Good afternoon. Welcome. Dan Brennan here at Cowen's 42nd Annual Healthcare Conference, day three, finishing strong, with the CEO of Waters Corporation, Udit Batra, who I've known from back in his Merck days. Really looking forward to this conversation. Hopefully, it's been a great conference for all of you. Feel free, anyone who's watching or listening to the webcast to shoot me a question through the video link. I think you've been using it, and I'll see it pop up, and we'll try to integrate it with our flow of questions. But I just wanted to say to Udit, welcome, and thanks for being here.
Thank you, Dan. Happy to be here.
Excellent. I thought maybe a couple of kind of high-level questions to kick it off. I mean, one of which is just recognizing, you know, the state of the world, with what's happened and, you know, Russia and Ukraine, the awful tragedy there, and, you know, some of the fallouts from that. You know, the oil price is up, you know, 30%. You know, risk of recession, you know, probably higher, and, you know, consumer confidence, we assume, and business confidence probably being negatively impacted. Just wondering, Udit, like, you know, to what extent, you know, from some of those metrics, anything there that kind of creates a risk either as we sit here today for first quarter or for your 2022 guidance?
So, Dan, firstly, I think the most important thing here is all the people who are impacted by what's happening right now. As you know, I have lots of friends in different parts of Europe who are physically much closer to the crisis. The first thing we did is we got our employees out of that zone. In fact, the morning of the invasion, I think it was 5:28 A.M., I sent a message to my HR head and said, "Get everybody out," and we were successfully able to, and there were a couple of colleagues in Russia. That's the first order of business, and I mean, our heart, at least my heart goes out to everyone who's there and all my friends and colleagues who are in Europe as well. Overall, from a business standpoint, it's not that impactful.
I mean, Russia and Ukraine constitute less than 0.5% of our sales, so it's not that substantive at all. From a supply chain perspective, there's not much impact either. We don't source much out of Russia or out of Ukraine or that part of the world. So really, from a business standpoint, not much impact. And then I think you talked about inflation and commodity prices. Our TA business does sell into that area overall, as you know, the industrial space. And that, I mean, the business has done super well over the last year. There is no sort of abating of demand that we see on that front in the TA business. And secondly, we've been pivoting that business more towards even faster-growing areas with secular demand like batteries and recyclable polymers. So all in all, really no meaningful impact.
And also, from a pricing perspective, I think that does not add to our challenges, at least not right now.
Great. No, thanks for that, Udit. That was great. So, you know, it's been about 1.5 years since you joined Waters. You know, the company's seen a material improvement in growth, you know, from the low single, mid-single, up to the mid-single plus. Including this year, you're at 5%-7%. You've got five initiatives, probably more than that, many more than that, but I believe five that you've been discussing as a key enabler to add 100 basis points a year plus a revamped management commercial team on top of that. So, maybe the question is, of the five initiatives, like, which of those represent, do you think, the biggest benefit as you're thinking about your 2022 guidance? And, like, do you endorse that 5%-7% growth?
Is that, is that the right way to think about Waters as we get past 2022 into 2023 as well?
Yeah. Dan, a lot to unpack there, right? So, but overall, first thing and the most important thing you need to know is Waters is back on track. I mean, that's what we had said that we would do first, commercially for sure, and the metrics suggest that, and I'll get into that in a minute. And when you said more than five initiatives, no. In fact, it's two more than I usually would've had. Usually, I think in threes, and I said, "Okay, five is fine." We had 50 ideas, and we said, "Nope, five," and that's it, right? And that gets implemented through and through the organization. So it's not 20. It's only five commercial initiatives that are really driving the growth. They all add, I mean, if you just look at the overlaps, etc., about 1% to the growth.
And that's why the algorithm is, "Look, mid-single-digit market as it stabilizes, 4%-6%, and so we should have a 20% lead over the market. If the market's midpoint is 5%, we'll grow at 6. If it grows at 7, we'll grow at 8." And we think these initiatives add on. And all of these initiatives should help us at least over the next two to three years and some even longer, right? So now to sort of pick through them,
Yeah.
