Olink Holding AB (publ)

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the O-Link Proteomics fourth quarter 2021 and four-year 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. 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 speaker today, John Medina with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Shannon, and good morning, everyone. Thank you all for participating in today's conference call. On the call from O-Link, we have John Hymer, Chief Executive Officer, and Oscar Helm, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, O-Link released unaudited financial results for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2021. A copy of the press release and an updated corporate presentation are 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 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 OLINC's business, please refer to the risk factors section of our final prospectus relating to our registration statement on Form F1, file number 333-257842, 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 the remarks or responses to questions, management may mention some non-IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations of adjusted gross profit and and certain other non-IFRS financial measures to the most recently comparable IFRS measures 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, February 14, 2022. 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 will turn the call over to John. John.

Thank you, Jan, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining Olli's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. I will start with a review of our operating results, highlight some key accomplishments and current strategic objectives, and discuss our guidance for 2022. I will then turn the call over to Oskar to provide more details on our financial results and our outlook. 2021 was a transformational year for Olli. including our successful IPO, strong execution of our strategic plan, and the achievement of numerous research and commercial milestones. I would like to thank the entire Ohling team for their dedication and commitment through a period of tremendous growth for the company. Ohling was well positioned exiting 2021, and we are optimistic about the company's prospects in 2022, expecting another year of strong growth in the next-gen proteomics market still in its infancy. First, I'd like to provide a high-level overview of our financial performance in the fourth quarter and also go into the details later in the call. I'm pleased to report that we delivered fourth quarter revenue of $43.7 million, representing growth of 61% compared with the fourth quarter of 2020. Full year 2021, total revenues was $95 million, a 76% increase compared with the full year 2020. During the fourth quarter, which represented 46% of full year revenue in 2021, we experienced some headwinds related to the impact from the COVID uptick across multiple geographies. Despite this initially unexpected impact, I'm pleased that the team was able to manage through and deliver revenue that was above the high end of our guided range. Customers are adopting Owling's platform at a rapid pace, which is very exciting and at the same time poses some challenges. The current seasonality of our revenue base is a function of where we are in our life cycle as a fast grower in a promising market and customer adoption curves, which are fluid. We do believe this current seasonality will remain in the near term, but over time, we expect it to become less pronounced. A few more words on COVID. our business in 2021 and how we are contemplating its potential impact in 2022. The increase in pandemic-induced business friction that we experienced during the third quarter progressed largely as we had anticipated through the fourth quarter. It was with the dedication of Olink's entire organization that our strong execution offset these headwinds during the quarter. As we consider the more recent rise of Omicron and its possible effect on 2022, We've not seen significant additional headwinds arising from it as of now, but continue to monitor developments as others in our industry have discussed. Despite the COVID headwind, we continue to execute on the multiple revenue drivers in 2021, which will continue into 2022. For instance, we see a very strong traction with explore externalizations at next generation sequencing labs, and reached a total of 25 installations by the end of 2021. We recently began delivering Explore 3K. And just as important, we've expanded Explore's reach within existing and Jet Customer installations placed earlier in this year and in 2020. All these factors combined help drive strong Explore utilization during the quarter, which Oscar will detail a bit more later. a new product for us last year represented 69% and 62% of our total revenue in Q4 and full year 2021, respectively. And with this positive performance, total kit revenue growth rebounded strongly in the fourth quarter, up 83% over Q4 2020, while service revenue growth was 37% compared to Q4 2020. We continue to make progress with our shift towards kits, with kits representing 35% and 28% of total revenue in Q4 and full year 2021, respectively. Though Explore pull-through will vary from quarter to quarter, given the size of the Explore install base and seasonal trends, we continue to anticipate additional progress towards increasing our revenue mix towards kits in 2022. In the fall, we began delivering Signature, and we are pleased with the 28 placements recorded during Q4. Signature has expanded our reach within the low and mid-flex market, and it's interesting to note that some Signature customers are also existing Explore users growing their activity with the O-Link platform beyond HyFlex. We believe this demonstrates the wide range of capabilities our technology and its ability to address multiple use cases at the same customer. It's clear to us that our technology and commercial strategy is resonating with customers across industry, research, and academia, and including our presence further downstream with our partner, OKTE Bioscience, in multiple sclerosis, O-Link's values being realized throughout the entire spectrum of proteomic applications. We feel we have a very solid commercial plan to support our guidance for 2022. We remain very confident in our competitive offerings demand from current and prospective customers, and are enthusiastic about the many opportunities we see arising for Olink to have an impact in both research and clinical applications. Our competitive position is stronger than ever in NGS and QPCR with Explore, 3K, and Signature, and we're confident in our ability to execute and expand in this largely untapped next-generation proteomics market. As market awareness and adoption continues to