook. After Jim's presentation, we will open up the session to Q&A from the audience and then conclude today's event.

Before we begin, let me refer you to the safe harbor slide, which contains additional details about our safe harbor and non-GAAP disclosures. Please note that certain remarks made by the presenters today, as well as some of the language in the presentation today, may contain forward-looking statements as well as non-GAAP financial disclosures. Let's begin with a company highlighting Thermo Fisher Scientific, and then we'll turn over the presentation to Marc Casper.

Speaker 15

Science moves the world forward. At Thermo Fisher Scientific, we help make that progress possible. Every day, our customers take on some of the world's biggest challenges, from developing life-saving medicines to ensuring the safety of our food, water, and environment. Our customers seek us out because we're the trusted partner behind that work. We combine global scale, leading technologies, and deep expertise to help ours move faster, make smarter decisions, and bring solutions to market with confidence. From early discovery to full-scale production, we simplify complexity so our customers can focus on what matters most: results. Our connected platforms and AI-enabled capabilities turn data into insight and insight into action, accelerating innovation at every step. As science advances, so do we, expanding our capabilities, investing in innovation, and strengthening our position at the center of growing and essential industries.

When our customers succeed, they don't just move science forward, they create healthier lives, a cleaner environment, and a safer world. That's what drives our success today and into the future.

Operator

Please welcome to the stage Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Marc Casper.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Good morning, everyone, welcome to our Investor Day. It's great to be with you here in New York and with the many that are signed on virtually. What I would like to do is start by thanking the members of our Board of Directors that are here with us today, as they have been in all the years past, as well as the members of the management team, for their tireless work to create value for all of our stakeholders. We're excited for the day. We're going to give you an update on the company, then we look forward to the discussion at the end of the session. In terms of where I want to start, really to give you an overview of the company, as Raf said, then we'll turn to the strategy. With Thermo Fisher Scientific, everything starts with our mission.

It's our purpose as an organization. That mission is profound. We enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. That inspires all 125,000 colleagues to bring their best every day because of the importance of the work that our customers do. When you click down a level into what that really means from each of those elements of enabling our customers to make the world a healthier, cleaner, and safer place, from a healthier perspective, our pharmaceutical and biotech customers work closely with us because we're accelerating the time to bring life-saving therapies to the patients that so desperately need them, leveraging our bioproduction, clinical research, and clinical development and manufacturing capabilities. From a cleaner perspective, our technologies ensure that the water supply and the food supply is clean for us to be able to consume.

Our LC-MS, or liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry technologies, are used ubiquitously in those applications. From a safer perspective, you see here a picture of our TruNarc Analyzer, a handheld spectroscopy instrument. What it's used for is to determine illicit drugs on the street to help law enforcement, in a safe way, stop crime and ultimately protect society. These types of examples, there are tens of thousands of them every day of what we're working with our customers on, ultimately make a huge difference in society and creates a great responsibility as a company to be our very best.

Investor Day this year. As you know, you've heard me say in the past, we truly love this day. It's a day for us to talk about our objectives, our future, and how we're shaping the company. The takeaways for today, there are 4 main takeaways. The first of which is we're an incredibly well-positioned industry leader. We have leading businesses that benefit the company's scale and depth of combined capabilities. We serve attractive and improving end markets, powered by strong long-term fundamentals. We actively manage the company, here to deliver outstanding financial performance and create a very compelling outlook. We do that by 3 things: our proven growth strategy that enables our customer success and ultimately allows us to deliver share gain, by driving significant productivity and operational excellence through our PPI business system, and through our tremendous value creation through our capital deployment approach.

Finally, we'll discuss AI at a fair level of depth today. We'll do that and show how AI is going to benefit science and ultimately our industry, that we're uniquely positioned to win because of AI, and we're actively deploying AI within our company to strengthen our own execution. A very important part of our agenda today. Our company overview. On one slide, we're the world leader in serving science. Our customers know us for our leading brands. They also know us for our industry-leading scale, $45 billion in revenue, 125,000 colleagues, $1.4 billion of R&D investment into our product businesses every year.

They see us for our leading innovative technologies, our deep applications expertise, as well as the comprehensive Biopharma Services offering, how we are able to reach them through our commercial reach around the world, be their premier productivity partner, and then we're constantly adding new capabilities to strengthen how we work with our customers. Ultimately, they see us as their trusted partner, and we'll bring that to life this morning. Finally, it's all about outstanding execution. Our PPI business system really allows us to execute in every environment incredibly well. When you look at the revenue profile of the company, it's incredibly attractive. We have leadership in attractive end markets, and we'll spend some time on that today. Pharmaceutical and biotech represents 57% of our revenue. Our other 3 end markets evenly split the balance, industrial and applied, academic and government, and diagnostics and healthcare.

We have a very strong recurring revenue mix, with 84% of our revenue derived from services and consumables. We have an unparalleled commercial engine allowing us to be a truly global company and the largest domestic company in every major market around the world. When you look at our business and you look at our segments, they're complementary to each other, and they are industry leaders in their own right. Life Science Solutions, a leading portfolio serving the bioproduction, life science research, and clinical markets. Analytical Instruments is leading technologies to enable scientific breakthroughs and solve the world's most difficult analytical challenges. Specialty Diagnostics, leadership and cost-effectively improving patient care. Our largest segment, Laboratory Products and Biopharma Services, enabling the biotech and pharmaceutical industry with our leading laboratory products, clinical research, development, and manufacturing services.

This combination of products, services, and expertise are highly valued by our customers and allowed us to deliver share gain. When you look at those segments and the major businesses within each of them, in terms of life science solutions, you know us for our leading bioscience reagents business, as well as our leading bioproduction business, and you'll hear more about bioproduction today. In analytical instruments, chromatography and mass spectrometry, and we can't wait for the American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference early next month to showcase our amazing technologies. Electron microscopy plays a critical role empowering the semiconductor industry. In specialty diagnostics, high-value diagnostic products to meet some of the most challenging diseases, very strong position in serving the transplant diagnostic market, autoimmune diseases within the immunodiagnostics is a couple of examples that we represent in this segment.

In Laboratory Products and Biopharma Services, a $24 billion segment, here we have our Clinical Research, our Pharma Services, as well as our Research and Safety Market Channel businesses. When you look at those segments and the complementary nature of them, they truly benefit from the total company scale and depth of capabilities. As you see the strategy unfold this morning, you'll see how our businesses benefit from our high-impact innovation, being the trusted partner to our customers, our unparalleled commercial engine around the world, further strengthened by our capital deployment strategy and underpinned by great execution because of PPI. As a company, we're focused on creating value for all of our stakeholders. When you look at our stakeholders from a customer perspective, we are their trusted partner to accelerate their innovation and advance their productivity.

From a colleague perspective, this is a great place to have a mission-driven career. We have incredibly loyal colleagues around the world that do great work every day. From a community perspective, we're good stewards in our communities, right? We're focused on enhancing them, giving back, and improving the world for current and future generations. Finally, from a shareholder perspective, an outstanding financial track record and outlook for value creation. When you look at that from a financial performance perspective, we have a proven track record of delivering excellent financial results. Over the past 10 years, we've delivered double-digit growth in revenue, adjusted earnings per share, and free cash flow. That is something that over the different periods of time, you would see that similar trend of just very strong historical growth in the company and delivering for our shareholders.

When I think about our focus in terms of the financial areas, the two things that we're consistently focused on in terms of delivering exceptional performance is delivering, one, strong and consistent share gain, right? That drives organic growth. Whatever the environment is that we're living in, what we can control is the share gain that we deliver, and we have an exceptional track record of doing that, and that will be our continued focus going forward. Second, to deliver excellent adjusted EPS growth, and that's been a hallmark of our focus over the last 25 years. 2026 is the year of our anniversary, our 20th anniversary since the creation of Thermo Fisher Scientific. I thought I would take a minute to reflect on the past and look to the future. When you look at that perspective, I'll start with our proud history. Right?

Over the last 20 years, we've had a durable and compounding formula in terms of serving attractive and resilient end markets, a proven growth strategy that delivers results, consistently strong execution, and being outstanding deployers of capital. If you look at the chart at the bottom and you look at the growth in adjusted EPS from 2006 through 2019, you can see that steady progression of growth in our adjusted EPS, irrespective of whatever the end market environment was, whatever the financial health of the world was, just a steady improvement of very strong growth. During the pandemic, you saw a very large step-up in the earnings of the company, and including in the unwind of the pandemic. We reinvested heavily during this period, and still delivered very strong earnings, allowing us to exit this period a much stronger industry leader than what we went into the period.

When you look at 2024 and beyond, you see that same upward march in terms of the growth in adjusted EPS, and I'm incredibly excited for the bright future that we have. We see it as a differentiated value creation opportunity. We are an incredibly well-positioned industry leader with industry-leading businesses that enable our customer success. We serve attractive and improving end markets that are powered by strong long-term fundamentals, and we actively manage the company to accelerate value creation for all of our stakeholders. Those themes will be the ones that we cover in the rest of our Analyst Day. It was a good moment to reflect on our 20th anniversary. We're excited for the decades ahead. The company strategy. I'm going to kick this session off, and we're going to cover how we actively manage the company for creating value.

When you look at it, there are going to be 5 elements to what we discuss. We're going to discuss the leadership that we have in growing end markets that have strong long-term fundamentals, our proven growth strategy that enables customer success and delivers share gain, our PPI business system and how that drives significant productivity and enables outstanding execution, then our capital deployment strategy and how it creates tremendous value, and then wrap up with our corporate social responsibility strategy and how it delivers competitive advantage. This will be the roadmap for our company strategy this morning. Starting with our end markets. We shape the end markets that we serve. Right? We've worked to shape what we serve and put ourselves in a position to have a great position in very attractive end markets.

When you look at the end markets we serve, it's a little over a $250 billion end market. We have roughly just under 20% market share in aggregate of the markets that we serve. These markets are powered by attractive fundamentals and enduring long-term trends. The fundamental driver in this industry is demographics, actually. Aging populations have unmet healthcare needs. They consume more healthcare, and they want to live longer, healthier lives. By 2035, there'll be 1.2 billion people around the world above the age of 65. That is driving demand fundamentally for more healthcare, which then leads to demand in our industry. A few years ago, you heard me coin the term Golden Age of Biology. Today, we have a greater understanding of biology than really at any time in our history, and it's being accelerated by artificial intelligence.