Each one of them is adding in its own right. I mean, I don't think you can pick one and say, "Well, this one's higher and this one's lower this year versus next year." I mean, the instrument replacement is sort of explanatory. We added $30 million in 2021. We'll add $40 million, so $10 million incremental. The service attachment rate, super exciting initiative. We're already in the mid-40s in the service attachment rates or from, from plan to warranty conversion. That's a very, that's a pretty respectable number, as I look at industry peers. But we think we can take it much higher than that, especially with what we've done in, in the U.S. and in Western Europe, and we can do that in China. I think it's, it's, there's quite a nice runway. That was 200 basis points over the last two years.
Contract manufacturing as a segment, again, something that was ignored for many years. I mean, we've just started, right? So we've gone from about 15% penetration to 20% penetration. We think it should be around 30% or so. That's going to take a couple of years as well. e-commerce. You know my history from MilliporeSigma, and I mean, you know, there we had 70%-80% of our business in, with a significantly larger consumables business going through e-commerce, and here we had about 20%. So we have a nice runway to get when the market median is around 50%, and so the next 2-3 years, maybe four years, we get to 50%. So you can see nice runway there, and then finally, launch excellence. You know, Waters has a history of finding difficult problems to solve. Go back to the UPLC time frame.
Now, with our premier technology, with our MRT and with our Arc HPLC, we find difficult problems to solve. We solve them. We were just sort of stumbling on launch excellence. And the latest case in point is relaunch of BioAccord, which we repurposed from QA/QC to clone selection and bioprocessing, and that's starting to get meaningful traction. And I think that basically is it. And I, you're asking me to pick amongst my kids which one I bet on. I, I don't bet on any of them. I bet on all of them altogether, and, and it's going very well. And thank goodness, it's not me operate, operationally running it day in, day out. It's Jon Pratt and Jianqing, and I'm all watching them. And it's, it's, it's a terrific team. Yeah. So I, I feel very good about where we've started and where we're going.
Great. We'll certainly dig into a few of those here coming up, but maybe before we do that, I'm going to go beyond those five, right? You started to discuss three new areas on top that can impact growth, excuse me, starting in 2023. I think bioprocess characterization, bioseparations, and LC-MS and diagnostics. I remember going, I think it must've been ASMS, like, in 2013. We were talking about diagnostics at Waters back then as well. So, which of these is... no, it's not. Listen, it's not you. It's like, I mean, it is a very accurate tool, right? It is an extremely accurate tool. So there's so much opportunity.
We hosted a call with Mayo Clinic a couple of years ago, and they said they're putting the screws to the mass spec vendors because we want this tool to be more pervasive and make it simple to use. So everyone understands the power right there. So it wasn't a jab by any means. But so maybe which of those three you think is the closest to being a material revenue contributor today? A, and then B, are these three going to come on top of the 5-7, or are they replacing some of those drivers? Like, how do we think about that kind of shift?
Most, I mean, the best way to think about it is on top, right? So we said the 5-7 has the possibility of becoming 6-8 higher or lower. I mean, don't ask me. I mean, remember when we started MilliporeSigma, the weighted average was 4.5%. We ended it, when I at least left, was about 9%, right? So I'm not going to say that's the trajectory, but I think if you focus on tough problems to solve and you don't veer too far away from what the heck you know about, right? I mean, if you don't veer too far away from your core competencies, it works out, right? And in this case, it's really relevant. And these three areas, there are different levels of maturity, right? So let me take each of these in turn, right?
So let's start with LC-MS and diagnostics. This is the one that you started with. We have a $150 million-$200 million business already in diagnostics with mass spec for newborn screening and for therapeutic drug monitoring. So it exists already. And we had a dry run with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and I can tell you, had we started that process of developing an LC-MS workflow for diagnostics for SARS-CoV-2 back in January of 2020, as opposed to September, October of 2020, when I came in, we would've definitely had it in parallel to PCR. There is no question in my mind, right? The workflow is that good. The selectivity and the sensitivity is high. And you have much fewer false positives, right?
