Olink Holding AB (publ)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Olink Proteomics Q3 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 one on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, John Medina. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Patrice. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for participating in today's conference call. On the call from O-Link, we have John Hymer, Chief Executive Officer, Oscar Yelm, Chief Financial Officer, and Carl Raymond, Chief Commercial Officer. Earlier today, O-Link released unaudited financial results for the third quarter ended September 30th, 2021. A copy of the press release and an updated corporate presentation are available on the company's website. Before we begin, I'd just like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results, or performance are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. For a list and description of the risks and uncertainties associated with O-Link's business, please refer to the risk factors section of our final prospectus relating to our registration statement on form F1, file number 333-257-842, which was declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on July 14th, 2021, and in our other filings with the SEC. 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 their 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 measures are available in the recent earnings press release available on the company's website. The conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, November 10th, 2021. O-Link disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. And with that, I'll turn the call over to John. John?

Thank you, Jan, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining O-Link's third quarter earnings call. I will start with a review of our operating results and strategic objectives before turning the call over to Oscar to discuss our financial results and full year guidance. Following that, Carl will provide his perspective on the commercial side. We will then open up the call for questions. First, I would like to personally thank all the talented and driven members of the O-Link team for their hard work and their execution. I look forward to working alongside you as we develop the market leader in proteomics. Our performance during the third quarter of 2021 was strong. We continued to execute on our strategy of expanding the adoption of the O-Link proteomics platform to drive improved understanding of real-time human biology. We remain optimistic about the prospects for O-Link as customer interest, interaction, and enthusiasm continues to be in line with our internal expectations set earlier this year. It's clear to us that our technology and commercial strategy is resonating with customer across industry, research, and academia. We had a robust quarter with total reported revenue of $20 million, representing growth of 82% compared with the third quarter of 2020. This brings our year-to-date revenues for the nine months ending September 30, 2021, to $51.3 million, just ahead of our internal plan for the year. Our total constant currency revenue growth ex-agricera was 79% year-over-year. Keep revenue growth in the third quarter was 14%, while service revenue growth accelerated to 152%, partly due to the delivery and revenue recognition on the UK Biobank project. While this dynamic drove a shift in revenue mix towards services in R3Q, impacting O-Link's overall gross margin, it's important to note that our kicked gross margins were within expectations and very strong. Overall, our Q3 performance was the result of focused and strong execution, despite friction driving more customer activity into and beyond the month of September. and a modest COVID resurgence in the broader supply chain across certain geographies. When considering the supply chain, plastics in particular have been a limiting factor, with some core labs now facing a minimum four-month lead time for plates. Supply chain disruption was also seen in the form of delays with some lab instrumentation and shipment of samples. Irrespective of these factors, we believe the third quarter is one to be proud of and that Oling continues to be well-positioned for continued strong growth. The third quarter was also our second full quarter of Explore kit sales, and we finished the quarter generating kit revenue from 21 Explore installations. It's important to remember that there is some time and training required on each installation before customers are pulling through consumables and there is further incremental time until they are put into routine use. We remain confident in the high level of interest from potential Explore Kit users based on active conversations and customer feedback. As of September 30th, we had 21 Explore installations compared with 16 on June 30th, representing 31% sequential growth. Despite more installations occurring later in the quarter than planned, The last 12 months' consumables pool remained at very attractive levels of about $550,000 over the last 12 months. Given the current stage of customer adoption and expected seasonality of customer utilization, individual kit orders can significantly impact the average pull-through metric, and quarter-to-quarter variability can be expected going forward. Looking into the remainder of the year, we're also pleased to see the fourth quarter Explore business off to a strong start with installations consistent with our annual forecast. The Explore pipeline remains robust and supports the plan that we have set out for the year and a good starting position for 2022. We're also encouraged by the fact that we see a good representation of both Biopharma and Academia customers in that pipeline. We remain on track to hit our annual revenue guidance of 90 to 92 million for 2021, although we continue to monitor potential impact from the COVID pandemic. From a regional perspective, we saw positive quarterly revenue growth and solid penetration of Explore in all regions. We continue to ramp up investments into our organization, and we're excited about the strong team that we are continuing to expand globally. I don't think we continue to find success and strong traction in all three of our product lines, Explore, Target, and Focus. Explore represented 63% of our total revenue in the third quarter of 2021, as compared to 53% in the previous quarter. And year to date, the Explore platform represented 57% of our total revenue. As you'll recall, We announced the expansion of Explore with the introduction of the O-Link Explore 3072 in June. We started taking orders in the second quarter and deliveries are expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2021. Carl will provide additional color during his prepared remarks. We know our customers are very excited about the expansion of our protein biomarker targets, and our ambition to expand to 4,500 protein biomarker targets in 2022 remains on track. And moving to our target and focus products, interest in Signature Q100 has been strong thus far, and we are on track with the