Hey, everybody. I'm Ted Kopeters here from the Life Science Tools Diagnostics team at Jefferies. It's my pleasure to introduce our next company this morning, Waters. We've got Udit with us. Maybe Udit, just to kick it off, you know, you and I were talking walking in about ASMS and obviously a lot of new innovation coming, new products. And I think you've really revitalized the portfolio, so I think maybe that's a good place to start. Maybe just talk about some of the new introductions and what you were highlighting this week.
Sure. Firstly, nice to see you again, Dyko. I should never talk to you when I'm coming in because I realized as I was doing it that you'd pick one of the threads, but this is a good thread. Thank you. Firstly, excited to be here and talk about innovation as the first question. Look, Waters has always been an innovation leader. We just sort of lost focus for a little while and we're back sort of putting equipment and instruments as well as consumables and software on podium positions. What you've seen so far is Alliance iS, which is now defining the category of HPLC with 40% reduction in errors. You've seen our TQ Absolute mass spec. I'll talk about that in a minute and what we did at the ASMS, but that defines sensitivity for PFAS testing.
I mean, it's good to look for causality in innovation, but it's good to also have correlation. The PFAS testing regime sort of started around the same time that TQ Absolute came out, and it's become our largest selling quantitative mass spec instrument, and it is leading the industry in terms of sensitivity. Thirdly, on our chemistry side, on our columns, we basically spend now close to 70% of our R&D dollars on biologics innovation there, and that has made a huge difference. Our MaxPeak Premier columns, that family of columns, continues to grow close to 30% after four years of launch. We recently launched a new platform of affinity columns, so taking affinity chromatography into LC and helping bioprocessing customers, something that I'm really excited about. It's just start with a protein A column. And then software.
We recently announced that now light scattering is going to be available with Empower, which is a significant step forward in our ambitions on bioanalytical characterization. Now to come to ASMS. As we were walking in, I was talking to you a little bit about how exciting it was to hear some professors talk about our charge detection mass spec technology, CDMS. It is one of the most meaningful innovations in the area of mass spec in several years, according to the KOLs. It basically takes large aggregates and vaporizes and puts them into the vapor phase without changing structure. Now, what does that mean? That means you can analyze proteins, analyze large molecules intact. That is not something mass spec has been able to do before. It allows us to look at structures of viral capsids. It allows us to look at empty versus full AAV.
It allows us to look at LNP particles. I'm a big believer in coming at innovation from both sides. You come up with a new technology and let the users figure out what the heck they're going to do with it. We have people in our company who do that for a living. On the other hand, you have market-led innovation. On the market-led side at ASMS, we introduced the TQ Absolute XR, extreme robustness. When you do PFAS testing, often after about 2,000 injections with any type of mass spec, you need to go and do service on the instrument. In high-throughput labs, that is a productivity sink. We've basically introduced our Ion Wave Guide that reduces this fouling of key parts of the mass spec and allows you to do at least six times more injections.
Two becomes 8,000 injections in certain matrices, very dirty matrices like fish tissue. You can go from 2,000 to about 20,000. Still going with that, the testing is still happening. The number of injections basically allows you to run the instrument for longer. Thirdly, at ASMS, we also talked about our chemistry portfolio and talked about affinity chromatography that I just referred to. Very excited with what's happening in the labs and equally excited about talking about it with customers. ASMS was really exhilarating. I really enjoyed it. Of course, I had to come to an even more enjoyable place here.
Great. Thanks for that intro. Maybe I want to step back a little bit. One of the questions we've gotten a lot is just pull forward. I think it came up in every single earnings call. I know you talked about the fact that you're not seeing it. You had good growth, I think, in the first quarter, pharma up 8%, double-digit growth in instruments. Maybe just talk a little bit about, because you also talked about pharma is obviously rethinking their own supply chain modifications. Maybe just talk about your comfort level that you're not seeing it, what metrics you're tracking to make sure this isn't going to be an issue down the road.
Yeah, it's a good question, something that we've looked at very seriously with all the KPIs we have. LCMS grew mid-teens in Q1. In the case of instruments, you can't grow mid-teens with pull forwards in the last few days of the quarter. It doesn't work like this. Basically, we had our funnels in the beginning of the year were very strong, and they consummated towards the end of the quarter exactly as planned. No real change in what we saw in our CRM system and what was delivered. I mean, that's the way we look at it, and that's the way we look at it going forward. We have very clear insight into what customers want to do with instruments in particular. I think your question about what pharma is doing, and we did the same.