With PCR, you know, when I'm going to travel next week and I can't take a PCR test because I had, even after getting vaccinated and boosted, a two-day Omicron bout. So if I do it now, there's a possibility that, that PCR is, PCR comes up with a false positive, and then I can't travel. So I'm not doing PCR. I'm doing an antigen test. Now, with LC-MS, that's not a possibility. So it's a tool that is made for this area. And then what is the challenge? The challenge is asset development. The challenge is regulatory and commercial. We have the box, and we have the informatics, and that's what we're working on, right? And our target is to go into endocrinology and go into oncology where, where you need multiple biomarkers to be analyzed in parallel with a multi-omics tool.
It's a tough problem, Dan, otherwise it would've already been solved. But you know what? I think if you don't try, you don't fail. I'm not saying we fail, but we're going to try, and it's going to be a long, long process. And anything that helps us accelerate that journey, right, be it sample prep, be it informatics, be it commercial or regulatory capabilities, we'll look at inorganic and partnership options as well. So that's one where we already have a base, right? And it's, and we know what we're doing, and we're progressing very nicely, right? And we've, in fact, what we've done, again, picking out from what we did at Millipore, we basically separated that business out of our big Waters division and said, "Okay, you're going to be globally verticalized." Jianqing Bennett has it under her now, and she's leading it.
And basically, it's a global business. So you win and lose, and we know what's happening as opposed to it being getting muddied by other businesses, right? So I think it's, I feel very good about what we're trying to do. It's early days. Second is bioanalytical characterization. And again, this was somehow, again, a bit opportunistic, but also really thinking through where there is a difficult problem to solve. And this is a collaboration with Sartorius, right? So having worked in this industry for a long time, I mean, one of the problems I knew about is clone selection in early-stage development of biotherapeutics. So in every process lab in the world, you are trying to do clone selection or you're trying to do bioprocess or bioprocess optimization. And the BioAccord is tailor-made for that application.
For instance, the workflow for clone selection of cell lines takes about six weeks with the Sartorius Ambr bioreactor system. We were able to work with Sartorius and narrow that down to less than two weeks, right? A significant acceleration in timing means you can go to market much faster. That one is also very nicely on track. Then the last one is bioseparations, right? Again, we are a world leader in developing columns for separation of small molecules, and the same logic applies for large. Here we have invested quite a bit organically, and we're looking for ways to accelerate that by partnering with reagent companies and the like.
So you can see across the board there is progress, but if I were to pick, I would say stable base already in LC-MS. We're just moving sideways and organically if the team's ready and moving. In bioprocessing, we've been very fortunate. We have a lot of traction with our, with our workflows with clone selection, and we're looking at other areas. And with the LC, with the, with bioseparations, it's early days, but it looks, looks reasonably good.
In terms of the cumulative, again, we'll find out more as we move forward in these sizes, but cumulatively, those work out. Again, they're coming at different points, and you're saying, you know, there's investment, and it's going to take time. I mean, could those be more than a point, less than a point? I mean, it sounds like, you've given some numbers, I know, on the Sartorius install base, and you've walked through some of that math, but I just figured, I apologize, like, is there an aggregate potential from these, you know, if they go reasonably well?
No, no, I don't. I mean, because there's so much sort of fuzzy math with it, right?
Yeah.
The timing and the total addressable market.
Yeah.
More in all three cases, it's a new application we are creating.
Yeah.
Right? So there is not an existing market that's been sized by competitors.
Yeah.
Right? It's a new market that's being created. I mean, I'll give you an example of the bioprocess one, right? I mean, we said there are 800 Ambr systems, and we went bottom-up and calculated a $500 million or so TAM. Now, that would be 2, 3, 4x that, if the traction is better and if we go to many more labs than we had assumed, right? So that's the bottom-up basis. Another way to calculate it is to say, "Look, every processing lab should have a simple LC-MS tool in it." If you go around with that calculation, you come to a similar number, right? So a $500 million or so TAM, and then you say, "Well, is it in three years, five years, seven years, 10 years?
Right.
