BioLife Solutions, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the third quarter 2021 BioLife Solutions earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker for today, Mr. Troy Wichterman, Chief Financial Officer of BioLife Solutions. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Eli. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our third quarter earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mike Rice, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Rod de Greef, President and Chief Operating Officer. Earlier this afternoon, we issued a press release which detailed our financial results and operational highlights for the three and nine months ended September 30th, 2021. As a reminder, during this call, we may make certain projections and other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company or its acquisitions. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. for a detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that affect the company's business and that qualify as forward-looking statements, I refer you to our periodic and other public filings filed with the SEC. Company projections and forward-looking statements are based on factors that are subject to change, and therefore these statements speak only as of the date they are given. The company assumes no obligation to update any projections or forward-looking statements except as required by law. During this call, We will speak to non-GAAP or adjusted results. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP or adjusted financial metrics are included in the press release we issued this afternoon. These non-GAAP or adjusted financial metrics should not be viewed as an alternative to GAAP. However, in light of our M&A activity, we believe that the use of non-GAAP or adjusted metrics provides investors with a clearer view of our current financial results when compared to prior periods. I'd like to turn the call over to Mike Rice, BioLife's Chairman and CEO.

Thanks Troy, and it's great to have you in the CFO role and on your first earnings call with Rod and me. And Rod, it's just great that you'll be on the team with us for another year or so. Thank you everyone for joining our call. After my remarks, Rod will provide an update on key initiatives he is managing targeting integration and gross margin improvements. Then Troy will present our financials for Q3 in the first nine months of 2021. and speak to another guidance increase we're making for 2021 based on continued strong demand for our biopreservation media products. After that, we'll be glad to take your questions. Turning to Q3 revenue and customer highlights. We sustained our strong momentum this year with top line revenue of nearly $34 million in the quarter. This was up 200% versus Q3 last year and 8% above Q2 this year. Organic revenue growth was up 37% over Q3 last year. driven by biopreservation media revenue growth of nearly 50% year-over-year. In Q3, we gained at least 213 new customers across our three products and services platforms, and I'll remind you now what those are. First, cell processing, which includes biopreservation media and Sexton products. Second is our freezers and thaw systems platform, comprised of CBS liquid nitrogen freezers and Sterling mechanical freezers and ThawStar systems. and finally, Storage and Cold Chain Services, which includes our SciSafe Storage Services and our EVO Cold Chain Management offering. These more than 200 new customers in Q3 compares to 213 in all of 2020 and 183 in Q2 this year. For the first nine months of 2021, we gained nearly 500 new customers, but as noted before, the actual count should be significantly higher and we'll report on that after year end when we get data from our key indirect distribution partners. You might recall that in 2020, for our biopreservation media products alone, two of our largest distributors shipped products to more than 2,300 different end users. Based on order volume so far this year, we expect another stellar year for our direct team and indirect partners in driving much broader adoption of our portfolio of bioproduction tools and services. Cross-selling to capture revenue synergies is a key focus for us, and in the first nine months of this year, more than 30 customers have purchased at least one additional portfolio solution than they were previously using. Note that we also disclosed earlier this year that a leading pharma CDMO is using every portfolio offering, and more recently, that we have a multi-point engagement with a top 10 global pharma company that uses our cryostore biopreservation media, Evo Cold Chain Management Offering, and SciSafe Storage Services. We expect to continue to capture revenue synergies by driving broader adoption of our portfolio components at our strategic accounts. Now I'll make some qualitative comments about our three revenue platforms and let Troy speak to the overall metrics for each. For self-processing in Q3, we gained 42 new customers and received confirmation that our self-processing media products will be used in at least 24 additional clinical trials for new cell or gene therapies. We estimate that our biopreservation media products have been incorporated into more than 530 customer clinical applications. For biopreservation media, we also remain confident that each customer clinical application, if approved, could generate annual revenue in a range of $500,000 to $2 million. Based on the estimated number of doses our customers would manufacture in a year, the volume of our media in each dose in milliliters, and the average selling price per mil. To date, our biopreservation media is used in seven approved therapies and our sex and cell processing media and vials are used in three approved therapies. For biopreservation media and approved therapies, actual and forecasted annual revenue is supporting the revenue range I just mentioned. With our freezers and thaw systems platform, despite the operational challenges we continue to work through, we gained 162 new customers. In early October, we shipped another high-value, high-margin, high-capacity controlled-rate freezer to a leading allogeneic cell therapy company. We anticipate shipping another this quarter. In our final of three revenue platforms, storage and cold chain services, which includes Evo Cold Chain Rentals and SciSafe Storage Services, we gained 26 new customers for the second consecutive quarter, 15 for storage services and 11 for Evo. Specific to our storage services platform, We recently announced the opening of our first European biorepository in Amsterdam. Our opportunities list of potential new storage service customers is long and robust. We're very bullish in how we can grow this business, and as you can imagine, are well into the planning process for where additional facilities will be located so we can capture our growth opportunities. With our EVO cold chain management platform, cell and gene therapy companies now have full optionality to access our class-defining offering to our expanded specialty courier partner network that now includes World Courier, Quick International, Pathion at Thermo Fisher, Marken, and Biocare. We're also well engaged in our new product development roadmap for the EVO platform and look forward to sharing details when we can. But I can say we're committed to defining the class through innovation, both internal and external. Now I'll turn the call over to Rod to give you an update on some of the supply chain and gross margin improvement initiatives he's leading.