We basically built up inventory as fast as we could in the few days that were there from indication to announcement of the tariffs. What we did see is pharma increased production in Ireland, in other parts of the world where they had production sites, and the consumption of chemistry became higher. They depleted their safety stocks, and that has been replenished since. A bit different for chemistry than for instruments. In the case of chemistry, chemistry did scale with the mad rush to sort of produce more and then bring it to the U.S. as fast as possible in terms of end products. Different type of dynamics.
Is there any way to put some kind of rough numbers around how much inventory is being added versus just moving around the globe?
I wouldn't want to venture a guess.
I guess CapEx has kind of been the other theme, and you're certainly well positioned here. I think we've seen something like over $200 billion worth of announcements for the next five years or so. Maybe just talk a little bit about how you're thinking about that. Some of it will actually come, I think, sooner for you for some of the CapEx players. How are you thinking about just pharma CapEx over the next couple of years?
I think the first thing to say, Dyko, is the $200 billion that's been announced, I think one has to be careful not to assume that all of it is incremental. Some of it is incremental, and we've done some math to see how much of it is incremental versus what the companies had announced previously. Second, you then have to ask yourself, okay, how much of it is relevant to you, as in RTAM, LCMS, instruments, et cetera, and our industry in particular, and then, of course, to our company. We think overall, over the next five years, we're looking at a 50-ish million number for additional LCMS support if you look at the incremental CapEx that's being spent. That's very far from the large numbers that you cited.
I think one has to be cautious, and we can walk you through the math at a different time. That said, the second thing one needs to keep in mind is different parts of the value chain in the CapEx. You are not talking greenfield left, right, and center. You cannot do that in the short term. What you can do in the short term is put in fill finish. If you have sterile products, you can actually very quickly scale up fill finish facilities, and then that allows you to increase the volume locally. Of course, for us, that means more QC in the short term. I will caution again. I mean, you do not see me sort of jumping and saying, this is a great long-term driver. It is not.
In the long term, our business in QAQC, in manufacturing, in generics, in CDMO scales with the volume of medicines produced. Unless the additional CapEx increases the volume of medicines produced globally, you're not going to see a massive increase over the long term. You will see a bump, and then we'll have to catch up. I don't know exactly when that bump comes. We have not seen our customers start to order anything new. They've not started to talk about exactly what they're going to do and where. Early days, but a conceptual problem, I would just caution against getting euphoric about, hey, there's more capacity coming. There's going to be massive growth for everyone.
There could be growth in the short term, but definitely there'll be a catch-up down the line because I mean, the overall volume of consumption, if it gets produced in one geography versus another, leads to a short-term bump, but over the long term, you have to catch up.
How do you think about that in the context of the replacement cycle, which you've been talking about for a while and you saw it pick up a little bit at the end of last year? How do you think about that as it relates to some of the new CapEx too?
Completely independent. In fact, we were with customers at ASMS who we were talking through with on where they see the replacement cycle, how are they perceiving different parts of the value chain. It is the same as we have talked about earlier. Generally, the way to think about the replacement cycle, and again, I think we have done ourselves a bit of a disservice because we are thinking it is a binary event. Our business is 70% replacement. In that 70%, imagine a pool, and on the top, there is a wave. That wave basically correlates with a small fraction of the volume on the top. That is what changes the growth rates for the business. Then 30% is de novo use, completely new use. On the replacement cycle, in general, from trough to peak, you see a two- to three-year time frame.
You see two to three years of accretive growth on top of our long-term average of 5% instrument growth. This time around, we think the cycle will be longer. Hence, the peak should be a bit shallower because there's pressure still in China in the generics market. CROs are not recovering, biotech's not recovering, pharma discovery is not recovering, and there are instruments in those customer segments also that need replacement. On the other hand, the large pharma, generics, CDMO segments are very, very dynamic.
When do you think some of those segments that are lagging will pick up, CROs, China generics?