I don't know. I don't know. It's a question of how fast we solve the problem. It could be very fast traction. I mean, the way to think about it is, and the leading indicator there, Dan, is how quickly some of our customers adopt the technique in their workflows.
Yeah.
How quickly it starts to appear in the Drug Master Files.
Yeah.
Right? And that then gives you confidence, say, "Okay, this is something that the regulators accept. Now we are in a new world of bioanalytical characterization.
Interesting. Okay. That's great. So maybe circling back on some of the initial five initiatives, and then go through some other questions here. But the first one is just on e-commerce mix of consumables. So as you go up, you know, from where you are today towards, I think, the goal of, I think you said it was like 55 or it might've been higher than that. Apologies. Like, what's the revenue pull-through as that mix goes up?
I mean, rule of thumb, right? Every $5-$7 or $10 that you spend on e-commerce, assume $1 is incremental.
Got it.
I mean, and if you do it extremely well, it could be better, but if you do it poorly, it's on the $10 range, in for every $10, it's one. If you do it very well, it's for every $4 , it's $1, right? So.
Got it.
It can be pretty significant upside.
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I got it. Maybe shifting over to instruments. You know, you had a really robust year last year after two years of negative growth. You've got the tough comp, so you're guiding to, I think, 5% this year, but, you know, given the trend line in 2019 and 2020, I would think that 5% still could be conservative just given, you know, the cumulative base of this, correct? So just kind of wondering on that. And then which initiative has the biggest impact for you on instruments?
Okay. So take a step back on instruments, right? Historically, instrument growth rate for Waters, and we've been tracking Waters for a long time, has been 3%-4%. And I'm not talking 2015 onwards where we had a bit of other challenges. From 2010 to 2015, the average instrument growth rate is 3%-4%, and that was somehow industry-leading, right? We grew on a stacked basis, and now I ignore 2020 because the growth rate was dramatic, right? I mean, it was 23% versus 2020. But versus 2019, on a two-year basis, on a two-year CAGR, it was a 5% growth. So we were tracking well ahead of historical average, say 20%-25% higher than previous best years of Waters. So that is a reasonable starting point. Now, look at it another way, right? So let's just take another angle.
And we were, and you can imagine, I mean, again, as you know me, and we, we're pretty analytical about how we think about estimates. So we basically also looked at the competitive set, right? And I said, "On a two-year basis, forget 2020, if I were to just take the analytical instrument businesses of our key competitors," and you know who they are, right?
Yeah.
You take them and you say, "Okay, I," and it's very difficult these days when people are changing nomenclature from core to organic to COVID versus non-COVID, but for several competitors, it's very straightforward. You can actually pull it out, and it's very clean as they report the full year.
Yeah.
On a full year, on a two-year basis, I mean, we grew 7%-7.5% on a stacked basis.
Right.
The rest of the industry was slightly shy of that. I mean, the average was around 5-ish %. And when you look at the instrument growth rate, it was, again, between 3%-4%. So the 5% number is actually pretty ambitious, right? On an ongoing basis, right? So in general, when you think of the algorithm, 5% of instrument growth, if you just think of what happened, versus 2019 and 2021, on a stacked basis, we said 7% stacked growth, 5%, on instruments, 6% on service, and then 9%-10% on consumables. And that's how the 7% name number was deconvoluted. So that algorithm is still pretty relevant, yeah?
Yeah. Yeah. No. Okay. That makes sense. No, that's totally fair. So maybe just back to the replacement cycles, just what was the, is it possible to tease out, like, how much the replacement cycle impacted you in 2021 and what's kind of baked in this year for that? I mean, is it kind of a, just trying to unpack the replacement cycle impact for you?
No, I mean, it's another $10 million on top, right? So $30 million, $30 million incremental in 2020 because that was last year.
Yeah.
We've sort of baked in in 2022, and you can. We had about 13,000 we found across the board, across LC and different types of mass spec and UPLC that we found should've been replaced over the last five years or so. We basically said, "Okay, put them into a database," and we started going through it. So as we've gone through it, we've contacted each and every customer. We feel there is still a nice runway over the next 2-3 years that it'll contribute as much or more it has than it has in the previous year. So, so a lot to do.