It's an incredibly exciting era. That is driving fundamental growth in our industry. I'll delve into more on that in a moment. When I think about the need for expertise, the greater the scientific understanding, the more opportunities for the pharmaceutical and biotech industry to serve those unmet needs, and it's more complicated. Because of our scale and because of the role of our industry, we're able to serve that in a very fundamental way to unlock new cures for patients that are desperately waiting for them. In our advanced materials applications for this industry, really an exciting time. There's about $1 trillion of announced investments in semiconductor capacity around the world, right, to fuel the AI demand for technology. It's really an incredible period, and our industry plays an important role in supporting that growth. The fundamentals here are very attractive.

Given the scale of pharmaceutical and biotech, I not only wanted to talk about the long term, but also some of the shorter-term dynamics that we're seeing. When you look at our largest end market as an industry, starting with pharmaceutical portion of it, what you see is a larger focus on biologics versus small molecules. Biologics are much more life science tools and pharma services intensive than small molecule. That simple shift of what's in the pipelines drives demand to our industry. When you look at some of the facts, two very different ones. The scale of GLP-1s is creating a reinvestment cycle in the industry that is really quite spectacular. It's expected at about $100 billion of revenue for the GLP-1s in the very near future. That really does put an R&D reinvestment to effectively fill the pipelines for the future.

U.S. government policies has led to a significant expansion of investment in the U.S. If you had asked me a couple of years ago, would have I expected half a trillion dollars of commitments to U.S. manufacturing, I would have taken the no on that. The reality is it's incredibly exciting because when I think about the investment opportunities it means for a company like ours, we serve that, not only in our clinical development and manufacturing capabilities, but our bioproduction equipment, we equip the labs, we supply the facilities. It really is an incredible opportunity. Towards the end of the discussion this morning, Mike's going to bring that to life for you in terms of that opportunity. Biotech, an incredibly important customer set. In 2025, especially early in the year, you heard me talk about improving sentiment, right?

I said there's a lot more optimism in the biotech customer set. Optimism doesn't spend any money, but it was good to see the optimism. That translated into increase in spending as the 2nd half of last year started to unfold. When you look at what's happened from a dynamic perspective, M&A has really picked up. Licensing has picked up. VC investment has picked up. If I look at how the company's growth has picked up this year in biotech, you see a nice step up in what's going on in the actual growth in serving that customer base. It's really quite an exciting time for the short term, and the fact that we live in a incredibly exciting world from a scientific advancement perspective fuels a very good long-term prospect for the industry. We're excited for the end markets we serve.

One of the questions that I get asked often is what does AI mean for our customers, and is AI a positive or not a positive for our demand longer term? We wanted to share our perspective on that topic today. When I think about AI and automation that is advancing very rapidly, it's going to be a tailwind for our industry. When you think about what AI is doing, it's enabling a more predictable and higher return on investment for the R&D process of developing a new medicine. What that does is it spurs a reinvestment in the pipelines of our pharmaceutical and biotech customers that will drive more demand for our industries.

When you look at the 2 main elements of our industry, the discovery phase and the clinical research phase, if you think about what's going on today in discovery, what our customers want is more embedded drug candidates. What that results in, the more that they understand the science, the more wet lab validation they will do to ensure that they're actually working on the right targets, or on the right candidates, I should say. We're also seeing new demand from what I would call a different type of work, which is purely populating biological-based models. You're seeing a significant uptick in experimentation just to populate biological understanding to complement the advancement of the drug development pipelines.

On the clinical research side, what you're seeing is a desire for faster clinical trials, better enrollment, the right sites, better protocol design to be able to go after complex diseases and do that more quickly and more cost effectively. Where that results in for us is greater demand for CRO services because we're able to help them manage the complexity and leverage the fact that we have more data than really anybody in terms of understanding clinical research and can use AI to actually improve our competitive position. It's an incredibly exciting time in terms of how AI will impact the fundamentals of our industry. As a company, we're exceptionally positioned to benefit from these AI-driven tailwinds.

AI really does amplify our existing differentiators, unparalleled global scale, depth of capabilities, and the trusted partnerships that we've earned, as well as our execution. We're uniquely positioned to capture AI-driven growth through our presence across the full drug development value chain. We have a very different offering than anybody else. The data really matters. We're benefiting from the differentiated investments that we've made in data that allows us to have unique insights. Ultimately, we're partnering with the right collaborators. They want to work with us because of our industry-leading scale and insight. It's a really incredible ecosystem that we're very well-positioned to benefit from. Let me conclude the end market overview with the summary that our end markets are large. They have attractive fundamentals. Pharma and biotech is really picking up and strengthening. We're excited about the future in that end market.

AI and automation is a significant driver, we're uniquely positioned to win, it's an exciting time in terms of our end markets. The second element of how we actively manage the company is through our proven growth strategy. I'll kick off this section, then I'll turn it over to the members of the team. When you look at our proven growth strategy, it has 3 elements: high-impact innovation, being the trusted partner with industry-leading products, services, and expertise, and our unparalleled commercial engine. Back in July of last year, you heard us talk about the outlook for growth, our view remains as it was back in July, that we see the growth rates of 3%-6% for the company over 2026 and 2027, then returning to a 7% long-term revenue CAGR as we enter 2028 and beyond.

We're very excited about the growth outlook for the company, and we'll bring that to life for you in the coming discussion. What I wanted to end on is why our growth strategy matters to our customers. When you think about it from an innovation perspective, our customers want cutting-edge technologies. They're doing incredibly important work, and they want the very best. We have an incredible track record here of bringing out those breakthrough technologies. They are doing their life's work. They want to have a trusted partner by their side to enable their success. We have an unparalleled commercial engine able to reach every customer around the world in a cost-effective way through whatever channel to market a customer prefers. It really is a unique strategy that has driven long-term success and positions us for an incredibly bright future.

With that, I'm going to welcome Gianluca Petitti to the stage, who's going to kick off our discussion on high impact and innovation. Gianluca Petitti.

Gianluca Pettiti
President and COO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Marc, thank you, and good morning to you all. Good morning to the ones joining us virtually. Over the next 20 minutes, Mike and I will give you an update on the pillars of our proven growth strategy, starting with high-impact innovation. I will start with an update on our innovation engine and then move to some very concrete example on how our innovation is truly transforming the way our customers work every day. That's exciting. When you think about our innovation engine, we do innovate at scale. It has been a true differentiator for the company for many years, and we continue to invest aggressively with more than $1.4 billion in R&D investment every year. We do that through 7,000 exceptional colleagues that work within our R&D function.

One of the key features of our innovation engine is the connectivity with our customers, the insights we get from them every day with thousands of touchpoints. Those insights are taken from world-leading scientists in each one of our businesses, and they're creating great solutions for our customers. That has resulted over many decades in a strong track record of best-in-class innovation that delivered very high return on innovation investments. Now, as Marc highlighted, we're complementing that engine with artificial intelligence, and we're very excited about it. Now, why that is incredibly important for our customers is because the end market we serve are thirsty for innovation. Just think of what is happening in biology. With the Golden Age of Biology and our pharma and biotech customers in need of bringing to market more effectively advanced therapies and new modalities to support patients.

We're at the center of that. Our differentiated innovation is supporting them. In precision medicine, where with aging population, the need of more frequent, more personalized diagnostic is critical to advance healthcare and support patients. In the world of semiconductor and advanced materials, the demand we're seeing as a result of AI is unprecedented and will be sustained through robotics and physical AI. Our customers are under pressure to get better materials to market, to improve their manufacturing processes. Again, innovation is central to that. Let me start with an example. In the field of biology and specifically in discovery and translation, with actually an update on one of the most exciting fields of science, proteomics. Proteomics is in fact a fast-growing, multibillion-dollar segment and business for us.

The reason why it's so fundamental to the capability of our customers to innovate is because it's giving them a real-time view of what is happening in biological systems. If you think back at when genomics came about, genomics gave scientists the possibility of taking a still picture of life. Actually, proteomics is giving scientists the capability to watch the movie of life. That's why it's so exciting and so fundamental now that they can map proteins at scale near real-time. That will unlock not only a deeper understanding of disease biology and the underlying mechanism of disease and their progression, but also novel protein drug targets, novel drug candidates, and, over time, a whole new class of diagnostics. It is incredibly exciting. What we have done over the many years is to assemble an ecosystem that is highly differentiated and quite unique.

Starting from where our customers face the biggest challenge, the very complex processes of preparing sample for the analytic process in the sample prep, we innovated materially over the years, both from a hardware and reagent standpoint. On the detection technologies, we've been consistently providing the gold standard to our customers through our mass spectrometry, through our Olink high-affinity proteomics solutions, with our cryo-electron microscope for structural biology, amongst others that you have represented on the slide, truly transformative to the capability of our customers to run science. Now we're complementing the ecosystem with an exquisite suite of software and solutions to allow our customers to analyze data at scale. I can tell you, spending a lot of time with them, they're producing more data than ever. Obviously we're complementing that innovation with artificial intelligence, bringing more solutions, more digital solutions to our customers.

What is the result? The result is that we're getting the preference of our customers. In fact, our technologies are, as I said, the gold standard in proteomics with very wide adoption. Not only we're getting our customers' preference day in and day out in their lab, they're actually entrusting us with their most critical projects, large population study, where they entrust our technology with hundreds of thousands of samples being tested on our platform. We shared in the past, as an example, the U.K. Biobank selecting our Thermo Fisher Olink technology to do their proteomics testing. A more recent example is Precise in Singapore, one of the leading precision health programs globally. They did something unique.

They actually decided to combine our mass spectrometry technology and our Olink technology, providing them breadth and depth, understanding the proteome of Singaporean citizen, they are on the verge of very exciting discovery as you think of the way that they're going to advance healthcare in Singapore. That's a great example of collaboration with customers at scale, and I have to say we're just getting started. That's an update on proteomics. It's a fast-growing, multibillion-dollar segment. We have a unique, differentiated proteomics ecosystem, and our customers love it. Now let me move from an exciting update to another equally exciting update because I don't think you can talk about innovation these days without talking about AI. Actually, I don't think you can talk about anything today without talking about AI. Let's dig in what we are doing in that space.

