Waters Corporation

Good morning, and welcome to the Waters Corporation Third Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today's call. The conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Kasper Dudor, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Waters Corporation Third Quarter Earnings Call. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Udit Batra, Waters President and Chief Executive Officer, and Amol Chabal, Waters Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I will cover the cautionary language. In this conference call, we will make various forward-looking statements regarding future events or future financial performance of the company. In particular, we will provide guidance regarding possible future results and commentary on potential market and business conditions that may impact Waters Corporation over the fourth quarter of 2022, all year 2022 and 2023. These statements are only our present expectations and actual events or results may differ materially. For more details, please see the risk factors included in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, our Form 10Qs, and the cautionary language included in this morning's press release. During today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including in our discussions of the results of operations. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are attached to our earnings release issued this morning and in the appendix of our presentation, which are available on the company's website. Unless stated otherwise, references to quarterly results increasing or decreasing are in comparison to the third quarter of fiscal year 2021. In addition, unless stated otherwise, all year-over-year revenue growth rates and ranges given on today's call are given on a comparable constant currency basis. Finally, we do not intend to update our predictions or projections except as part of a regularly scheduled quarterly earnings release or as otherwise required by law. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Udit to deliver our key messages for the quarter then Amol will provide a more detailed look at our financial results. After, we will open the phone lines up to take questions.

Uday. Thank you, Kasper, and good morning, everyone. We continue to deliver excellent results in the third quarter with very strong growth across our product portfolio, our end markets, and geographies. This was led by instrument growth of more than 20%. Similar to previous quarters, orders again outpaced sales a result like this takes an exceptional effort and dedication from all our colleagues we are very proud of what our teams continue to consistently deliver today we have three key messages to share which reflect the ongoing strength and exciting drivers of our business first we are consistently delivering strong commercial execution our transformation has become embedded in how we operate with a relentless focus on commercial excellence. You can see this in our results. Second, innovation at Waters is back. It's delivering across our portfolio and contributing meaningfully to our growth. Our refreshed product portfolio is answering our customers' unmet needs across a variety of applications. Adoption rates for new instruments have been impressive and are driving market share gains. Thirdly, our growth initiatives are gaining traction. We continue to make measurable progress on our high growth adjacencies and have proof points that are giving us confidence. Turning now to our third quarter results, our revenue grew 7% as reported and 15% on a constant currency basis. We saw broad strength across our end markets and geographies with robust demand from our customers. Growth in the quarter was led by industrial and academic and government, which both grew over 20%, and pharma, which grew 9%. Each of our regions grew double digits. China grew over 20%, India grew 20%, Europe grew mid-teens, and the U.S. grew 11%. Instruments grew over 20% with our LC, mass spec, and TA portfolios each growing double digits. Mass spec growth was very strong at almost 40%. Recurring revenues grew 10% supported by our growth initiatives in e-commerce and service attachment. Our Q3 non-GAAP adjusted earnings per share was $2.64. This is roughly flat year over year despite FX headwinds of 13%. Now, looking at our year-to-date performance, we're executing well throughout the organization despite a tough macroeconomic environment. Our strength has been broad-based across our geographies and in markets, each of which are up double digits this year. Pharma is up 12%, industrial is up 15%, and academic and government is up 16%. Instrument growth has been very strong throughout the year, growing 19% year to date, led by the US at almost 30%. We expect this to drive future growth in our recurring revenues. Our transformation has allowed us to consistently deliver excellent results. Our three-year CAGR underscores the momentum we've built across our business. Year to date, we've delivered 9% three-year stacked growth overall on a constant currency basis. Moving on to our second key message, innovation. Waters has long been known as an innovation leader. Our investments in innovation are again driving results and contributing meaningfully to our growth. Sales of ARK HPLC, Acuity Premier, and max premier columns again doubled in the quarter versus the previous year. Our new products are solving problems that matter to our customers supported by our technical strength and strong commercial execution. RKH PLC is driving customers to upgrade their LC fleets used for routine small molecule analysis. This is advancing customer lab capabilities and productivity while accelerating the cadence of instrument replacement. Our MaxPeak Premier technology separates complex molecules like biologics. By