You can ask, "Hey, why does it take long?" You know, customers don't have capital sitting, just capital sitting around when we go and say, "We've gotta replace this and replace that." When their capital cycle comes up, and they're not replacing one or two instruments. These are big replacements, right? People usually buy 50 LCs if they're going to replace everything in a lab, and that's a pretty significant purchase. Some of them have said, "You know, not this year, but next year for sure we will do it." That's how we do the projections, yeah?
Got it. Okay. So maybe looking at a little higher level on pharma, you know, there was a few smaller competitors who noted some near-term pressure from emerging pharmas. I'm sure you've got this question 15x , but net, we're still trying to get level set with some of the larger players in this space. So emerging biopharma, you know, balance sheets are great. Now the capital markets are effectively shut. So are you seeing any impact from that group of customers in terms of demand trends? And maybe could you give us a sense of how big maybe pre-commercial pharma is for your business?
Less than 5%.
Got it.
Of the total pharma business, right, that we have, so 60% of our total business is pharma. I mean, less than that, less than 5% of that is pre-commercial pharma, and you know Waters' business model. I mean, we are more heavily weighted towards QA/QC.
Mm-hmm.
Or so in development and at least in discovery, right? And that sort of jives with what, what I just told you, right? So our, I mean, our business is very resilient because it scales with the volume of testing of existing molecules that have been already filed, right? So it's very predictable. Most of the, most of the revenue comes from medicines that are already on the market and repeatable testing as long as we replace the instruments, as long as when the customer calls and wants a service call or some consumable, we supply it. I mean, that part of the business is super robust. The early stage is more relevant for chemistry.
Yeah.
There too, in pre-commercial pharma, it's less than 5% of total business.
Got it. Okay. Maybe, maybe just one more broadly on LC-MS. So it's just interesting that we, you don't hear who's losing share. I mean, all the vendors say they're gaining share, right? So, or they're holding share. So I'm just trying to, you know, how do we, you and I have talked in the past about, you know, trying to compare some relative share numbers and, and, I'm just wondering, is, is there, is there a decent part of the market that is from smaller players that we're not really focused on that are just not as competitive and that all, all the big players at varying degrees during their strong cycles can, can really take some share? Or just how do we think about the cumulative market growth and then also the share shifts?
Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit frustrating, but I mean, if it's relevant, people will go after it, right? So I give you sort of a three-faceted answer. So when I took over, I said, "Guys, I need to know how we're growing, how the market is growing. I hear Waters is trailing the market." And people said, but we don't have the right portfolio. Other folks have this portfolio, and you came from a bioprocessing player, and then you had this and that." And I said, "Okay, clean it up. Let's develop an algorithm. It's where it's apples to apples." Okay? And we did this at MilliporeSigma as well. We said, "We'll compare our bioprocessing business to Sartorius," right? The fastest growing. And then I used to have debates with corporate on who's faster every quarter.
And perhaps you could talk to Joachim Kreuzburg and ask him who was faster every quarter because we were used to look at each other's numbers. But you can do that if you really look at people's public reports. So all the key competitors, so that was the starting point. And I said, "Okay, develop an algorithm." So we developed a simple algorithm, right? And this is the second point I want to make. We said, "What is the analytical instrument base of these competitors? The larger ones, Thermo, Danaher, etc., and even Agilent, that is publicly reported." And they report these numbers, organic growth numbers, right? And that is the most relevant comparison to us. Take out M&A and take out COVID. And they do that themselves. So you have very clean comparisons historically. There is no leading indicator. So historical comparisons are very easy to do.
If you do those comparisons for full year 2021, right? So do full year 2021 for all of these folks and us, what you find is on a two-year basis, the market amongst the analytical instrument businesses, and these are larger ones, you find basically 5-ish % stacked growth. We were clocking close to 7%. There's another one who's closer to 7%. I won't tell you which one, but you can do it, it's all publicly reported, Dan, right? I mean, it's six or seven players, and that's how we look at the league table, right? So that's the second method. The third one is self-reported, right? Our reps come in through our CRM, tell us the win-loss ratio, and that is a proxy for the market share. It has been significantly higher than it was in 2019, right?