As Marc highlighted, our customers are focusing on accelerating the amount of data they are generating to train AI model. Equally, they are focusing in streamlining their processes, improving their laboratories so that they can run science more efficiently. In that journey, we're focused on three things: enabling our customers with more speed to insights, helping them improving their R&D processes. Ultimately, trying to support them in what is going to be a transformation in their capability of getting drug to market. More success will mean more therapies to patients.

We're actually uniquely positioned to do that as we serve our customers across the continuum of what they do. We start with helping them in designing their experiment, supporting them for all their needs in their laboratories, in the setup, including procurement of products, as well as the testing phase, where they're using our technologies day in and day out, and ultimately supporting them with software tools to analyze their data. That's quite unique, as there's not another company serving customers with that level of breadth. We were missing something. Therefore, we decided to strengthen our physical value proposition, the hardware, software reagents, with great partnership with leaders in the digital and AI space. Marc highlighted our partnership with OpenAI. I'm equally excited for our partnership, as an example, with NVIDIA.

That partnership would result in the first version of fully autonomous instruments being deployed to our customers in the second half of the year. What does that mean? More speed to result, better quality, and full integration of those platforms into their AI ecosystems. We're very excited for what AI is bringing to our end markets, and we're equally excited for our progress in supporting our customers with more and better artificial intelligence solution. Now let me pivot to another exciting example, precision medicine. As Marc highlighted, aging population is requiring more frequent, more personalized, and precise testing. The way that we have tackled that over the last decade is to laser-focus our next-generation sequencing business on that very challenge. I'm incredibly excited to give you an update today on our NGS business and the contribution that it has done to medicine.

In fact, more than 50% of all non-small cell lung cancer companion diagnostic tests today are done on a Thermo Fisher Scientific platform with our Ion Torrent Genexus Dx integrated sequencer in combination with the Oncomine Dx Express Test. What does that mean in simple terms? An oncologist can go from a sample to a therapy selection for a patient in as little as 24 hours. That is a fully walk-away system, so it's simple to answer. Incredibly simple. It's truly transformed the way that doctors are identifying the right therapy for the right patients with the right timing, because that's incredibly important for cancer patients. That's an exciting update on our next-generation sequencing business that has been a world leader in clinical-based NGS now for years.

Finally, let me pivot to the world of semiconductor. In fact, AI is driving an unprecedented demand in the space of semiconductor, and our customers are truly under pressure as they have to accelerate manufacturing, improve their processes, innovate in the way they develop new materials. In this example, the time to yield in high-volume semiconductor manufacturing is a critical area of focus for our customers. You're looking at very large fabs and month-long semiconductor manufacturing processes. What is the need? It's better quality and, more importantly, full integration of automated system in line of manufacturing. That's what you see in that picture. It's a bit dark because it's a quasi lights-out lab. You can see the track on the ceiling of the factory. That track is capturing samples at the manufacturing sites, de-delivering it to our microscopes that are seamlessly analyzing those samples and just in time delivering result to manufacturing managers.

This technology has been so transformative that we retain a very high share in the semiconductor space, and it's been a very material contribution to the revenue for our material sciences business as well as for the company. More than 3% of the company revenue is now in that space. It's incredibly exciting how we are truly transforming and advancing the capability of our manufacturing customers to advance their processes. With that, I wrap the high-impact innovation. We started with the innovation engine. We looked then a few example on how we are consistently transforming our customers' work.

Now I'd like to invite Mike to share with you how we became the trusted partner for our customers. Mike?

Mike Shafer
EVP and President of BioPharma Services, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Okay, thank you very much, Gianluca. That was excellent. I'm going to spend some time talking about our trusted partner proven growth strategies and how that enables customer success, and equally important, enables us to drive tremendous share gain. I want to give you also a sense for what Marc alluded to, why it matters to be a trusted partner and from the customer perspective and how they think about it, and how we're uniquely positioned to deliver on that. What you're looking at here is basically our definition of our trusted partner status. It's something where we uniquely occupy this position in the marketplace because we're the only company in our end markets with the scale and depth of capabilities to serve our customers' needs.

When we talk about scale, what that means is that in many cases, we're the largest single supplier for the customer, which makes us incredibly relevant to them. What depth of capabilities means, it's a huge differentiator for us because if you just think about a typical customer, let's just say a pharma and biotech customer, or a pharma customer, I'll take. If you're the head of R&D, you want to spend time with us because we provide your teams with the best tools and capabilities so that they can accelerate their scientific breakthroughs. That's super important to the head of R&D and all of their person's teams. If you're the head of manufacturing, you need access to the best equipment, manufacturing equipment, and supplies to ensure that your manufacturing facilities are operating efficiently and productively.

You probably are using parts of our CDMO capability to complement your internal manufacturing. It's super important to spend time with Thermo Fisher if you're a head of manufacturing. Oops, excuse me. If you're the CFO, remember we're usually the largest supplier, but we're also the source of support for driving productivity across their organization. We're very important to supporting their agenda. If you're the CEO, the CEO's in a position where they want to try to accelerate innovation. That's their most important strategy, and that is exactly what we are positioned to do and why they want to spend time with us. That scale and depth of capabilities are extremely relevant to our customers. Remember, we have to back this up with performance, and we have.

We've done that over a long period of time and have an unprecedented track record of driving performance. Our customers have seen us deliver for them. They've seen how our customer-centric culture shows up in the daily engagements with their teams every day. They see us solving some of their most critical challenges on a regular basis, and they see us consistently performing in a wide variety of different market environments. From that, we've built this great track record of success and performance for them. That is how we think about it. The way we think about it is that we need to earn their business every day, which is exactly what gives us our access to customers because it becomes super logical for customers, and their teams, to spend time with us because we're making their jobs better. We're helping them be successful.

What we do is we take the insights and experiences that we get from all of these engagements, and we continuously invest in new capabilities, both organically and through acquisitions. All of this creates a compounding effect that drives share gain for us. It's almost like a flywheel effect. The more we invest in solutions for our customers, the more they engage with us, the better we execute, and the more business or share gain we end up getting. This is the case in all of our end markets that we serve, but it's particularly evident in our pharma and biotech end market.

When you think about the pharma and biotech market, one of the biggest challenges our customers face is that bringing a new therapy to market is incredibly complex, and it can take more than 10 years and $2 billion to get there. Our customers need a trusted partner that can help them drive faster scale-up of clinical trial programs and get them to commercial launch faster. They want a partner that they can access to provide scientific and regulatory expertise to help them with the increasingly complex modalities and support them as the regulatory environment evolves over time.

They want a partner that is able to drive productivity for them so that they can reduce the costs involved with manufacturing and development, giving them the flexibility to redeploy their capital in the areas that create the highest value for them and their business. When I think about what underpins all of this, when you look at the entire flow from discovery to clinical development and scaling up in commercial production, we are uniquely positioned with the scale and depth of capabilities to address their needs. We have a foundational set of products that are critical to the work the customer is doing every day. When you look at our portfolio of services, they're essential to the clinical development and commercial scale-up in manufacturing capabilities. The combination of these capabilities are what give us a unique position to address their needs.

I wanted to give an example of what this might look like for a customer. In this example, this is a biotech customer, call it an early-stage biotech customer based in South Korea. Based in New England, actually. It's a company we've met with many times over the years. The way we first approached them is through our commercial engine. We got into this customer earlier in their process. Gianluca told you about the proteomics environment and what's going on there. This customer is actually developing new therapeutics based on proteomics. We were in a great position to address their needs with relative our mass spec portfolio and reagents for proteomics.

As you think about it, over time, as they start to grow and build out their lab capabilities, we became the rational partner to help them do that. We understood what they were working on. We were able to support them with our channel business and lab supply capabilities so that they could efficiently build up that lab. As they start to get closer to clinical trials, we're there as well. We know exactly where they're headed. We bring our clinical trial team earlier than we might have otherwise, and we help them design that trial moving forward. In this customer case, we're actually in phase II trial right now with them and starting to work on planning for their phase III program.

Our trusted partner status truly enables us to increase market share with these customers because we're with them during the entire journey of their work with us. On the clinical research side, I want to dive into a little bit more detail on how we're thinking about utilizing AI in this environment. The reality is that the clinical trials are complex, and they take a lot of time, from trial design and site selection to patient recruitment and execution and regulatory filings. The AI impact is clear. Customers can get faster trials, better execution, stronger outcomes, which then importantly unlocks the pipeline so that customers can do even more successful trials. This requires a partner that has the scale and depth of capabilities across the entire clinical workflow. This is actually where we really are differentiated.

We combine large-scale datasets, global clinical execution, and advanced AI capabilities, including the point that was mentioned earlier about OpenAI and our collaboration with them, to deliver these solutions in an integrated, scalable way. The combination is why customers are selecting us. It's a key reason why we continue to win and how we extend our leadership in clinical research while helping our customers to bring therapies to patients faster. When you connect our CRO and CDMO capabilities together, you have what you've heard from us before as our Accelerator Drug Development program, which is an integrated model that connects every step of the drug development process from early development through clinical trials and commercialization. Effectively, what we're doing is making it faster, simpler, and more efficient for our customers.

This unique offering is a key element of how we are a trusted partner for our customers. The recent acquisition of Clario, too, adds an important capability around digital endpoints that further differentiates our capability. Let me expand a little bit on why it matters and how this kind of plays out for the customer. When we look at what our customers are requiring here is, number 1, we have to be able to support them across all major modalities and therapeutic areas. As they go through their journey, we're there to support them on every aspect of their pre-IND filing activities, their clinical trials, and then eventually their post-approval and commercial scale-up. We do that across a global network with trials and supply capability operating around the world. Importantly, we connect it all.

We bring our CDMO capabilities, our CRO services, our clinical endpoints, and our trial supplies so that each step of the development is integrated and not fragmented. That's a key point here. That integration matters because it enables our customers to make faster, better decisions and reduce the complexity of managing multiple vendors. It removes the delays that often come between different phases. This is exactly what Accelerator Drug Development means, and it's an integrated and entirely unique model. We are literally the only company in the world that are providing these capabilities for customers. I want to give you a few examples here of what this looks like. This is the South Korea customer that I was thinking about originally.

Our commercial team met this company after they were already down the road a little bit with some of their preparations for phase I. The issue was that the people they were working with, they really had some terrible delays in the program. Our commercial team went in there and started understanding what their needs were, of course, and we ramped up our Accelerator capabilities, integrating multiple solutions that eliminated several bottlenecks in the process. Formulation issues, trial design issues, and regulatory alignment requirements. The cool part about this is the customer saved about 12 months in the whole process. We took something that was delayed to accelerating it by almost one year.

