Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.

Please stand by, your program is about to begin. If you need assistance during your conference today, please press star zero. Good day, everyone, and welcome to today's Bio-Rad second quarter 2024 earnings results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session. You may register to ask a question at any time by pressing the star and one on your telephone keypad. You may withdraw yourself from the queue by pressing star and two. Please note this call is being recorded. I will be standing by if you should need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Head of Investor Relations, Edward Chung.

Thanks, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today, we will review the second quarter 2024 financial results and provide an update on key business trends for Bio-Rad. With me on the call today are Norman Schwartz, our Chief Executive Officer, Andy Latt, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Rubalak Raju, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin our review, I'd like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements about management's goals, plans and expectations, our future financial performance, and other matters. These statements are based on assumptions and expectations of future events that are subject to risk and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from these plans, goals, and expectations. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements and I encourage you to review our filings with the SEC where we discuss in detail the risk factors in our business. The company does not intend to update any forelooking statements made during the call today. Finally, our remarks today will include references to non-GAAP financials, including net income and diluted earnings per share, which are financial measures that are not defined under generally accepted accounting principles. Investors should review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP results contained in our earnings release. With that, I'll now turn the call over to our CEO, Norman Schwartz.

Thanks, Ed. Again, we appreciate your joining us on the call today. I guess I would say overall, despite a challenging market environment, we did have a solid quarter with revenue in line with expectations and margins actually ahead of expectations, driven by product mix, productivity gains, and overall good cost management. You know, I would say that while we have seen some positive signs with the improved biotech funding, we are continuing to see constraints in biotech biopharma spending globally. As such, we do think it's prudent to revise our full year 2024 financial outlook to better reflect what I think of as a more modest pace of market recovery than originally predicted. Rup will cover this in greater detail as we review our updated 2024 financial guidance. During the quarter, we continue to make progress establishing the new leadership team. You've already met Rup, our new CFO, and have gotten a sense of his priorities as he comes up to speed. Our new heads of life science and clinical diagnostics, I would say I've also hit the ground running and are working closely with CEO Andy Last to align on key initiatives. Lastly, here we have made good progress on our search for a new chief operating officer and have identified several finalist candidates. We do hope to share an update with you on this front in the coming weeks. We are continuing our corporate transformation path, more recently with efforts in supply chain and core process improvements, which are really starting to contribute to our margin expansion. We expect to build on this progress and when our life science business rebounds in future quarters, we anticipate we'll see further benefit here. On the capital deployment front, we've continued to be successful with share of repurchases, having bought back $100 million worth of BioRed stock during Q2, and an additional $96 million during the month of July. And just to continue on that, this week the Board authorized an additional $500 million, which further positions us to make opportunistic repurchases going forward. So all in all, I guess I'd like to reiterate that we view our strategy and focus for the future growth of the company to be really very much intact. In clinical diagnostics, we have leading market positions globally for our core platforms, continue to invest in supporting their growth while building a position in new molecular diagnostic segments. And in life science, We both continue to maintain a focus on biopharma, especially for digital PCR and a process chromatography products and new products in development around cell biology. But we also continue to invest to enhance our leadership in digital PCR and other positions in the academic market, a very important area for us. As such, we believe we're well positioned to drive long-term growth in both the academic and biopharma markets in life sciences as we move through this dynamic period. So maybe now I'll turn the call over to Andy to provide an update on global operations. Andy?