accelerate, we have invested to support the company's position as the market leader. Spending was higher than planned due to the opportunities that we continue to see developing with customers, most of which will take time to cultivate. We anticipate 2022 will be another year of investment to support our growing leadership position in Proteomics. And given our successes with new investments in the Explore platform, our early results with Signature, and other commercial opportunities we are pursuing, we believe we have a unique ability to drive improved return on investment over time for all of these initiatives. Oscar will get into the details on the financial guidance in a few minutes, but I wanted to be clear that despite this accelerated level of investment, we are well capitalized to deliver on our existing strategic plan and return to profitability. leveraging the strong unit economics, leverable business model, and strong marketing position. The combination of all drivers of our business results in 2022 forecasted revenue to increase between 42 and 53%, achieving a range of $138 to $145 million. We expect continued systemality this year with quarterly trends similar to 2021, And over time, we do see the potential for our seasonality to become less pronounced as our revenue and customer mix continues to expand. This guidance also assumes that the existing pandemic environment and resulting operational friction are roughly similar to what we're experiencing today. Beyond this year and over the long term, we remain optimistic about our competitive position and our ability to drive strong revenue growth still being at the very front end of the billion-dollar opportunities in postgeomics research and diagnostics. Underlying our optimism for 2022 are many of the positive factors that helped drive a strong 2021. Explore continues to gain strong traction in NGS with new prospects and existing customers. Landing and expanding are both proceeding very well. and recently launched EXPLORE 3K is being very well received in its early days. In this context, I would like to add that this represents groundbreaking times in proteomics. In my opinion, this is the first time in the history of proteomics that is both at scale and quality with unparalleled throughput. Looking at 3,000 proteins in parallel with single-plex quality In large cohorts consisting of thousands of samples in just days. We have all the reason to believe that proteins and proteomics represent the most important omic when it comes to tracking the transition from health to disease, measuring disease progression or drug response. We can feel that the research community is very excited that proteomics is finally here. and we see a strong adoption and excitement across both academia and biopharma. As the CEO of O-Link, I am very proud that we have driven the field to this current state. We continue to rapidly expand research opportunities and remain convinced all of this work by us and our customers will have a major impact on how healthcare is executed and drugs developed. Beyond NGS, and Explore 3K, Signature, our newest offering in the low- and mid-plex space, has similarly found a ready customer base we expect will grow strongly in the quarters and years ahead. We think Signature is another strong example of our promise to address the multitude of proteomics research goals within customers' labs. We think the findings of more than 800 studies published today Exploring PEA, we further define our place as the leader in proteomics. We believe this body of knowledge also speaks to the quality of the data the O-Link platform generates, a sentiment shared by many of our customers in their real-world experiences as well. As we've discussed in the past, the UK Biobank project is an immensely important project, and O-Link is proud to be the platform which supports the project. We view this existing project as an investment in scientific discovery, deepening our relationship with the 13 Biopharma Consortium members and the global research community. The project's use of O-LINKs 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. By the end of last year, we delivered data on 56,000 samples to the UK Biobank Consortium, a tremendous accomplishment that would not have been possible without the hard work and talent of our employees. And for 2022, we plan to run samples in the expansion phase on the Explore 3072 platform. When data from this research are published, it will be published using Olink's Unit of Protein Expression, NTX, or normalize protein expression. In some ways, O-Link is not only leading the commercial market in next-gen proteomics, but also define its language. Further to defining the language of proteomics, our ambition to expand from 3,000 to 4,500 protein biomarkers in 2022 remains on track. Us is our ambition to expand beyond that. Aside from UK Biobank, Additional consortia that we're part of include Scallop, Coral, and Colibri. The Scallop consortium, led by Anders Malasty, has a goal of identifying novel molecular connections and protein biomarkers causal in certain diseases, such as coronary artery disease, RA, bipolar disease, heart failure, dementia, and metabolic syndromes. Coral Formed and chaired by neuroscience thought leader, Dr. Charlotte Tunison, it's a collaborative community of scientists working on the only platform investigating diverse neurological conditions by studying blood and CSS samples. With a goal to identify biomarkers and biological mechanisms for neurological diseases. Lastly, Colibri is a consortium to define protein biomarkers of inflammatory bowel disease. led by Sabrine Vermeer, Jonas Halvorsson, and Bram Bergstad. As with these consortia, we're exploring more opportunities where the all-win platform can be the underpinning technology for large-scale projects which are grounded in science, specificity, accuracy, and decision-making for customers. In addition to the UK Biobank population proteomics project, we see a lot of interest and excitement across many large and strategic cohorts around the world. need and want to add proteins to the cohorts to complete the multiomics perspective. We're convinced that proteomics is and will continue to be very high on the agenda for all of these worldwide cohorts. We look forward to continuing generating a lot of democratized value in these data sets and particular to do so through our external Explore Lab partners via our kit offering. In summary, We believe we are in early phases of this multi-billion dollar next generation proteomics opportunity. We believe Olink is the most advanced scientifically and commercially, and we are working hard to continue to drive impressive growth at Olink in 2022 and the years to come. I will now turn the call to Oskar to discuss our financial results.