The cool part for Thermo Fisher Scientific is it's really a great example of how when we engage with biotechs, or anywhere in the world for that matter, we can literally drive share gain with our Accelerator Drug Development capabilities. The second example, this is a larger biotech, biopharma type of company. It's a U.S.-based company, and it's a company that we have been working with for a while. We have a pretty well-established trusted partnership with them. In this particular program, it's a respiratory disease that they were working on that addressed a large patient population need. We were working with them in the whole program from the beginning, so they were coming into phase III, and they identified an issue. They identified a need to try to get to commercial launch much faster than they had originally planned.

The reason was, is there was a competitive market, there's some seasonality issues, and they said, "You know what? We need all your guys' help to double down and get this out the door faster." Fortunately, we had our CRO and CDMO capabilities already embedded in the phase I and II activities, we had plenty of leverage to pull because we kind of had it managed all under one roof. They identified a bunch of different areas that they could drive some cycle time reductions. Ultimately, what happened for the customer is that we were able to activate over 160 different sites in less than eight weeks. It was huge. I mean, there was something like 8,000 patients in this. We reduced the enrollment time and the dosage timeline by more than 50%.

Really just blew away the targets that were originally set, and that trusted partnership became the key element for how we were able to support their needs. You get a little bit of a sense of why we're driving share gain across the clinical research and pharma services business. Let's see. I don't think I have 1 example. No, sorry. I would just give a little bit of a summary. When you think about our trusted partner growth strategy and how that enables us to gain share, you can think about how we work with our customers across many different areas with our scale and depth of capabilities.

You look at programs like Accelerator Drug Development for our pharma and biotech customers, you can see the reality of why this creates opportunities for us to help them accelerate their innovation, drive productivity, and ensure that we're gaining share across all of the end markets here within our trusted partner status around the world and growth strategy around the world. Thank you very much. Obviously, this is super exciting. It's real. We're actually winning a lot of share right now doing all of this, I'm super excited for the prospects moving forward.

With that, I'll have Gianluca come back up and talk to us about our unparalleled commercial engine.

Gianluca Pettiti
President and COO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Mike, thank you. Let me pivot to another very important element and differentiation that we have at the company, our unparalleled commercial engine. What differentiates us here is the combination of 3 elements. An exceptional commercial scale and access. We have, in fact, what is the largest commercial organization and presence in essentially all markets that we serve in our industry. That's combined with a decade-long journey, or decades-long journey to actually build what is a truly comprehensive infrastructure, both from a supply chain standpoint and services standpoint, that allow us to reach every customer, every day, essentially across the globe. Finally, an extensive set of data and insights that we gain from the interaction with our customers, both physically and digitally, happening every day.

Let me give you an update on each one of those, starting with the exceptional commercial scale and access we have. We have thousands of interactions with our customers every day. This is happening as a result of the largest commercial team in our industry, and as I said, it gives us the benefit of powerful insights. We also interact with our customers at all levels, from the front line to key decision-makers, all the way to the C-suite. In fact, there's not a week that goes by that us, the senior executive team at the company, don't interact with many executives at our customers. That's strengthening our trusted partner status. We're there for them when they need us the most.

The second element is a comprehensive set of infrastructure and services that have been assembled and scaled, and we truly continue to invest in those capabilities every year, starting with our customers' enablement center. This is a center where our customers can go, demo our solution, test them, learn about innovation, and ultimately, is a big driver of adoption of our technology. We also have leading on-site services. It means thousands of Thermo Fisher Scientific colleagues spending time at our customer site every day. They're fully integrated in their operation. Finally, we complement that with scale capability and very specialized in supply chain and logistics, both in mature markets and across the world in emerging markets and the regions.

Truly a comprehensive set of capabilities that gives us the opportunity to have access to a tremendous amount of data and customers' insight, whether those insights are coming from physical interaction and knowledge that our teams are developing, being on site with customers, or through the digital interactions, where our leading e-commerce platform, thermofisher.com and fishersci.com, are the most scaled e-business platform in the entire industry, where we have millions of touch points and transactions happening every year. Obviously, we're taking full advantage of artificial intelligence to analyze those data scale and ultimately improve our capability to serve customers day in and day out. Let me give you a concrete example on how this set of capabilities are coming together in a single integrated platform, our research and safety market channel business.

Our research and safety market channels business, it's a highly differentiated and scaled channel to market. Just think that we have more than 6 million products. We aggregate 9,000 suppliers into 1 single channel for our customers. That yields more than 4 million orders processed every year. We have more than 2,000 colleagues that are sitting at our customer site every day. I tell you, I visit a lot of those customers, you can't differentiate whether someone is working for Thermo Fisher or is working for our customers. It's incredible, the level of trust and integration. On the bottom of the slide, you can see the importance of our infrastructure with scaled and integrated supply chain and logistic and delivery, including logistics service directly to customers delivering product here in the U.S. and the global scale.

When you combine that with our digital presence, with fishersci.com, which is a premier website utilized by our customers to find choice and convenience, this creates a truly spectacular experience for our customers. It has resulted over the many years in consistent share gain in the space. We're very excited about our research and safety market channel is performing extremely well. Another element of our unparalleled commercial engine is our presence and investment in emerging markets. Trust me, I had the opportunity to spend 3 years in South America, 5 years in China, this is incredibly important. Our customers in the region are incredibly thirsty, not only for innovation, but for support, for help, and they look up to Thermo Fisher Scientific as a partner of choice to advance their science.

These markets have been very good growth for us over many years, they're incredibly attractive in terms of long-term growth prospects, driven by obviously favorable demographics and growing healthcare spend in most of these markets. We continue to invest, scale, and employ commercial capabilities. On the slide, you have a few examples. We're doing that in areas like India, Southeast Asia, and Brazil, where over the last year, we have increased our presence, both from a manufacturing standpoint, commercial standpoint, customer enablement center standpoint. We'll continue to do so over time, creating what should be an equally exceptional experience in the region compared to what our customers are getting here in the U.S. We're getting that to many, many of our customers. With this, let me wrap up our proven growth strategy section.

We started from high-impact innovation, a key differentiator for our customers in all the segment we serve. Mike explained how we gain trusted partner status and the central role of our services business to elevate the engagement and trust of our customers. We closed with our unmatched and scaled commercial engine, which is a practical but incredibly important aspect of our strategy, connecting us with our customers every day.

With that, let me now call Jim to the stage to give you an update on our PPI business system. Jim?

Jim Meyer
SVP and CFO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Thank you, Gianluca, and good morning, everyone. One of the constants in my 17+ years with the company is the PPI business system. Sorry. I vividly remember my initial PPI training upon joining the company that included a competitive simulation on most efficiently making toast. Picture it. I'm a new finance guy about three days into the company. I'm in a makeshift kitchen in the mezzanine of a Rochester, N.Y. factory on a team of value stream supervisors trying to shave a few more seconds off our next piece of buttered toast. It's an incredibly memorable and valuable learning experience for me. I'm reminded of it every time I'm in my kitchen at home, taking any unnecessary steps between cupboards and drawers, and then annoying my kids, explaining the missed efficiency opportunity right in front of us. The fundamentals are very simple.

The concepts are very fundamental, but incredibly powerful when deployed at scale. The PPI Business System at Thermo Fisher is our discipline that enables outstanding execution. It's how our global teams know if they had a good shift, a good day, a good week, a good month, a good quarter, and ultimately a good year on repeat. It also allows us to know quickly and course-correct when we're off track, and it does happen. PPI facilitates continuous improvement where all 125,000 colleagues can contribute to finding a better way every day. This creates robust pipelines of opportunities to reduce our costs, enhance our quality, and make the customer experience better tomorrow than it was today. We deploy PPI to help us effectively navigate complexity, like integrating acquisitions, mitigating inflation with agility, or executing large-scale transformation programs.

In the current environment, we're focused on delivering excellent growth in adjusted earnings, and we're using PPI to deliver an accelerated level of productivity. We're aggressively leveraging our scale to grow the use of our global shared services and functional centers of excellence. We're expanding the use of product cost reduction capabilities through value engineering, and we're actively managing tariffs. We're also deploying PPI to drive working capital efficiency, additionally benefiting free cash flow generation. AI is allowing us to run the company even better within the framework of continuous improvement and PPI. At the core of it is reimagining business processes to drive efficiency by deploying AI tools. This drives real cost reduction and a step change in scalability as we grow. As we look forward, we expect our headcount growth to be far less correlated to our volume growth as it's been in the past.

AI is also unlocking tremendous value and insights from the vast proprietary data that we have across commercial, operations, and supply chain, allowing us to work even smarter end to end, further strengthening our predictability and execution. The examples on the right show how we're more efficiently serving customers even better on a daily basis with real-time knowledge. We're deploying advanced software development capabilities to accelerate new product timelines and further stimulate innovation. We're strengthening our operations by deploying automation and predictive modeling to improve our throughput and reduce downtime. The PPI business system at Thermo Fisher is deeply ingrained in our culture. It lives within us as a persistent passion to always be better. It fuels consistent, outstanding execution. It drives durable margin expansion over long periods of time. We are excited about how AI can strengthen its impact moving forward.

With that, I'll turn it to Marc to talk about capital deployment.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Jim, the toast story really resonated with me. I have to admit, Allison hates when I give her suggestions about how to run the household. I stay in my lane. When I think about the fourth element of our company strategy, how we are actively managing the company, it's really about capital deployment. Our disciplined approach, Jim's going to walk through that in his presentation, it hasn't changed. It's been a proven approach to unlock significant value for our shareholders. What I did want to talk about is our proven M&A strategy, which is an important element of our capital deployment strategy. When you look at that strategy, it's been incredibly successful. It starts with a rigorous selection criteria for all acquisitions. A company must strengthen our customer offering, so that it'll be valued by our customers. It has to enhance our strategic position as a company.

When you listen to how Mike talked about the trusted partner status, you see how the businesses keep reinforcing one another and how we've curated those capabilities to have a stronger and stronger competitive position. That ultimately it has to create meaningful shareholder value, and we measure that through the ROICs, the internal rates of return, as well as the EPS accretion that it adds over time. The second aspect of that strategy is disciplined decision-making. There'll be a number of companies that will fit that criteria, and the decision-making process is really to characterize risk and to understand the various scenarios of the businesses that we buy and how it will work out, and our ability to deliver against the commitments we make to our shareholders. Our track record through that decision-making process has really been exceptional.