deliveries in the fourth quarter. In addition, in the third quarter, we reached an exciting milestone with the first major data delivery on the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project, one of the world's largest studies of blood protein biomarkers conducted to date. The project's use of O-Link's PA technology aims to significantly enhance the field of proteomics, enabling a better understanding of disease biology and supporting innovative drug development for project participants. We are in the process of running 56,000 samples on the first 1,500 proteins expected to finish this year and plan to run the expansion of the Explore 3K platform on these samples in 2022. We view this exciting research project as an investment in scientific discovery, deepening our relationship with the 13 BioPharma Consortium members and the broader scientific community. A key part of our strategy is to work closely with thought and key opinion leaders to drive the focus and content of our library, new product development, validation strategies, and enhanced data analysis. We see a strong trend amongst market participants to collaborate and share data. Olink has been selected to work with various consortia, including the UK Biobank and the Scallop Group, previously discussed on the second quarter call. In the third quarter, we announced the O-Link partnered CORAL Consortium was formed, chaired by neuroscience thought leader, Dr. Charlotte Tooneson. CORAL is a new collaborative community of scientists working on the O-Link platform to investigate diverse neurological conditions by studying blood and CSF fluid in an effort to identify novel biomarkers and biological mechanisms for neurological diseases. The large quantity of proteins measured in neurological disease research demands analysis of multiple biologically relevant proteins simultaneously, and this opens opportunities to smoothly translate findings into clinically useful biomarker tests. We are proud that O-Link's proximity extension assay technology is being used in this important collaborative research on neurological health. Looking forward, Olink remains focused on investing in the business to accelerate research and development, as well as to expand our commercial infrastructure to drive revenue growth. We ended 2020 with 214 employees and continue to deliver on a strategic plan to build out our organization. And at the end of September 2021, we had 379 employees. These efforts to expand our presence have proven beneficial. and we expect continued aggressive investment during Q4 and into 2022. The people and technologies driving O-Link are helping us drive the proteomics conversation with more than 750 peer-reviewed publications to date featuring the use of our platforms. This number is growing significantly, and we consider it a tremendous source of validation and differentiation for our industry-leading platform our go-to-market capabilities, and the real-world applications we are enabling today. For instance, this summer, a paper published in the Annals of Oncology by authors Dr. Johan Loreau, Antoine Italiano et al. explored protein biomarkers and their relationship with immune checkpoint blockade resistance. This study leveraged O-Link Explore, first, to cast a broad net of biomarkers and found strong evidence for the role of one biomarker Leukemia Inhibitor Factor, LIF, as a potential suppressor of anti-tumor immunity. As a follow-up on this very exciting finding, they ran the O-Link Target 96 inflammation panel, which also includes LIF, in a different cohort and verified and confirmed their initial findings. A great example of why and how we built our product portfolio for various use cases and stages of experiments and how customers use them as a first discovery step with Explore, followed by verification of preliminary findings with Target. Furthermore, LIFT is not only a new potential response prediction biomarker, it also provided additional important information to the currently clinically established biomarkers PD-1 and PD-L1. While the field of oncology has made tremendous strides in recent decades, we expect additional progress like this and identifying more reliable predictors of response is needed. And we believe next generation proteomics is likewise needed to get at this relevant information. Scalable technologies such as ours will allow efficient discovery, verification, and clinical validation of tomorrow's improved biomarkers. Another recent example was featured in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology just last month by Matthias Unterhuber et al. This study explored O-link-enabled proteomics and machine learning with the goal of improving prediction of cardiovascular mortality in at-risk populations. It included a discovery cohort of almost 2,000 individuals and a verification cohort of 772 subjects using PNL. utilizing the O-Link Cardiovascular 2 panel consisting of 92 preselected and relevant protein biomarker targets. In our opinion, the data generated represent the remarkable early example of applying machine learning to large datasets to better estimate the risk of mortality. In this study, the combination of machine learning and protein biomarker-based prediction significantly outperformed classical risk score for all-cause mortality. Classical risk scores, such as the Framingham risk score, are based on only a few biomarkers, for example, BMI, blood pressure, smoking, and blood cholesterol, and have an accuracy of just over 60%. However, this protein biomarker machine learning approach provided a striking improvement in risk prediction of over 90%. We think these are impressive results and representative of the type of projects our customers are conducting on our platforms. It's also very encouraging to see how this strategy could pay off with potentially great and important results for human health. In an effort to help the investment community learn more about O-Link and how our customers are using proteomics to understand human biology to make more informed research and clinical decisions, we're hosting our inaugural investor day on November 15th. We plan to provide an overview of how some key opinion leaders in the field of proteomics, including Rob Garstein, Arna Mehta, Emma Gutman, Ferhan Qureshi, and Chris Wheeling, are using the O-Link product portfolio spanning across explore, target, and focus in their work. They will share views on how our technology helps in their research, as well as how proteomics is evolving. We've decided to host this event in a virtual format. However, it's our intention to meet many of you in person in 2022. As of today, we're planning to be in San Francisco in early January when many of you are likely to be there as well attending an investor conference. In summary, we are pleased with our third quarter performance. We are confident we have the framework in place to continue executing on our investment and strategic plans and drive meaningful growth for the years to come. I will now turn the call over to Oskar to discuss our financial results. Oskar?