Difficult to tell. I mean, take it in turn. China generics, so let's talk about China in general for Waters first, and then I'll dig deeper into this. China for us in Q1 grew 5%. It was largely driven by growth in the academic segment, which grew double digits partly due to the stimulus, and the industrial segment, which grew double digits as well due to the dynamism in the battery segment. Pharma, branded generics, which is 50% of our business there, is still declining mid to high single digits. That is after several years of decline. Unless the volume-based pricing regime starts to change a bit, we think that pressure will continue. For biotech funding, I think you can look at the funding. The funding changes. Funding's gotten better, but the capital has not yet been allocated towards additional equipment, additional capacity.
For CROs and others, I think there are other folks who are a better place to answer that question. They're such small segments for us. It's not a meaningful discussion.
You had a good first quarter. You bumped core guidance slightly higher. You kept instruments unchanged around 5%. Maybe talk a little bit about, as we think about tougher comps in the back half of the year, some of the gives and takes on the instrument side.
I think it's just arithmetic, Dyko. Look, the first half versus the second half dynamic that you're referring to is an artifact of what we saw in 2023 and not 2024. 2024 was a normal year, 45% in the first half of the year of sales and 55% in the second half. Normally, that's what Waters used to do pre-pandemic. When you look at it quarter by quarter, a better way to look at it is a three-year CAGR. What you find is the first half and the second half are similar. If you look at a six-year CAGR from 2019 as a baseline, it's the same answer. It's an artifact due to 2023, where in the second half of the year, we started to see a lot of pressure build up in China.
Then 2024's second half looked much stronger than the first half of 2024.
Maybe just spend a minute on service. You're up 3% in the first quarter. There are obviously two less selling days. I don't know how that specifically impacts service versus consumables. As we think about a couple of things, the attach rate, you've talked about 500 basis points of improved attach rate you're targeting. How do we think about that in the context of everything going on in pharma? Is there risk they may start to move to third-party, cheaper service providers? How do you think about the gives and takes?
I think we think it's quite to the contrary. In fact, under times of pressure, pharma actually starts to redouble on people that they trust, redouble down on people that they trust. We see exactly the opposite in terms of service attachment rates. Very happy with our service team. We've seen the attachment rate go up 550 to 600 basis points since we started the transformation. We've upped our target to basically 10% instead of 5% over a five-year period. We're very happy with where the service team is. In Q1, service grew roughly 3%, basically due to two less days in the quarter. If you add that back, it's roughly 5% ish, which is lower than our long-term average of 6%-7%. That is generally explained by third-party vendors, so multi-vendor service folks who are ordering spare parts from us.
They basically depleted a bit of their inventory. You should start to see that come back sooner than later. Very happy with the service team. In fact, in times of replacement, in difficult times, also when people are moving sites, people rely specifically on our service team. The case in point is in India. The India generics market and generics customers rely on our service team, not just to ensure that the instruments are running well and the service is being done well, but also to prepare them for inspections. Several years ago, large Indian generics companies were being targeted or were subject to a lot of 483 and consent decrees. They never want that to happen. If that happens, their manufacturing sites have to shut down. They rely heavily on our service team.
Maybe just pivoting to software and Empower, you mentioned in your opening comments that you've opened it up to light scattering technology from Wyatt. Talk a little bit about how you think about that opportunity. I think it's the number one request you had from customers since you acquired the business. Maybe how should we think about that opportunity?
Again, I mean, maybe I make three comments. First, very happy with what the team's been able to do. I mean, it's one thing to say that you're going to do something in pre-acquisition. It's another to do it six to nine months faster. That's fantastic. Very happy with what folks have been able to do. In addition, working closely with customers who had requested this as the number one request. Now, that said, the second comment I'll make is, look, when you think of penetration of new products into QAQC, once they're in, it's a wonderful annuity. It's a replacement business, and you're not looking at replacing one or two instruments. You're looking at replacing tens of instruments. This is a fantastic value creation opportunity for Waters in the mid to long term. However, this takes time. It'll happen customer by customer.
The customers who asked us, who had medicines that they were using to characterize the biophysics with light scattering, are now going to be able to take it into QAQC. I do not expect this to be a massive increase in sales in Wyatt overnight. It will happen over time. Once it happens, then it will become a replacement business like LC. Our intent is to make light scattering into LC. There is a lot of work to be done to simplify it even more. Light scattering is much more complex in terms of the data that comes out of a light scattering instrument than an LC instrument. It is going to take some time to continue to simplify it, but the journey has started, and that is really, really exciting. Lastly, on your question on Empower, think of it again three ways.