We have a proven integration process for those businesses that we acquire, and the result of that combination of understanding the selection criteria, buying the right businesses, a proven way of integrating them, is to be able to ultimately enhance the financial and operational performance of well-run businesses that we acquire. We don't buy broken businesses, we buy good businesses with strong competitive positions. We make them better. Our ability to deliver synergies has been exceptional, whether it is the aggressive cost revenue or tax synergies that we're able to target that really has created meaningful value. Ultimately, those businesses, you see them within our leading segments as having better strategic decision-making processes that drive their long-term success. We've been active deployers of capital.

In terms of M&A, we've deployed $70 billion since 2012. Here are some of the major acquisitions that we've done over that period of time. We've done significant number of smaller ones as well. I thought in a moment I would give you an update on a couple of the more recent large acquisitions that we've done. First, I want to talk about capital deployment and M&A in the context of how we actively shape our business. When we think about it, we're adding to our capabilities. If you look at the couple recent acquisitions that we've done, both Clario as well as Solventum's filtration and purification business, they've actually expanded our capabilities in high growth end markets.

As part of our process of shaping our business, we actively look through our portfolio, think about, are we the right owners of our businesses and, best businesses to free up capital and free up time. At the end of April, we announced the upcoming divestiture of our microbiology business as part of that portfolio management as well. A quick update on our two most recent acquisitions. We closed the acquisition of Solventum's filtration business at the beginning of September of 2025. As a reminder, the rationale for the acquisition was it was adding leading capabilities in filtration and separations technologies in the production of biologics. A very complementary set of capabilities to our bioproduction portfolio. Ultimately, it's enabled us to serve an unmet need of our customers in the filtration segment.

When you look at how it's going, while it's early days, it starts out with a $750 million set of capabilities that's been added to our company. We're on track for this business to become a mid to high single-digit organic growth business as part of Thermo Fisher, and I think over time you'll see us move higher in that range. We're on track to deliver the synergies. The teams have done a really nice job on the early synergies and really setting up the plan and execution against that $125 million target. We're on track to deliver the double-digit internal rates of return that we signed up for when we announced the transaction earlier in 2025. Really an exciting addition that's going very well. We announced Clario, and we were able to close Clario at the end of March.

We announced at the end of 2025. The rationale for Clario was to really bring the industry-leading endpoint data solutions into our company, and this is a business that has very differentiated technology, proprietary data assets. It is very much of an AI-enabled business with deep scientific expertise. Really is a very special addition. It positions our company in one of the fastest-growing segments of drug development in clinical research. It is a great fit with our laboratory capabilities in terms of one of the key areas that we bring in generating endpoints in clinical research. Ultimately, it is going to give us deeper clinical insights for our customers in the drug development process. When you look at Clario, this was a $9 billion acquisition for us. It is foundational in terms of its role in the drug development process. It has supported over 30,000 clinical trials around the world.

70% of the medicines approved by the FDA and EMA have been using these capabilities over the past decade. We're actively working on 3,000 trials around the world. Really an incredible set of capabilities. Financially, the business did $1.25 billion last year. This year, in the 9 months that we will own it'll add about 20 basis points to our margins, $0.32 to our adjusted EPS. Longer term, the expected impact here, as a reminder, is it will be accretive to our organic growth, our adjusted operating margins, and to our adjusted EPS. We're on track to deliver the $175 million of adjusted operating income by year 5 and deliver double-digit internal rates of return. An incredible opportunity to create shareholder value from our capital deployment strategy.

We're excited about the pipeline of activities that we're looking at today, and we'll continue to be good stewards of your capital. The final element of how we're actively managing the company to create value is around our corporate social responsibility strategy. Ultimately, it delivers competitive advantage. I wanted to spend a moment on that. I started this morning with our mission. When you think about, I talked about our colleagues, I talked about a great place to have a mission-driven career. When you think about the company and our colleagues' passion, they want to work for a company that is a great steward of the planet, a great member of the community, making a difference to society. That really creates a remarkable culture that allows all of us to bring our very best selves to work and work as a winning team.

Our commitment to environmental stewardship is important to the company. When you think about some of the examples of our road to net zero, today, 63% of our electricity is sourced from renewable sources. We're well on track to deliver 80% of that by 2030. In some of the markets where it doesn't exist yet in terms of renewables, as soon as it does, you'll see us continue to advance our target in terms of the use of renewable electricity. When I think about how we operate, it's incredibly important that we operate as an ethical company, a safe company, a high-quality company, and that is critical to our colleagues and critical to our customers as being a trusted partner.

In giving back to our communities, we're so passionate about science and STEM education that last year, 180,000 students around the world have benefited from how we give back to education, and really a compelling view of the difference that we're making. All of this focus on corporate social responsibility is about creating an environment where our customers want to work with us, our colleagues are passionate about being here, we manage risks for the future, and we set ourselves up for a bright future. With that, we're going to take a break. I think you got a good sense of the company's strategy.

We'll take a 15-minute break. We'll return. Mike will come up and talk about how we bring this to life in one of our businesses and one of the business opportunities, then we'll turn to our financial outlook. See you shortly.

Thank you.

Operator

Now please welcome back to the stage, Mike Shafer.

Mike Shafer
EVP and President of BioPharma Services, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Welcome back, everybody. I hope you're well and highly caffeinated now, ready for the next part of our session. What I want to do here is, you've heard a lot about our company strategy, the proven growth strategies, PPI business systems, capital deployment, and what I want to do is provide a few examples. These are really cool, big examples, by the way, that we're uniquely positioned to go after. Talk a little bit about how we combine these capabilities in a way that enables us to drive share gain, and win new business. I'll start with our bioproduction business. You guys, I think, have heard a lot about our bioproduction business over time, and it's really an outstanding business in its own right, in a very fast-growing end market.

We're the leading provider spanning the full cycle from cell culture media and single-use technologies, to filtration, purification, and production chemicals. We have a leadership position in core categories, and the business has been and continues to be an exceptionally fast-growing business, growing extremely well with clear momentum as it fully leverages our total company capabilities. When you think of this, what we're showing here are the components of our company strategy and growth strategies. I'll start with our ability to invest in high impact innovation. That ability enabled us to create new technologies that really address critical challenges for our customers. The one we're showing right now is our DynaDrive single-use bioreactor that really enables customers to accelerate process development and scale up to a much larger scale with single-use technology.

If I think about our trusted partner status, we're not just supplying products for our customers, we're working with them to help understand what's necessary to design and validate end-to-end bioprocessing workflows. We do this through our commercial engine, where we're able to engage customers around the world, leveraging our scale of commercial efforts, and bring the right subject matter expertise to the discussion, either in their facilities or in one of our global located bioprocessing design centers. These design centers are cool because it gives the customer a chance to come in and take a look at the equipment, understand how it's used, even run some non-GMP type of trials.

As you heard from Marc earlier, our ability to deploy capital to address critical categories of capabilities that enable the customer workflow solutions with the Solventum filtration business is a fantastic way by which we continue to strengthen our bioproduction business, leveraging our company growth strategies and continuing to drive growth and share gain for the business. The next one I want to bring your attention to is the U.S. reshoring theme that we're seeing across all of our big pharma customers. Biopharma companies have announced, I think you guys have all heard over a half a trillion, Marc mentioned it earlier, half a trillion dollars in U.S. manufacturing investments. They're really looking for partners who can help them move quickly.

What they're really trying to solve then are these time-based challenges around how do I move some of my programs into the U.S. now? They're doing that with our U.S.-based CDMO capacity. Number 2, how do I accelerate the whole process of scaling up these new investments in the U.S.? Again, company strategy, the components of it coming together in a way that enables this. I mentioned the DynaDrive here. This is a part of an entire platform we're creating. If you imagine if you're going to build a new facility, you're going to want the best-in-class next generation platform to fit out your new factory. In this case, what we're showing you here is the entire platform.

From lab scale all the way up to commercial scale on the DynaDrive platform, this really becomes the next generation, and it's a great opportunity for us to capitalize on the new investments in building out manufacturing in the U.S. From a trusted partner status, in the near term, what they want to do is get some of these programs into the U.S. right away. That's a huge priority for them, they're leveraging our CDMO capacity to do that. They know us already. We're working with all of these big pharma companies in our CDMO business across many others. They know that we're in a great position to help them as a trusted partner advance or accelerate this agenda.

That unparalleled commercial engine is based on the fact, as I mentioned in the trusted partner section, we're working with clients at each level of their company. As a result, we're in there very early talking to them about their specific needs and what we can do with the subject matter expertise to help them design and build out the workflows and concepts that they need to drive. From a capital deployment perspective, you may know that from a sterile fill-finish perspective, there's huge demand for capacity. We used our ability to deploy capital to acquire Sanofi's New Jersey sterile fill-finish facility and create capacity for all of the programs that customers want to start transferring into the U.S.

In summary, when you think about all of these components of our growth strategy, you really can get a sense for how we're generating share gain and demand and supporting these customers. The point I want to make on this last page, too, is that this is not some sort of way out in the future thing. We're actually already winning new business, significant new business for our CDMO because people are moving programs into our capacity right now, and we're getting great traction on supporting customers with their planning and development programs for the new builds that they're going to do. What I want to do is give you an example of this. This is real-world.

We're actually in the process of doing this right now with one of these top 10 pharma companies, where the way we're engaging with them right now, and, of course, we've been working with them for many, many years, is we're working with them right now on enabling the validation of the workflow with this bioproduction platform that I mentioned. Our teams are together running tests and so forth in our design center so that it can get a good understanding of what it's going to take to do this at scale in their new facilities. From a short-term perspective, we're already working with them on giving them capacity for their new programs to transfer in. We can start to run those now and actually validate them in a GMP environment.

The last piece is, when they get the facility built, they want to ramp it up extremely quickly. We will be in a great position to help them do that ramp quickly because they've done the tech transfer end tests already, and we will be able to help develop the tech transfers to them ramping up in the facility on the same platform that we've been using. It's really a phenomenal opportunity for us. It's kind of one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, and we are so well-positioned to win and gain share here. It's very impressive. In summary, company strategy, 2 big opportunities, how we deploy the components of that strategy and combine them in ways that really enable us to drive share gain in the industry.

