Sartorius AG

and a warm welcome from my side. I'm joined today by our CEO, Michael Große, by Florian Funk, our CFO, by René Faber, Head of our Bioprocessing Division and CEO of the Terrestrial Biotech, and by Alexandra Gatzmeier, Head of our Products and Services Division. As always, we will start with prepared remarks followed by the Q&A session. As the call is scheduled to one hour, please limit your question to one so that as many participants as possible can take part. Please note that management comments during this call will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainty for discussion of risk factors. I encourage you to review the safe harbor statement contained in today's press release and presentation. With that, I'm pleased to hand over to Michael Postel, CEO of Sartorius. Michael, please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Petra, and a warm welcome also from my side. And thank you all for joining us today for our preliminary full year 2025 results. Before we begin, I would like to sincerely thank all of our colleagues across Sartorius for their commitment and dedication over the past year. Their passion, professionalism, and strong focus on execution are clearly reflected in our results we are presenting today. I would also like to personally thank everyone who has made it such a smooth and rewarding experience for me to step into my role as a CEO, and particular thanks as well to my colleagues here, Alexander, Renee, and Dorian from the executive team, It's been a really great journey up to now, fantastic work on the strategy, and great things to come. And I don't want to miss out as well on saying thank you to the team here from investor relations, communications, and finance, because I think the workload over the last couple of weeks and days has been tremendous in order to get us all prepared and get our reporting in place. Thank you all for that. Now, let me briefly summarize key messages that we would like to share with you today. First of all, 2025 was characterized by return to normal demand behavior for consumer goods and continued cautious investment activities by our customers. Combined with an active operational management in a still challenging environment, we delivered improved operational and financial performance. Am I on the right? Okay. All right, supported by the improvement, improving demand trends mainly on the consumer side and the operating leverage inherent in our model, Sartoris achieved considerable profitable growth. For the full year, we delivered results slightly ahead of our upgraded full year 2025 sales guidance. Profitability landed in the upper half of our initial guidance from April and exceeded our October EBITDR target with a margin of 29.7%. This performance reflects growing volumes, operating leverage, and strong execution. Now, growth was once again driven by our recurring business across both divisions. In bioprocess solutions, strong double-digit growth in recurring revenue more than offset continued softness in equipment, which, however, stabilized over the year. In networks and services, performance improved regularly as expected. Growth in H2 was driven by recurring business, while instruments showed positive momentum, also supported by product launches in bioanalytics. Our operating performance allowed us to further reduce our leverage ratio, underscoring our commitment to financial discipline and a strong balance sheet. Overall, in 2025, we laid a solid foundation for the year 2026. For the group, we expected sales growth of around 5% to 9%, with an underlying EBITDR margin slightly above 30%. Let me now turn to action we are taking to enable future growth. Let's talk about innovation and partnerships. We have made tangible progress in two key areas, innovation and the expansion of our resilient global R&D and production capacity. We launched several new solutions across both divisions. In bioprocessing, we made progress in more sustainable product design with the launch of Satopor Evo, a PFAS-free filtration solution which addresses growing regulatory and customer expectations around the elimination of persistent substances while maintaining the high performance and reliability our customers require. We also launched the Satocon Cassettes, further strengthening our offering for efficient and scalable downstream processing, particularly for viral vector purification. Now, on the equipment side, we introduced a continuous bioprocessing platform developed with , which faces high customer interest. This platform supports the industry's transition from traditional batch production to continuous processes, enabling faster, more efficient, and more sustainable manufacturing workflows. And our teams advanced our bioanalytical portfolio, including the only live cell imaging system with confocal microscopy inside an incubator, a really important step forward for the work with complex 3D cell models. We further strengthened this area also through the acquisition of MATCHEC, expanding our portfolio of advanced 3D cell models that more closely mimic human tissue, deliver more predictive and reproducible results, and help reduce the need for animal testing. And we entered into a partnership with Nanoteam Technologies, enhancing our capabilities in cell expansion and activation to support next-generation biologics. In parallel, we continue to invest in a resilient global manufacturing footprint. We completed the expansion of Banyan and progressed with the expansion in Germany, as well as with the construction of our Greenfield site in Songdo, South Korea. ensuring scalability, supply reliability, and proximity to our customers. Taken together, these actions strengthen our ability to support customers as market normalize and position for Sartorius for sustainable innovation that grows over the coming years. With this, let's take a closer look into our numbers. Yeah, thank you, Michael, and a warm welcome also from my side to everybody out there. I'm happy to take you through our numbers that reflect, in my perspective, the consistently strong performance in the year 2025. So let's start with top-line performance. Our sales revenue increased by 7.6% in constant currencies and 4.7% in reported currencies, reaching slightly more than 3.5 billion euros. This positive development was driven by mid-teens growth in our recurring business in 2025, which represents by far the largest part of our business, as you know. Our non-recurring business remained soft on a four-year basis, but clearly stabilized in H2 and was above H1 in absolute numbers as expected. The difference between constant currency and reported growth was primarily driven by U.S. dollar weakness which represents a headwind of almost 300 basis points to reported sales growth in fiscal year 2025. Our full-year performance was also influenced by U.S. tariffs. The successful implementation of tariff surcharges contributed approximately one percentage point to sales revenue growth. Order intake developed strongly, growing faster than sales. And as a result, our 12-month rolling book-to-bill ratio remained consistently above one throughout the year 25. Although, as expected and also communicated in our last quarterly call, it declined slightly sequentially in Q4 due to a very strong prior year comparison. An absolute terms order intake in Q4 was roughly on par with the exceptional strong Q4 2024 You remember that above $1 billion figure that we posted there. And that was the quarter with the highest absolute ordering trade in 2025. And therefore, we entered 2026 on the back of a strong order book. Looking at our divisions in more detail, BioProcess Solutions delivered another strong quarter, bringing full-year sales revenue growth to 9.5% in constant currency. Growth was driven by mid-teens growth in consumables throughout the year, while equipment remained soft, as Michael already mentioned, but was clearly stabilizing, with H225 sales being double-digit percentage above H125 sales. Lead products and services delivered a resilient performance in a challenging market environment. Sales were essentially flat at 0.2% in constant currencies plus. supported by solid momentum in consumables and services. The acquisition of MATIC contributed slightly more than one percentage point to growth. Instrument sales were impacted by constrained CAPEX spending in life science research and markets. However, we are seeing encouraging signs of stabilization, supported by positive momentum in bioanalytics in the second half, driven in part also by the launch of several updated instruments in that market. Let me also quickly elaborate on our regional performance. EMEA sales performance remained robust, with growth of almost 6% in 2025. As a reminder, the recovery in EMEA started earlier than in other regions and therefore faces higher base effects compared to the Americas or APEC. The Americas outperformed, growing by 8.9%, like APEC, which also grew by 8.9%. In APEC, China continued to stabilize with early signs of improvement. Excluding China, the APEC region delivered low double-digit growth in the year 2025.

Let's now turn to our profitability.