eliminating the need for passivation, MaxPeak columns can get scientists answers up to 20 times faster than their non-Premier equivalent. They also give sharper peaks with 12 times the sensitivity when separating oligonucleotides, as an example. The customer benefits around Premier are very compelling. This has resulted in significant large molecule growth in recent quarters, which now accounts for over 30% of our pharma revenues versus 20% just a few years ago. Today, biologics represents 20% of the pharmaceutical market, but account for 40% of the R&D pipeline, positioning us very well for future growth. With our cyclic ion mobility separation high resolution mass spec, cyclic IMS for short, scientists can separate molecules by shape as well as mass due to the combination of ion mobility with time of flight. This is providing customers with amplified resolution and clarity. Demand has ramped up for cyclic within omics research for lipids, proteins, and metabolites, all exciting areas within early disease detection and discovery. As an example, the largest privately funded mass spectrometrics facility in Canada has been using cyclic for antibody sequencing and discovery. They're impressed with the quality of data that Cyclic has provided, supporting their lab at the forefront of scientific discovery. Also within mass spec, we're seeing great traction for our recently launched Zevo TQ Absolute. It has seen strong demand in food and environmental applications led by PER and polyfluorinated compound testing. The PFAS testing market has seen rapid growth in recent months, driven by increased surveillance testing and newly added compounds of interest. We see this as a multi-year growth opportunity. In June of this year, the US EPA announced new drinking water health advisories for the four most notorious PFAS compounds, setting measurement levels finer than parts per billion. TQ Absolute is so sensitive, it can detect PFAS at one part per quadrillion. This is less than a grain of sand in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. TQ Absolute's ability to quantitate low abundance molecules is beyond anything on the market and gives us the right to win in this space. Since launching TQ Absolute, we've won competitive placement for PFAS testing across every region. In one example, a large global testing organization is using it for infant food and water testing in Southeast Asia. This customer is developing a new set of methods that can be used for routine testing across workflows in their organization. Within informatics, Waters Connect is enabling exciting new analytical areas in large molecule analysis on instruments like the G3QTOF and BioAccord. This includes cell culture media analysis, peptide mapping, and oligonucleotide characterization. There is a lot of long-term potential in these areas given demand for stability, quality, and impurity analysis. The characterization of biologics and novel modalities allows these molecules to move downstream into routine QAQC workflows. Additionally, at TA, we have added new powder rheology capabilities to our portfolio. This is to support the strong growth we're seeing in battery-related applications. Powders are critical to anode and cathode manufacturing, allowing battery producers to better screen electrode coatings, and solvent-free dry coatings helps ensure optimal performance, prevent defects, and reduce cell failure rates. According to industry sources, in the next 10 years, production of lithium-ion batteries is expected to grow tenfold. Demand is expected to exceed 4,000 gigawatt hours per year by 2032, driven by electric vehicles and energy storage. As battery volumes scale, our TA instrument portfolio is well positioned to support an expanding set of testing demands within the battery development and safety analysis space. One of our European customers, a fast-growing Scandinavian battery producer, uses our rheometers to test incoming materials for critical electrode components. This company has tripled its purchases of TA instruments this year reflecting not only its own growth but the confidence they have in our technology and support as they scale their operations. I would now like to share some of the recent progress we've made towards our high growth adjacencies as our third key message. Since time is limited, I will only focus on bioprocess characterization. BioCord offers a compelling value proposition to bioprocess engineers. It provides a paradigm shift in analytical capabilities for biologics manufacturing which which while being quick and easy to use. Through our collaboration with Sartorius, we have expanded the capabilities of BioCord in this area. We can dramatically shorten clone selection times. We are also enabling improvements in titer and yields, which can reduce corks. Our value proposition is resonating amongst industry leaders. At the recent Bioprocess International Conference in Boston, which I attended personally, AstraZeneca publicly highlighted the benefits of implementing online process analytical technology using the BioAccord to monitor drug substance and cell culture media. Meanwhile, Janssen and other pharmaceutical companies are already using it to monitor vital components during cell culture production and for analysis of raw materials used in bioprocessing. By fingerprinting components in cell culture media using BioChord, they are generating insights that can help streamline the manufacturing process. These are just a few of the early proof points we can share with you today for BioChord. We're encouraged by the long-term opportunity we have to solve unmet needs in bioprocess characterization. Now, I will pass the call over to Amol to continue covering our third quarter financial performance and provide our guidance for the remainder of 2022. Amol?