With that, I hope you get a good sense of how that all works. I want to hand it over to Jim to talk about the exceptional financial outlooks.

Jim Meyer
SVP and CFO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Thank you, Mike. Those are great examples of our strategy in action, where we bring the power of Thermo Fisher to a particular business or across businesses to enable our customers' success or capture an attractive market opportunity. You've heard much about our company and our customers' important work, and now I'm excited to spend a few minutes now sharing our exceptional financial outlook. I'll be bridging what you've heard about our end markets, our differentiated growth strategy, and our disciplined approach to capital deployment to what the expected financial outcomes will be as we execute in 2026 and beyond. I'll start with a look backwards and then dive into 2026. As I look forward, I'll talk specifically about our expectations and approach to managing the company over the midterm, which we've defined as the next couple of years.

Then I'll turn to share our expectations for the longer term. Starting with a look backwards. Taking a 10-year historical view clearly demonstrates our proven track record of delivering exceptional financial results. Over the course of the past decade, we've delivered double-digit compound annual growth rates in revenue, adjusted earnings per share, and free cash flow. This is a strong reflection on the attractiveness of our end markets, the impact of our proven growth strategy, the power of the PPI business system, and compounding capital deployment generating excellent returns. Turning now to 2026 and a summary of the guidance provided during our Q1 earnings call. The bottom line here is 8%-10% growth in adjusted EPS. This reflects our commitment to delivering strong earnings growth as our end markets and top line continue to improve. Clicking into some of the key assumptions embedded in our guidance.

Our organic revenue growth range remains 3%-4%, with a midpoint slightly above 3%. We have very good visibility and continue to have very good visibility to the expected sequential growth progression across the year. Adjusted operating income margin expansion of 70 basis points includes an approximately 30 basis point headwind from the impacts of tariffs and related FX year-over-year, the majority of which we've already experienced in Q1. Acquisitions will contribute $1.5 billion in revenue or 3% reported growth, $0.27 of adjusted EPS or 1% growth. In terms of free cash flow, we expect to deliver between $6.9 billion and $7.4 billion, and this includes an elevated level of capital expenditures as we ramp the capabilities of new acquisitions and invest to support our customers with their U.S. manufacturing initiatives. We are on track to deliver our financial commitments for the year.

Turning now to the midterm. As a reminder, in our July 2025 earnings call, we provided a financial framing that included roughly the next couple of years, including 2026 and 2027. This represented a view of how we were actively managing the company in a more muted but improving set of market conditions to deliver outstanding earnings growth. We outlined an expectation for 3%-6% organic revenue growth progressing through that range over the period, and that with that top-line assumption, we would deliver 50-70 basis points of margin expansion and mid to high single-digit growth in adjusted operating income. As we stand here today, we are on track to deliver the midterm financial framing provided. Organic revenue growth is on track with an improving trajectory. Our end markets are progressing as expected, and our customers remain focused on advancing their priorities.

We are executing well on the accelerated level of productivity embedded while funding high-return strategic investments and delivering strong earnings growth. The accelerated level of productivity is proving durable, and we are still in the early innings of unlocking efficiency from AI and automation. Capital deployment continues to be a compounder of long-term returns. In Q1, we closed the acquisition of Clario, which is immediately accretive to our margins and adjusted EPS. The business is on track and expected to grow high single digits under our ownership, and integration is progressing very well. In late April, we announced we had entered an agreement to divest our microbiology business for about $1.1 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of the year. We'll provide any expected impact to our 2026 financials in our Q2 earnings call.

When I layer in the impacts of known capital deployment to the previously provided organic elements, our expectation for growth and adjusted operating income improves. We still expect 3% to 6% organic growth progressing through that range over the period. We will deliver 50 to 70 basis points of margin expansion each year, and we now expect to deliver high single-digit growth in adjusted operating income for both years. As usual, we'll provide specifics on our expectations for 2027 in January. Pivoting now to a longer horizon. As I think about the makeup of the company as we exit 2026, we are incredibly well-positioned to deliver outstanding financial performance and create long-term value for all our stakeholders. Our actions have shaped our end market mix to 60% pharma and biotech with compelling growth fundamentals, and where our trusted partner status strongly resonates with customers.

Our business mix of greater than 85% services and consumables is highly durable, and our new acquisitions are well on track to be accretive to organic growth as they anniversary their close dates. Capital deployment will continue to be a compounder of returns, and the PPI business system has never been stronger. We are incredibly well-positioned to capitalize as our end markets continue to improve. We thought it would be helpful to share what we view as the building blocks to our long-term expectations of a 7% organic revenue CAGR. It's helpful to start with 2025 as a grounding baseline where we grew 2% in the face of several specific end market headwinds that impacted the company's growth. Turning to the building blocks for 2026 and beyond, I've outlined the key drivers of steady end market improvement that we've begun to see or expect to see moving forward.

This steady improvement is what progresses us through the range of 3%-6% over the next couple of years, and then to 7% organic revenue CAGR beyond that. This implies that end market growth progresses to normalized levels of about 4%-5% in the out years. Starting with pharma and biotech. We saw improved biotech funding driving strong authorizations growth in our clinical research business last year that's translating to stronger revenue growth this year. As biotech continues to improve, funding will flow further to discovery and research, which we serve with industry-leading businesses across our products portfolio. In pharma services, we've been investing in production capacity to support existing customers with their ramping up for commercialized medicines.

We have well-contracted capacity coming online over the next several quarters that give us great visibility into the business progressing to stronger and sustainable organic growth in the back half of this year and beyond. At the same time, we're actively supporting our customers with their U.S. pharma manufacturing investments. As Mike outlined, this will first be realized in our CDMO capabilities, and then more broadly in bioproduction, analytical instruments, and the Fisher Scientific channel. In addition to the shorter term impacts of capacity builds, we expect our long-term outlook to improve as well because our technologies and capabilities are incredibly well-positioned to have higher share in newly built production capacity. Further out, as detailed earlier today, we expect R&D pipeline investment to accelerate as the benefits of AI improve the return and predictability of drug discovery.

Our unmatched breadth and scale of capabilities, including our Accelerator Drug Development offering, position us incredibly well to win as AI helps bring more medicines to patients over time. Turning to Industrial and Applied. Our electron microscopy business is a critical enabler to innovation in semiconductors. As investment in innovation accelerates and focuses on more efficient, higher density chip designs, our cutting-edge instruments play a critical role enabling our customers' success as they scale capacity and transition new chips into production. In Diagnostics and Healthcare, we've seen reimbursement impacts globally, including in China, that we expect to moderate over the near term. As discussed earlier today, aging population demographics support our expectation for a steady uptick in testing volumes over the long term. In Academic and Government, we expect to see stabilization of funding in the U.S. and China over time.

Specifically in the U.S., we've seen the approval of an NIH budget with a slight increase in funding, and it was positive to see the flow of funding improve at the end of Q1. The cumulative impact of these market growth catalysts gives us great confidence in the organic revenue growth progression we are planning for over the long term. Turning now to capital deployment, which will continue to be a strong contributor of value creation in the future. Our ability to generate strong free cash flows gives us substantial capacity for capital deployment in the short, mid, and long term. Our disciplined approach drives outstanding returns, and those are additive to the returns generated on our organic investments. Marc outlined the tenets of our M&A strategy. The highly fragmented nature of the industry gives us a robust pipeline of opportunities to execute against.

M&A remains the primary focus of our capital deployment strategy, and you can expect share buybacks will remain the primary means of returning capital. Over time, we expect to deploy capital roughly two-thirds to M&A and one-third for return to shareholders. That mix can vary in any given year depending on the opportunities available. Our formula for long-term financial success is very attractive and represents a compelling value creation opportunity. Taken all together, our long-term outlook includes a 7% organic revenue CAGR, delivering 40 to 50 basis points of margin expansion annually, fueled by the PPI business system, then layering in substantial capital deployment, delivering strong returns. This leads us to delivering low teens adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow growth consistently over the long term.

As I close the financial section, let me bring back together the key points that underpin our exceptional financial outlook and compelling value creation opportunity. We have a proven track record of delivering. Our markets are attractive and improving, which supports the steady organic growth improvement outlined. Our growth strategy is differentiated and delivers compounding share gains. When we deliver well for customers, we earn the right to do more. No one else can bring the depth or scale of capabilities that we can. The PPI business system is the engine that drives great execution consistently and produces durable margin expansion over time. AI will only strengthen its impact.

We have substantial capacity for capital deployment and ample opportunities to deliver excellent returns. Thank you for your time today. I'm one of over 125,000 colleagues who are incredibly excited about the bright future we're building together for our company. We appreciate your continued support of Thermo Fisher Scientific. I'll now turn it to Mark to open the Q&A and invite Gianluca and Mike to the stage. Thank you.

Mike Shafer
EVP and President of BioPharma Services, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Thank you, Jim. We're looking forward to your questions. Eileen and Raph have the mic, so if you raise your hands, they'll hand them out. We'll start there. Go ahead, Mike.

Michael Ryskin
Managing Director, Bank of America

Great. Thanks for the question. Michael Ryskin, Bank of America. Marc, Jim, a number of times in your remarks, you kind of alluded to end markets continue to improve. You're seeing early signs of that improvement. You updated the LRP today again to, I think, 7% organic growth in the out years. You kind of refined it a little bit last year, too, but it's still a long ways away from where you are today and where the end markets are today. That slide you had a couple slides ago, Jim, the building blocks of the long-term growth, the bridge, that's really helpful, but just wondering if you could drill into that a little bit. How much of that is tangible? How much of that are you already seeing today versus maybe is a little bit more still hypothetical or theoretical?

What gives you confidence in that 18 months that you'll get there for 2028?

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Mike, thanks for the question. When I think about the end markets we serve, right? We gave the midterm view in a period where I think the investor community in particular, about 1 year ago, very uncertain about what the markets were. Actually, us explaining how things would progress was very reassuring to the investor base. If you think about it, we've had the benefit of 3 quarters since then, and the markets have actually played out exactly as we've expected to, right? There's lots of things going on in the world. We have a war and all these other things, but actually, our end markets are incredibly predictable. Where I sit today, and I think about how much we're interacting with our customers across all 4 segments, they would articulate that the activities would actually support the progression that we're laying out.

