Olink Holding AB (publ)

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the O-Link Proteomics first quarter 2021 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 during the session, you will 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 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Stina Thormann, Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for participating in today's conference call. On the call from O-Link, we have John Heimer, Chief Executive Officer, and Oskar Hjelm, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, O-Link released financial results for the first quarter, ended March 31st, 2021. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities law, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or prediction of future events, results, or performance are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statement due to a variety of factors. For a list and description of the risks and uncertainties associated with Olin's business, please refer to the risk factors section of our form F1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 24, 2021. We urge you to consider these factors and you should be aware that these statements should be considered estimates only and are not a guarantee of future performance. Also, In the remarks or responses to questions, management may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of adjusted gross profit and EBITDA and certain other non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP message are available in the recent earnings press release available on the company's website. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, May 20, 2021. O-Link disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. And with that, I will turn the call over to Jan.

Thank you, Stina. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Oling's first quarterly earnings call. Oskar and I will start with prepared remarks, and then we will take questions. I'd like to start by saying that we are very excited to be speaking to you on our first quarter following our IPO on March 25th, listing on NASDAQ and raising $264.7 million in gross proceeds. We're pleased to be able to report that we had a strong first quarter with reported total revenue of $13.6 million. This represents significant growth of 70% with the first quarter of 2020 on a reported basis. We generated significant growth in both kit and service segments with reported year-on-year growth of 89% and 60% respectively, driven by the Explore platform. On behalf of O-Link, I would like to thank everyone who was involved with the IPO. With the investment community's support, we are now better positioned to invest and further accelerate our plan to expand the adoption of proteomics to help enable better understanding of real-time human biology. While we had a chance to tell our story to many of you through our IPO process, I'll start today's call with an introduction to O-Link and our platform solutions. O-Link is a market leader in the emerging field of proteomics, addressing overwhelming, growing, and accelerating inefficiencies in healthcare and drug development today by providing clarity on mechanistic biology with our differentiated platform. O-Link is helping researchers and clinicians investigate protein pathways that drive disease to help guide candidate drug development improve outcome in drug development, earlier and more accurate diagnosis of patients to ultimately ensure that the right patient receives the right treatment at the right point in time. Our platform of products and services have demonstrated success and used by over 600 customers in over 40 countries. Our customer base includes both large and small biopharma companies, as well as leading academic institutions around the world. In addition to our customer footprint, utility and value of our platform has been validated as the research product used as a basis of almost 550 peer-reviewed publications through end of March in 2021. Two papers worth highlighting are based on the Explore platform, which is of particular interest due to the fact that the platform was launched less than 12 months before each was published. The first publication titled Next Generation Plasma Protein Profiling to Monitor Health and Disease is a longitudinal wellness diabetes study published in Nature, led by Professor Mattias Edén. With this study, Explorer was the platform of choice for the researchers to investigate wellness and treatment in the Diabetic Patient Org. The study examined newly diagnosed patients with type 2 diabetes before and during therapeutic intervention using plasma protein profiling. The authors found evidence that a panel of proteins could potentially be used for the early diagnosis of diabetes, including the stratification of patients with regards to response to metformin treatments. The authors concluded that their study demonstrated the value of comprehensive plasma profiling for precision medicine efforts. Specific findings from the study will, of course, require validation among larger cohorts, but it's very exciting to see the Explore platform associated with such cutting-edge research. The second publication, Longitudinal Proteomic Analysis of Plasma from Patients with Severe COVID-19, revealed patient survival associated signature, tissue-specific cell death, and cell-to-cell interaction. A longitudinal analysis of COVID-19 by researchers at the Broad Institute and MGH in Boston, led by Professor Mike Hilbin. One unique aspect of this study was the dense serial sampling of subjects in both the inpatient and outpatient settings. enabling the monitoring of intra-individual changes in circulating protein as patients move from early disease to clinical deterioration. This allowed not only the identification of potential biomarkers characteristic for different disease stages, but also the examination of temporal patterns of protein expression that were associated with severe versus non-severe COVID-19. These two papers well encapsulate the scientific utility of O-Link and the Explore platform, as well as the breadth of the research that our platform enables. O-Link is differentiated in the market with our disruptive and proprietary proximity extension assay, EEA, technology, which is used in discovery, translational, and clinical applications. PA comprises of three product lines, explore, target, and focus, offers as kit products or a service through our analysis service labs. Each product allows scientists to detect and quantify protein by a market target, with 1,500 available today, soon to be 3,000, and expanding to 4,500 in 2022. We believe that our proprietary and patented GA technology has the foundation necessary for broad application, large-scale discovery, as well