Qiagen N.V.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am Sarah, your PGI call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining QIAGEN's Q3 2022 Earnings Conference call webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised that this call is being recorded at QIAGEN's request and will be made available on their internet site. The prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touchtone telephone. Please press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. At this time, I'd like to introduce your host, John Ghilardi, Vice President, Head of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations at QIAGEN. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to our call. The speakers today are Terry Bernard, our Chief Executive Officer, and Roland Sockers, our Chief Financial Officer. Also joining us is Phoebe Lowe from the Investor Relations Team. Please note that this call is being webcast live and will be archived on the Investor section of our website at www.kygen.com. Today, we'll first have some remarks from Terry and Roland, and then move into the Q&A session. A presentation with details on our performance is available in the IR section of our website, along with the quarterly release. We will not be showing the slides during this call. Before we begin, let me cover as usual our Safe Harbor Statement. This conference call discussion and responses to your questions reflect the views of management as of today, November 8, 2022. We will be making statements and providing responses to your questions that state our intentions, beliefs, expectations, or predictions of the future. These constitute forward-looking statements for the purpose of the Safe Harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. QIAGEN disclaims any intentions or obligations to revise any forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which are also available on our website. We will also be referring today to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAP. All references to EPS refer to diluted EPS or earnings per share. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in our press release and the presentation. And again, these are both available on our website. I would like to now turn over the call to Thierry.

Thank you, John, and good morning, good afternoon. Welcome to our conference call today, and thank you to everyone for joining. We are very pleased to report a strong performance in the third quarter of 2022. We indeed saw solid ongoing market trends with broad-based demand for both our molecular research and clinical diagnostic solutions across the business. So let me get right to the top messages for today. First of all, we again exceeded our quarterly outlook for net sales growth and adjusted EPS. This was driven by the top performance in our non-COVID portfolio and also higher than expected sales from products used in COVID testing. Net sales for the third quarter of 2022 were $533 million at CER and exceeded our outlook for $510 million. These results were largely unchanged from sales of $535 million in the third quarter of 2021, a period of high COVID testing demand. Our non-COVID product groups delivered 18% CER sales growth over the third quarter of 2021 and represented more than 80% of our total sales. Adjusted diluted earnings per share were 55 cents CER, and above the outlook for at least 48 cents. Those results demonstrate that our portfolios are performing very well. In fact, this is the seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit CER growth in our non-COVID portfolio. This clearly underlines the strength of our business and the execution mindset across QIAGEN. Second key message. our teams have been delivering on key goals as we advance our five pillars of growth. The performance for the nine months of 2022 underscored the strength and agility of QIAGEN in a very dynamic micro environment. I am definitely very proud of our teams. They have done an outstanding job this year, remaining proactive and staying focused on executing our five pillars of growth strategy. This is creating a very solid foundation for sustainable growth in the future. All of our five pillars of growth are on track to achieve, and some are even likely to exceed significantly the sales goals we set for 2022. Our sample technologies product group is benefiting from a new wave of instrument upgrades. This is helping QIAGEN to leverage our leading position in sample prep the first step in any molecular biology lab. We are driving consumables growth in non-COVID application, which is the larger portion of this business and by far. Remember that DNA kits and non-viral-related RNA prep make up more than 70% of cells in this group, with COVID-relevant viral RNA kits making up about $150 million of cells in 2019. The Quantiferon TB franchise for tuberculosis testing is performing very well as well, with year-to-date growth well above our target for more than $310 million. The demand for TB testing is on the rise, as noted in a recent report by the WHO that TB deaths and disease prevalence rose significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. For our integrated clinical PCR testing platform, Pneumodix, two new tests were launched for use in areas such as transplant diagnostic. This brings the CE IVD menu now to 16 tests on Pneumodix, one of the largest available from any competitor. We are tracking well on system placement and seeing encouraging indicators on the transition from COVID to non-COVID utilization. For KyaStat diagnostic, our authoring for seed roaming testing, the KyaGen teams have responded to the monkeypox outbreak with the rapid development of the KyaStat DX viral vesicular panel. Placements are continuing to grow worldwide, and it is worth noting that more than 50% of sales for KyaStat are now for non-COVID application. In terms of KyaCriti, our offering for digital PCR, we recently launched 13 new biopharma assets. This is an extremely important step in our entry into the biopharma area of the market, where we see as an important customer segment involving pharma companies around the world. And it creates a strong base for future growth in 2023. So as you can see, we are making good progress in our five pillars of growth. This fits very well into the overall strategy to maximize the value of our portfolio through our ability to address a broad range of customers in the continuum of life science to molecular diagnostics. Third key takeaway message for today. We have increased our outlook for the full year 2022 based on another quarter of solid results. We are now expecting sales of about $2.25 billion for the full year 2022, with a reaffirmation of the goal for double digit CER growth in our non-COVID portfolio. As for EPS, we are now expecting about $2.40 CER for adjusted EPS, and this is up from our prior outlook for at least $2.30 CER. As always, We will stand ready to support the needs for COVID-19 testing and surveillance. And this also goes for other public health emergencies, like we are seeing for monkeypox. As for COVID trends, testing volumes have dropped significantly in most countries around the world. We are continuing to take a very conservative view of demand trends for COVID. But as we have said before, QIAGEN remains relevant for COVID testing, but we are not dependent on those cells. Indeed, we continue to believe it was the very right decision to decouple our performance from COVID trends, and QIAGEN was in fact among the first, if not the first, to do so. But our overriding focus remains on advancing our strategy based on our non-COVID portfolio while continuing, of course, to have our eyes open to the changing microenvironment. Roland will be providing more details on the outlook later on this course. For now, let me hand over to him for a financial update on the quarter.