We feel that the ability to see the growth in the 3%-4% range this year, we're on track to do that. We had very strong orders in the first quarter, all these dynamics that set it up. If I think about what 2027 looks like, it feels like a continued progression of that. As you exit that period, you get into that long-term dynamic. Hopefully that's helpful.

Michael Ryskin
Managing Director, Bank of America

If I can ask a follow-up. You touched a lot on AI and how that's being implemented, how that's changing pharma R&D. I think the longer-term argument of improving ROI on R&D and pharma reinvesting that, I think that makes sense, but there's still a question of where will those dollars go? Will those dollars get reinvested back into tools, or are they getting reinvested back into AI or maybe other processes? I don't know if you had any specific examples you could point to. There were some major headlines today about pharma deploying Claude at a high level. Just sort of the early adopters of AI on pharma. Are they spending more with Thermo? Where are they spending it? Are they shifting how that money's allocated between clinical, pre-clinical? Just any details you can give on that would be helpful.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Sure. Mike, when I think about it, I've had the benefit of being in this industry for 30 years, right? In every technological advancement that we've seen, whether it was genomics or all of the different ones that have happened, the advancement of science has expanded the market. AI is so exciting. What does it really mean where the spending is? This customer base understands fundamentally how complicated biology is, and the higher the certainty you have, the more you actually invest in wet lab of those experiments, right? Of course, there's going to be experiments that never get done, right? Because you know from, in a way, in silico that it's a waste of time. There's so much desire to spend money and time on things that matter.

The wet lab validation would be a great way of giving confidence on the earlier side of research that you do that. On the development, the higher the confidence you have in the molecule, the more indications effectively you run. You kind of front load your spending. We're quite excited about it. Maybe the most tangible example I can give is some years ago, in electron microscopy, AlphaFold existed, right? There was early read that the fact that you could have in silico predictions of a microscope, what would happen, would there be less electron microscopy done? What actually happened, it was a huge Accelerator, because actually once you had more insight, you actually wanted to validate it.

It's a very much of applied, in a way, AI example to a technology area where you could have a hypothesis that it shrinks the market. The reality is it ultimately expanded the market. Hopefully that's helpful.

Michael Ryskin
Managing Director, Bank of America

Thank you.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Great. Raph, hand.

Tycho Peterson
Managing Director of Global Equities, Jefferies

Hey. Thanks. Tycho Peterson from Jefferies. Maybe just a couple follow-ups there. First, just on the adjustment to the LRP, is that just prudence going from 7+ to 7, or is there something that has changed in your outlook? I guess just thinking about AI, is there any way to quantify how much training LLMs might actually raise R&D in the next couple of years? It seems like it could be a significant amount. Are you investing in semi capacity as well? I think it's 3% of revenues today, you said. A priority is that to build out capacity, and it sounds like you've got some autonomous instruments coming too. I'm just curious what you're alluding to there.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Tycho, thanks for the questions. In terms of the outlook, and then I'll have Gianluca talk about some of the AI aspects of it in electron microscopy. When we looked at the outlook, actually it's the same in terms of what it is. What we thought about the longer term is, what is the view on the market? Our view is that it's going to average 7%. There'll be years definitely above it. There'll be the years of the plus. For the analyst community, we wanted to actually be able to model, because I don't know how you model a plus. We put the 7% CAGR out there, and of course, there'll be years that'll be higher than that and the years that'll be around that.

That's how we thought about it, and we're quite optimistic and quite confident in the progression of the market, returning back to that more normalized growth. Gianluca?

Gianluca Pettiti
President and COO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Tycho, thanks for the question. Perhaps the best way to address it is share a couple of example of engagement with our customer and how they are thinking about it. I was recently with one of our large customer in the Boston area, is a biotech company. They're very tech forward. They actually built their business on the premise that AI-driven drug discovery will enable them to accelerate drug to market. They had to create an enormous amount of cryo-EM structure in this. We supported them to actually begin to train model. I was recently another company in the Boston area, we were sharing notes on how, and perhaps more importantly, which kind of data are available to truly train models. I think the general consensus on what we're hearing from customer, everybody in the tech bio space is trying to generate more and more data.

We'll definitely see a pretty material acceleration over the next, I think, few years, including customers that will build data factory that will be specifically deployed to train AI models. It's definitely a quite clear trend, hearing it from our customers. There's going to be substantial deployment of capital in increasing their testing throughput over the next few years.

Tycho Peterson
Managing Director of Global Equities, Jefferies

Maybe just one quick follow-up for Jim on AI on margins. Understand it's an enhancement to PPI, and understand your long-term guidance here on margins. How do you think about AI contributing to maybe margin expansion above that?

Jim Meyer
SVP and CFO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah.

Non-GAAP margins.

Mike Shafer
EVP and President of BioPharma Services, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Thanks, Tycho. When I think about the 40-50 basis points of margin long term in an environment growing 7%, it's about $80 million-$100 million of more annual productivity than the previous, the historical long-term model. We feel really good about our ability to deliver that, and AI will be a major contributor of that. We see tremendous opportunity to drive incremental cost efficiency, and we're still in the early phases of prioritizing and understanding the future costs of that deployment as well, so that we can really get to a number. If it proves to be bigger than that, then we're well-positioned to capitalize on it.

Tycho Peterson
Managing Director of Global Equities, Jefferies

Great.

Speaker 14

Thank you, Jack. I wanted to follow up on the AI questions. I think one of the big themes of today is AI will benefit the industry over the long term. Something you didn't talk as much about is all of the data resources that Thermo Fisher has, including the recent Clario acquisition. Can you talk about what you might be able to do in terms of new products that customers can improve their productivity with?

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Sure. I'll start and then I'll turn it over to Mike to add as well. When I think about clinical research, more broadly before we talk about Clario, one of the really unique assets that we have is we've just run an enormous number of trials, much more than any of the innovative pharmaceutical companies, just given our scale. The two large CROs are in that unique position in terms of the amount of data. Everything from protocol design, everything from site selection, the regulatory filings, it benefits enormously from the experiences. When you actually think about the trend that AI enables the development process, the stronger your data footprint is, the more capable you are, the better actually you have as a competitive position. Clario really adds to it in terms of the insights that it brings.

Mike, maybe you talk about an example in terms of how we're applying what we're seeing.

Mike Shafer
EVP and President of BioPharma Services, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah. The simple way that we think about it is when we're involved in all aspects of the workflow, endpoint solutions, clinical supply and so forth, we have a unique set of data all under one roof. In the physical world, like with Accelerator right now, when we accelerate their trials, we win more business. They give us more molecules, and they create more programs. From the data angle, it's similar concept. We're in this kind of unique position where we're going to extract the data out of that in ways that nobody else can and figure out ways to model it. What we have this AI kind of suite of agents right now that we're applying it to clinical forecasting, trial execution, and so forth.

The key to that is that we're underpinning that with this whole workflow data. What we're able to do is start to forecast where we're going to have opportunities to accelerate the trial with patient recruitment and so forth, more effectively. Adding in the Clario piece into that is really going to be super helpful. Clario, they have 40, 50 different agents already being deployed on the platform that they've got in their program too, and that continues to grow.

Speaker 14

One follow-up.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Sure.

Speaker 14

What are the KPIs that we should be tracking to be able to judge for ourselves that this thesis that AI will be better for the industry is showing up? I'm thinking things like an increase in the number of new companies that are being created or an acceleration in R&D spend because customers are making more money because they're bringing more things to market. What are you seeing in the business? What do you think would prove that out?

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

I always go back to what we hold ourselves accountable to, which is delivering the organic growth outlook that we've outlined in terms of how we're translating that. When I think about our expectations, pharmaceutical and biotech, we expect it to be a high single-digit growth market for the company. We'll be giving you examples throughout time in terms of what we're seeing in terms of for our customers and bring it to life. At the end of the day, it's all going to be how it translates into our top line performance. That'll be helpful.

Speaker 14

Good.

Doug Schenkel
Managing Director, Wolfe Research

Good morning, Marc. Doug Schenkel here. Under your leadership, there are many examples of how Thermo plays offense when others are playing defense, especially in periods of slower growth. Clario and Solventum, those deals and the Sanofi site acquisition, those are good examples of how you've done that recently. With that in mind, really, I guess, kind of a 3-parter. 1, is there more to do this year in advance of the group hopefully moving into a more meaningful period of recovery? 2, are the partnerships you cited as part of your efforts to be seen and to be positioned as a trusted AI partner, things like NVIDIA, BenchSci, TetraScience, are those kind of new components of your offensive playbook? Then, 3rd, collectively, are these actions fully reflected in the LRP? Thank you.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Doug, thanks for the questions. I agree with the sentiment, which is, in periods that are not massive tailwinds? There are periods where you're living there, most times are not. Those are when you differentiate yourself as a company and you strengthen the industry leadership. The moves we made on the downside of the pandemic to strengthen the company really allowed us to exit in a stronger position than anybody else. I love this environment from an M&A perspective. We're very active. Does that mean anything gets done? We don't know? We're going to stick with our discipline about can we generate strong returns from it. This is a good M&A environment because companies aren't loved as much as they once were, and we can be a solution for some of those companies. I think that is positive.

When you think about the AI partnerships and the trusted partner status from that lens, whether it's OpenAI or NVIDIA, they want to work with the industry leaders because they understand we actually have more data, more insight, more commercial reach. The more successful we are, the better off it's going to be in terms of the revenue that they generate, right? We've been able to curate a set of partners that allows us to be successful for the future and have flexibility as well, so that as other companies evolve their technology and become very competitive, that we'll be able to bring those capabilities into our company as well. Hopefully, that helps. What was your third question?

Doug Schenkel
Managing Director, Wolfe Research

The third was on the potential upside to-

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah. When I think about it, right now, we want to deliver against this. We're not constraining ourselves to the 7% CAGR. As we move through the midterm, we'll start to articulate how we see the end markets playing out, and we'll get some more data points on what does the academic and government look like, what does China look like, and those could be obviously upsides to what we're assuming right now. Thank you.

Evie Koslosky
Global Investment Research Associate, Goldman Sachs

Hi. Evie Koslosky with Goldman Sachs. Given your LRP hinges on not only Thermo-specific growth initiatives but also the underlying market improvement, can you walk through how much of the improvement in the growth rate depends on Thermo-specific execution versus broader end market changes? What are your expectations around the broader market growth baked into the 7%?