So I don't want to cite that externally because that's an internal number, but every direction we look at, we feel we're holding our own or doing better. There is no publicly reported market share number, and we're working on this. I mean, our intent is to develop that, an objective view on that, and I'll share that once we finish that algorithm. But I feel we're definitely holding our own and doing better. And then, I don't know which one is losing, but if you just went through that league table yourself, you'll find some are growing at 3%-4%, some of the larger players as well, and then a couple of us are growing at 7-ish%, and you find who might be losing share and who might be gaining share.
Got it. Okay. Maybe moving over to software. Can you just walk us through? You've got, you know, strategic initiatives related to the LC and Empower software. Just kind of walk through your software strategy today. I know you've had some key initiatives. What kind of impact it's had thus far, and how do we think about, you know, what it can mean going forward?
Yeah. So think of our informatics approach in, again, three dimensions, right? First, we have the Empower base, the LC CDS, right? The chromatography data system. Roughly 50% of instruments that are plugged into Empower are competitive instruments, right? And 50% are Waters instruments. So the first and foremost task is to figure out, and we invest a fair bit in keeping up Empower, right? And we basically spend a lot of time upgrading it, improving the user interface, improving the drivers, etc., right? I won't get into the technical details, but we spend a lot of time. It was not being monetized as it should've been, right? And so we initiated some approaches, which meant that the competitors who wanted to plug into Empower had to pay a fee, right?
more than what they might have done in the past. So that's an obvious first initiative. What is the economic benefit of the investment we're making, and can we make sure that it is commensurate with the investment we're making, right? And it's a pretty important thing to do. Second, we said, "Look, can we develop, can we help our customers develop insights from the data that they have in Empower," right? And that's a work in progress, and we were working with several vendors who were extracting data, and we've been working with them to figure out how we aim to monetize that for Waters, but also to answer the questions that many of our customers have as they analyze the data. And the third one, which is most exciting, is to develop a cloud-ready platform, right?
And so this is Waters Connect, and we did this first for the mass spec side because we didn't want to touch Empower. We did it for the mass spec side. We launched Waters Connect, and most recently, we launched a quantitative mass application for our tandem quads for our mass specs, which basically processes data 50% faster than the industry-leading software, right? And that's super exciting for our food safety customers, who test hundreds and thousands of samples a day. So they save 50% of the time with a simpler user interface. We'll take that idea now into environmental and then into pharmaceutical uses before the end of the year. So very exciting roadmap for informatics, but it starts with monetizing what we have, and we weren't doing that sufficiently.
Again, consistent with the turnaround mentality that we had, let's just monetize what we have and then building value add, and then finally, the platform for the future.
So how do we see that manifest? It's obviously stickier. You get a little higher revenues, it sounds like. It's stickier. The informatics, you know, the cloud-ready, maybe that drives higher margins. So when you, you know, besides strategically cementing your position, how does it manifest in the income statement again?
So to give a very, very simple example, right? So we were not charging for, charging enough, in my view, for plugging into Empower. If I charge $1 yesterday, I'm charging $5 today. I'm not saying that's what we did. We, for one, we charged $2, something like this. And that's an obvious increase that flows right to the bottom line, right? So that's the first. When I say economic benefit, that's what I mean, yeah? On the second, on the value add, it's a service. The customer wants to process data. How can you build a software that helps him extract data and process the data? And the third one, which is again most exciting, it's a much longer build. I would not get too excited about it yet because the cloud-ready piece, I mean, the customers are super conservative.
I mean, Lipitor's data is not getting out of the premises of Pfizer. I can assure you it's not going to go into any cloud, no matter what it is.
Right.
So that's, I think we have to be patient there. But the first two are pretty significant for us. So I just want to give you a flavor.
Yeah.
I won't give you the exact quantitation, but I think the logic is in where there's a price increase, it goes right to the bottom line.
They're in the numbers, they're in your guidance today? Are they upside levers? Like, where do they fit?
A mix because some of this we didn't know how well it would hit. So it's a mix.