First, short term, we believe that we need to refine our commercial model. It needs to go from an on-prem model, which used to be the case in the 1990s for many software companies, to a subscription model, which was in the 2000s, say 2010 onwards. Now most software is delivered through SaaS. We've started that journey. We've gone from on-prem. We're starting to offer our customers subscription models. It's a significant benefit from a cash flow perspective. We'll talk about it in the rearview mirror as that starts to happen. Customers are actually keen to transition because they do not want a CapEx every few years. They would rather have a subscription. That has benefits for us as well. Second, we're looking at expanding the applications of Empower across different types of instruments.
In addition, offering value-added services to our customers who are on Empower. Cloud-native applications. Customers often want to know how to integrate peaks much more efficiently using AI/ML techniques. We are offering that as an additional tool through Empower. We are offering the ability to get full visibility of your instrument fleet if you are on the right version of Empower. That is something that customers have been asking. I could go on, but there are several value-added apps that are being built on Empower, something that we had not done in the past. The third is a midterm initiative to take Empower from sort of a code that was written in the 1990s to a modern code so that you can offer Empower as a SaaS product.
Lots to do, a nice runway ahead, mostly organic, but maybe through some partnerships and through some M&A, we might be able to accelerate the journey.
Great. We've touched on China at various points in this conversation, but maybe we could just step back a little bit and give us kind of a state of the union there. Obviously, you've had a nice growth driver with China generics. Underlying growth rates for everybody are a little bit lower than they had been historically. How do you think about long-term durable growth in China? What does it take to get back to normalized growth? Are you assuming anything around stimulus?
Lots of questions there, Dyko. Normalized growth, let's start there. I think in the midterm, you should assume it's a low to mid single-digit grower. I mean, that's our assumption. I don't assume that China is going to 19%, 20%, or 15% like it did for several years from 2005 to 2018 or so to 2020. I think those days are for now in the rearview. There's a lot of structural changes that have to take place, and we can go through them in turn. That's sort of the headline. If you dig a bit deeper, the segments that are more dynamic now are the innovative biotech segment. That's going to continue to expand. It's a very exciting innovation that's coming out of China.
You can see that as many of the large pharma companies continue to license products more so from China than anywhere else in the world. It's not that they're brand new categories of compounds. They're biobetters. Antibody drug conjugates, the largest number of antibody drug conjugates that are being produced or developed are in China. Other types of peptides, stuff that already exists. There are 20 different PDL1s in China available already. If you don't have one in your pipeline, you should license it from there and bring it and develop it quickly. Part of the advantage is that the early-stage clinical process in China is much less onerous than it is in many other geographies. That makes a development process faster. They've built the talent over the years. I'm excited about what that's going to lead to.
Now, that could lead to, of course, a lot of outlicensing into large pharma, which I think is a short-term phenomenon. In the mid to long term, the translational ecosystem will develop like the rest of the world. You'll see some large pharma companies develop out of China, homegrown large pharma companies develop out of China. That is pretty exciting. That, over the next 5-10 years, should start to create a tailwind for companies like Waters and other companies in the tools industry. Second, other segments in the industrial area, especially the production of electric vehicles and batteries for electric vehicles, I mean, China is by far in the lead. Our TA business has the best growth in China. Our rheometers, our thermal analysis equipment is moving downstream. Think again, I mean, we like businesses that can go into high-volume regulated applications.
Once they're specced in, you have sort of a simple virtual cycle to replace them. That is where battery testing is heading. The first place where the transition will be made is in China. In the academic and government segment, given the geopolitical pressures, we expect there to be continued focus on innovation in those segments in China. How it comes remains to be seen. Is it a government stimulus? Is it VC money? Is it others that fund it? I do expect over the midterm, China starts to build other segments than the rest of the world. Excited about what we'll see in the midterm. Short term, I mean, I think we're pretty modest with our assumptions.
Just to round it on the geography, we touched on India a little bit, but you're up over 20% in the first quarter, well above kind of the long-range outlook there. Maybe just talk a little bit about that. There has been some discussion about India reducing U.S. tariff rates to zero and stronger bilateral relations. How could that factor into the outlook there over the course of the year?