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Jim, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Jim Meyer
SVP and CFO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah, sure. I'll start with the assumptions on the end markets within the long-range model of progressing to a 7% organic revenue CAGR. The underlying end market assumption is that we progress to a normalized level of about 4%-5% end market growth over that period of time. That means we'll continue to drive share gains of about 2%-3% over that period of time. We've outlined the compelling growth strategy and gave examples of real share gain opportunities, and we expect to be able to accelerate and deliver more throughout the period.

Evie Koslosky
Global Investment Research Associate, Goldman Sachs

Great. You guys talked a bit about emerging markets and some of the investments you're making there. How much of a growth contribution from these markets is baked into the 7%? How do you balance investments there relative to China, where you've seen an increased investment from MNC Pharma in the region?

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Eve, thanks for the question. In terms of the emerging markets, there are clearly some incredibly exciting things going on in India, certainly in Brazil, and a number of the markets that will continue to support the long-term growth that we've outlined. We have a large presence in China. It's about 7.5% of our revenue. When you look at what's going on in the end market, actually, pharma and biotech is growing nicely. Despite the fact that the industrial healthcare sectors are under more pressure in China, for us, pharma and biotech has been very strong. There's a lot of activity that's going on. The Chinese companies, they think about their Chinese competition. They know if they're going to license to a Western company, there is a real competitive advantage for the Chinese company to work with the right Western partners.

I was in China at the end of March, and I was thinking about the number of leaders of the Chinese biotech companies that I met with. They want differentiation relative to somebody else that's trying to get a license for a molecule, and they're opening up new opportunities for us. Western companies are investing very heavily, not only in doing their own early research and early development in China, but also figuring out how to license, as well, and that's creating more growth opportunities. I actually think China is likely to improve, and probably, if it plays as we'd expect, it could be actually an upside relative to what's assumed in our model. Thank you.

Dan Arias
Managing Director, Stifel

Hi, Marc. Dan Arias from Stifel. I wanted to ask you about biotech if I could.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Sure.

Dan Arias
Managing Director, Stifel

Obviously, your scope across the industry is super broad, and my assumption is that your account-level details are pretty good, too. It kind of feels like you're our best shot at asking this question. Have you been able to look at spending at the company level for biotechs that have raised money either in 2024 or during this wave here in 2026, and draw conclusions on what might happen? The reason I ask is because I think we're all just sort of looking around and wondering whether this financing activity is going to translate to higher spending for these companies. I'm wondering whether that's just a wrong thesis to have at this point.

Have you been able to look into the numbers and say, "This company raised $200 million," and you saw that 6 months or 12 months later?

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah. It's a great question. Don't lose the faith. We hang out with these people all the time. If you think about what our biotech customers are doing, they are trying to make an enormous impact on human health. The individuals are doing their life's work to make a difference in society and build great businesses. If you think about the cycles that go in here on the earlier-stage biotech companies, the ones that are pre-revenue but could have you spending at a high level, the pattern is actually quite predictable. Which is, there's roughly a six-month lag between the raising of money and activity starting to pick up. It largely always shows up in the development pipelines first because as you progress through development, you are able to tap into more funding. You see that.

We talked a lot about how authorizations in clinical development really were picking up in the second half quite meaningfully. That would then turn into spending thereafter. You saw that in our growth rates pick up in the fourth quarter, first quarter in clinical development. The activity now is starting to pick up in the research, which follows in the next phase. Actually, that cycle is predictable, and we've lived through many cycles. This is not a new phenomenon on the pacing of it. I feel very good. You're seeing M&A activity pick up, which then leads to more interest in VC in the industry. You're seeing that activity pick up in terms of funding of new companies and new rounds. You're seeing licensing pick up.

Actually, the environment feels very good and will set us up, in the way that Jim articulated it over the next couple of years for a nice step-up in growth in the biotech area. Should be very positive, and we feel highly confident. You're also seeing what I'll call the, not the emerging, but the mid-size biotech companies which have products on the market. Those companies we work with incredibly closely, and because they are actually meaningful customers, but they're still small enough that 2 or 3 people at those customers make the decisions for the organization. Those are spectacular customers for us because we're able to sit down with the CEO, head of development, head of operations at the same time, and just lay out a compelling way forward to be able to accelerate their timeframe to market. We're very excited about biotech.

Dan Arias
Managing Director, Stifel

Okay. That is helpful perspective. Thank you. Maybe just to go back to your comments on China, what is the underlying growth assumption beneath the 7% CAGR for China? When I think about the old long-term growth rate that you talked about and the 7% number today, one of the big differences there is obviously just what that geography is capable of.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah. Our assumptions embedded in the 7% would be below the company average. That's what's assumed there. The upside is pharma and biotech becomes a larger and larger proportion, grows more quickly. For now, we're assuming it's a bit below the company average.

Dan Arias
Managing Director, Stifel

Okay.

Dan Brennan
Senior Equity Research Analyst and Managing Director, TD Cowen

Hey, Marc, it's Dan Brennan from TD Cowen. I guess the first question would be, I just wanted to go a little further on Mike's question on the bridge. You've got 3%-4% growth this year. I think you're closer to 3% at the kind of midpoint, and consensus sits around 5% for next year, which seems reasonable in the context of the 3%-6% framework. I'm just wondering, the confidence level in seeing these levels of growth, and I'm just wondering if you can help bridge a little bit more on how we think about either customers or business segments improving to support the growth.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah. Dan, thanks for the question. When I think about our confidence, you have an experienced management team that's interacting with our customers all the time. We have extraordinarily high confidence in the progression of our end markets and what the next 2 years and what longer term looks like. When I think about how do you support that, you ultimately support that with customers making decisions to spend their resources with us. If I think about the pipeline of activity, the orders that we're winning, which is much faster, actually, than the organic growth that we're delivering right now, we're building that backlog, if you will, to support the progression. When we talk about things like pharma services capacity, Mike's team has sold it out. We just need to actually bring those online, go through the regulatory process, produce the medicine.

What's embedded in the step-up is largely in our control, right? We feel very good about that in terms of what the next couple of years are, and we understand the drivers or end markets that supports the longer-term growth as well.

Dan Brennan
Senior Equity Research Analyst and Managing Director, TD Cowen

Great. Maybe as a follow-up just on an AI question and the benefits that you're expecting, particularly on the PPD business, I'm wondering if you could differentiate between how you think about the impact on the broader CRO industry versus your ability to capitalize on AI, since I think a lot of CRO peer stocks have faced more challenges given some concerns around what the impact could be.

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah. When I think about the entire CRO industry, like every segment, there's always going to be a certain level of winners and losers, right? For the industry as a whole, I actually think for the companies that have the deep data and capabilities has a real competitive advantage in serving the pharma and biotech industry. I'm quite bullish about our position in serving that. It's actually from two different lenses, right? It's actually the capabilities we have today to support pharma and biotech and how we're applying AI to be able to really lead in the field and benefit, as Mike articulated in the Accelerator Drug Development, understanding all of the handoffs between the physical creation of a medicine alongside the development process is a huge advantage, actually, in shaving time and cost out of the process. We feel we're uniquely positioned to win.

Thank you, Dan. We'll take one last question.

Luke Sergott
Director of Healthcare Equity Research, Barclays

Great, thanks. Luke Sergott, Barclays. All the questions on AI, I feel like there's a different paradigm across drug discovery, regular research in the labs, down till pharma manufacturing, where you almost have it fully adopted on the manufacturing process on the semis business. It feels like that we have a different scale of automation that's needed across the different labs. Can you talk about the investments that you guys are making from an innovation side where the research, traditional wet lab work is needing to adopt all this innovation and automation, and how close are we to getting to that semis automation example that you used?

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Yeah. Gianluca, why don't you talk about how some of the larger customers are thinking about the lab of the past versus the lab of today and how we're helping them modernize the approach to the early research?

Gianluca Pettiti
President and COO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

It's interesting. The lab of the future became the lab of today. We're starting to see material traction in terms of demand for automation. We do have a business that is focused on automation and software. We combined those businesses a few years back, and we're seeing really good demand. I would say we're going to see more as some of the data factories are becoming more real. As we said, the amount of data that needs to be created at scale is so material that we'll naturally see more and more demand for automation. One of the challenges that the industry had historically is that automation has always been incredibly bespoke.

Large engineering project, and I think over time, we're going to see automation being productized more and company like ours will have a lot of benefit from it, considering the scale that we have in being able to bring productized and more standardized automation to our customers.

Luke Sergott
Director of Healthcare Equity Research, Barclays

Great, thanks. Just last here, kind of follow up on Iris's question on the biotech side, pharma's been backfilling a lot of their pipelines with M&A within China biotech. I feel like China biotech was an upside driver for the tool sector in 1Q, and it feels like that's a durable tailwind going forward. I guess it's more of a question, does that kind of supplant the innovation that's needed and done on the Western biotech side that drove a lot of upside growth, let's say, pre-COVID? Is this just shifting around of the dollars, or is this going to be something that can be incremental on top from what we're seeing from the funding side on the Western side?

Marc Casper
Chairman and CEO, Thermo Fisher Scientific

It's a great question, Luke. When I think about what we're seeing, we're seeing really a nice pickup in funding in the West as well, right? You're seeing that dynamic in China. We're also seeing some of the Western biotech companies saying, "We want to do some more of the early clinical research actually in China to get a quicker read on whether my molecule is safe and efficacious," right? You're actually seeing global companies saying, "All right, Thermo Fisher, you have the reach into China. Help us actually tap into that market as well." Whether we're in Cambridge or whether we're in Shanghai, that we're able to take benefits of the regulatory landscape as well. We see it as an upside and additive to our total business. Let me conclude with the takeaways of the day. Right?

I think you came away with the enthusiasm we have for the future in terms of how well we're positioned as the industry leader and how our businesses benefit from the scale and the depth of capabilities that we have. We serve attractive end markets that have long-term compelling fundamentals. We're actively managing the company through our growth strategy, our PPI business system, and our proven capital deployment approach. We're excited about AI and the acceleration of science, how we're uniquely positioned to win because of AI, and then ultimately, we're applying AI as well to how we're running the company to further strengthen our execution.

We're very excited for the years ahead. We look forward to updating you on our progress periodically, starting next in the month of July with our earnings call. Thank you, everyone, and thanks for your attention today.

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