Okay. Okay. So we're almost out of time. I'm going to do a quick one on margins. So just one on margins. So, so you talked about 5% top line gets you, you know, north of 50 basis points, you know, 50%-55% on operating margin, but you're investing. So you're showing less than that today. So I guess how much, how long do these reinvestments occur for? Like, when do we, when do you show that leverage?
Now, look, I mean, just the math first, right? I mean, basically just looking at the gross margin itself, we're offsetting inflation with pricing, right? So that's why the gross margin is flat. Then 50 basis points on productivity, 50 basis points on leverage, subtract FX, and that leaves you with 50 or so basis points for investments so you can show 20 basis points of margin expansion. That's the math, right?
Got it.
That's straightforward.
Yeah.
On the investment time horizon, we see over the next 2-3 years significant investment, which is about, in this case, if you do 50 basis points, it's about $15 million-$17 million. It's not a ton, but it's good enough to sort of get these initiatives started, and we expect then these initiatives to pay back in that timeframe, right, so if I were to compare apples to apples, yes, you should see margin expansion in 2025-2026, that timeframe, and up to 2023, 2022, 2023, 2024, maybe 2024, you start to see early stages of turnaround. It again depends on, Dan, how quickly some of these things get traction. Bioprocessing is out of the gates very fast. LC-MS for diagnostics is out of the gates nicely. Bioseparations has just started, and it's in the incubation stages.
So I don't want to get too prescriptive, but that gives you the algorithm. Next 2-3 years, yeah, we're investing. 20, 30 basis points is a reasonable assumption. And if things get traction faster, you see the margin expansion faster. And that's not to say that we will not have other growth ideas. I would much rather grow the top line double digit than have it be 5% and give you the margin expansion that you're aiming for. The overall profitability and the overall EPS will scale better if my top line grows faster. That's the ambition.
Got it. We're a minute past. We're supposed to be out of time. I'm going to sneak in one quick last one. So I think you've come on, you've kind of reset the growth rate. You've done a lot of blocking and tackling. You're kind of moving forward with some interesting growth initiatives. So I think investors kind of see that and they get it, and you're a good communicator. Is there anything you think that folks aren't paying enough attention to right now? I mean, it's an execution story, obviously, but where would you say people might not be appreciating enough if that exists?
I think, I mean, in general, I would say nothing is, for people who followed us, nothing is really misunderstood. I think it's just a question of understanding it better, right? The first thing you need to know is Waters has a resilient business model, right? We get into QA/QC, and that machine works, provided we don't take the eye off the ball. We take sophisticated instruments, we simplify them. I talked about Empower already, and we can get value out of our informatics software. We have consumables, and we have service, right? I mean, it's a terrific business model. That's the first and the most important thing. Second, our exposure to pharma is one of the highest in the industry, right? And this whole discussion gets lost in, well, how much do you have biologics and how much do you have this?
It's one of the highest in the industry, if not the highest, right? What does that mean? That means we know what the heck is going on in pharma. We know what problems are there to solve in pharma. And it's not a mystery that we figured out that bioseparations is an area that pharma has great needs in. And bioanalytical characterization is another area where they have great needs in. So we are very, very deeply embedded with pharma, which is the fastest growing market. And I think that somehow gets lost in the messaging, right? I mean, how much is small molecule, how much is large molecule? You know, small molecule is not a bad word. 80% of the pharma market is still large molecule. And guess what? Most of the industry scales with that small molecule growth, not with the large molecule growth.
So I think those are the two points I would say.
Yeah.
Once you spend more time on, say, look, it's a resilient business model. It's not going anywhere. Great gross margin, highest margins in the industry, great free cash flow, and a very strong position if we have the intent, the courage, and the strategy to move into these faster spaces, and that's what we intend to do. We are very well positioned.
Excellent. Well, Udit, thanks again. Love talking with you. Have a great rest of the day here. Hope everyone had a good presentation here and hopefully enjoyed the conference and finished strong. Thank you.
Thank you, Dan. Always good to talk to you.
Cheers.
Take care.
Bye-bye.