as more targeted clinical trials and diagnostic application. Compared to many other technologies, PA is totally scalable and can enable faster, better-informed decisions in research with earlier detection and quantification of protein biomarkers in high multiplex and high-throughput with an assay performance that does not compromise on data quality. Our newest product is Xplore. Launched worldwide as a service offering in June of last year, and rolled out as kit offering just a couple of months ago in March this year. Xplore combines our unique PA, high multiplexing technology, with next-generation sequencing readout. The product overcomes significant limitations in other proteomics technologies, including remarkably increased performance in high multiplexing, throughput, and cost efficiency. We achieved these improvements while maintaining the same robust, transparent, and thorough validation of each assay, generating accurate and reproducible data that can be trusted, turning findings into actionable outcomes. This exciting offering from Olink has been met with excitement and strong adoption from our customers. In the first quarter, Explore represented more than 50% of total revenue as compared to 26% for the full year 2020. We are pleased with Explore's traction as a service offering and are very excited about the momentum in the kids' business. We are just beginning to commercialize this effort, but we are very pleased with the initial success and positive response from the market. In the end of April, Illumina hosted a virtual meeting on Explore and its integration for NovaSeek and NextSeek NGS users. We expect Explore to continue to be a top driver of revenue growth rolling and a shift of the business from fee-for-service to a kids' business model over time. Our target and focus product use qPCR readout on Fluidine Biomark HD system. But as we discussed during the IPO process, we are very excited to open up our order books for Olink Signature, a next-generation, modern, cost-effective, bench-top qPCR system for our target and focus product portfolios in early June. We anticipate shipments of systems to begin in the fourth quarter. We believe O-Link Signature will drastically lower the hurdles of adoption for our more targeted products. In conjunction with the launch of O-Link Signature, we're also very excited to start development of a new flexible product offering where customers can freely pick and choose up to 20 protein by market target. This product will add a great new addition in our target portfolio, which we believe our customers will very much appreciate. we will begin selling this flexible product in 2022. On top of that, we will also open up our order books for our 3K product already in June, doubling our library of validated protein by market targets. This is an important milestone in our ambitions to rapidly expand our offering in the high-tech space. We know our customers are very excited about the expansion of our protein by market targets and we anticipate shipping kit and recognizing revenues related to the 3K product in the fourth quarter of this year. As we reported during the IPO, Olink is a global enterprise with a strong footprint in the US and Europe and a rapidly growing presence in China. During the first quarter, we were particularly pleased with our performance in the Americas. after seeing some impact on our business during 2020 as a result of COVID-19. In the first quarter, revenue was $7.3 million in the Americas, growing 142% year-over-year. In EMEA and rest of the world, revenue growth was 51% and negative 41%, respectively. Oscar will discuss the details of our revenues in a moment. It's great to see that Americas is picking up steam to pre-COVID growth and also the continued strong growth across EMEA. We established our business in China during 2020 with the opening of our first office in Shanghai early in the year. In China, we've been focused on getting our commercial team in place and have strengthened the business development and the field application science team as well as working through the regulatory and administrative issues to ensure smooth business operations for all customers. Following the IPO, Olink remains focused on investing in the business to accelerate research and development, as well as expand commercial infrastructure to drive revenue growth. We remain confident in expanding our protein library to 3,000 athletes later this year and 4,500 in 2022 in the HyPlex space. In parallel, we're building out our MidPlex portfolio product and looking at various opportunities to accelerate R&D as well as product and service offerings from only. Further, The IPO process may enable Olink to pursue technologies and capabilities that are better acquired than built internally. As you recall, we closed an acquisition of Agrisera, a Swedish manufacturer of antibodies, in April 2020. Agrisera had previously been supplier to Olink, and by owning Agrisera, we've been able to accelerate the development of antibodies and generation of new assets within the Olink family. The integration of Agrocera has gone as well as, or perhaps better than, we had anticipated at the time of closing. And we are now actually expanding operations of Agrocera in new, larger facilities and transferring some of the early upstream DEA development processes to Umeå, where Agrocera is based. In parallel, we remain very open to opportunities to expand commercial and R&D efforts that will accelerate our growth and market leadership position. We continue to invest according to our strategic plan, consistent with what was communicated during the IPO Roadshow. We continue to add meaningful number of hires to our commercial and R&D teams in particular. But we are really growing all parts of the business, and we are investing slightly ahead of the curve. We ended 2020 with 214 employees, and at the end of March, we were 270 employees. On a run rate basis, including all hired personnel who have not yet started and consultants, we are 337 employees as of the end of April. All in case of a strong start in 2021 with significant opportunity ahead. As we continue to grow to meet customer demand, we are making sure to watch our operations carefully. One area that we are more focused today than just a couple of months ago is our supply chain. We started to see some impacts from COVID related to transportation and logistics, but we are diligently monitoring development as these arise and managing through them as best as we can. In summary, we are pleased with our first quarter performance, and we look forward to executing on our investment and strategic plans outlined during the roadshow as we move forward through 2021. I will now turn the call over to Oskar to discuss our financial results.