Too early to comment on the second part of your question. I mean, we'll look at it once the facts are there. I mean, right now, a lot of conversations with our customers, many of them are planning for reshoring in different geographies to ensure that there is no disruption in the demand patterns, but nothing really that is concrete. In terms of trends that support the growth in China, I mean, over the last five years, basically, or in the forward-looking five years, there will be roughly 40% more volume of small molecule generics than there have been in the past five years. In the past five years, our India business has grown in the low to mid teens, or sorry, in the high teens. And what we've assumed going forward is low to mid teens, which is what you just commented on.
We think there is a lot we can do in China. Our relationships with the largest generics manufacturers there are excellent.
I made it this far without asking about PFAS. I guess we'll go there next. One Q growth was great, 90%. We've seen some new updates from the EPA talking about revisions in the drinking water standards. Talk a little bit about early views of some of the policy changes that potentially could impact that market. Do you think it'll continue to outgrow the market?
I think the policy changes, I mean, as you look deeper into what, and there were 23 or 24 different ideas in the announced policy changes. As you look deeper, there is a demand for better and more sensitive detection and more robust detection. Think TQ Absolute, think TQ Absolute XR. There is a higher demand for remediation. That opens up another segment, industrial manufacturers who have to remediate their existing products. We're already working with the large industrial manufacturers to help them do it. Other segments are starting to open up. The EPA has also said, hey, focus on larger chain molecules first, meaning PFAS and PFOS. Don't focus on smaller chain molecules. We want to basically ensure that long-chain molecules, which are detectable by LCMS, are out of the system first. Then we will start to look at smaller chain molecules.
They've narrowed down the PFAS molecules of interest. I mean, when you define PFAS, it's over 200 different species. The list keeps rising. They've said, look at two large chain type of species in the short term. That said, our customers, several of whom are in the water testing business, in the food testing business, or are manufacturers, as I just mentioned, want to remediate and want to detect anything and everything that is possible to detect because they believe down the line, the EPA is going to get more stringent. That's why the TQ Absolute has done so well, because it detects PFAS at one parts per quadrillion, whereas the requirements from the EPA are four parts per trillion, which is three orders of magnitude less. People are much more focused on sensitivity.
They're more focused on a wide variety of different molecules, even though the EPA has narrowed down what they want people to focus on in the short term.
Maybe in the closing minutes, we could hit on capital deployment. You did the Halo Labs deal. Talk a little bit about it. Not a huge impact in numbers, but talk a little bit about what that kind of brings to the portfolio. Then stepping back a little bit, how are you thinking about the appetite for M&A? What are you seeing kind of in terms of valuations in the market?
Dyko, Halo Labs is consistent with what we've been very public about. What are we interested in? Basically, we have a very simple business model. We take complex instrumentation, convert it into simple systems that have instruments that you and I can use, and basically arm it with compliance software like Empower. Our chemistry basically moves along with the complexity of the molecules that we're trying to detect. The service team has the highest NPS scores in the industry, and that makes that wheel work. We said, look, early on back in 2021, once we've turned our business around, once we've sort of gotten our commercial excellence, our innovation excellence back to where we want it to be, we will start to take this business model into other areas that have similar characteristics. Downstream, high-volume applications that eventually have regulatory barriers.
We said, look, we need to strengthen our focus on biologics. Bioseparations, bioanalytical characterization. In the bioanalytical characterization area, we first acquired Wyatt. Halo Labs is just the next step. There are several other techniques that belong in QAQC for detection of large molecules. We will continue to bring them on either through M&A or through partnerships or through organic development. BioCord is one such case. QDA2 is another case for partnerships. Capillary electrophoresis is a case. That ambition remains. We also said we're interested in applications of mass spec in clinical diagnostics. That is going super, super well. There will be a time to talk about that as well. We believe that is an area that has similar characteristics to what we see in QAQC in small and large pharma. Lastly, in battery testing, it is the same.
Those are the areas where we feel we want to allocate capital, both to strengthen the core and to strengthen our position in these faster-growing adjacencies where our business model is relevant. Equally, we feel that we've developed a very strong muscle in instrument replacement, in service plan attachment, in e-commerce, in innovation excellence. That is applicable to any company with a similar business model. We're excited about what we see going forward.
Just to close, how about the buyback? What would it take to turn that back on?
We always look at trade-offs between M&A and share buybacks. You will hear more about it as we go forward.
Great. We're at time. I want to thank you, Udit, for taking the time today.
Thank you, Tika.