DiaSorin S.p.A.

Good afternoon. This is the Coruscant Conference Operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the DIA-Sorin First Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Carlo Rosa, CEO of Diasorin. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to the Q1 conference call. As usual, I will give some color to the financial results, and then I will let our CFO, Alberto Donati, to take you through the numbers. I'm going to make my comments at constant exchange rate. In quarter one, 2026, as anticipated during our full year result call, the quarter registered slightly negative performance, minus 3%, and mainly as a result of the following factors. First one, as reported Thank you very much. S.p.A. And then last but not least, the qualifier on TB performance that in the U.S. has been driven by the reduction of immigration-related testing, which specifically for us resulted into a one-off event of destocking of some of the large commercial labs in the U.S., that where typically this testing happens. Now, I will now deep dive into the three business lines. Immuno grew 1% compared to last year. Molecular diagnostic declined 12%, and LTG declined 7%. So now let's go one by one. When it comes to UNO, as said, it grew 1% over last year. If we exclude China, the growth was 2%. And North America was growing 1%, and the rest of the world, including Europe, 2%. China declined, continues to decline, 32%, as the effect of BBP broadens now also. is hitting the performance of the company in Shanghai and Beijing that until last quarter were not actually affected by EBP. When it comes to quantifieron, the performance of quantifieron globally was weaker than the previous quarters. The quantifieron franchise grew globally 6%. And this is due to one of these talking events of the QuantiFERON product in some large commercial labs. And this has been driven by a decline in demand for TB testing, which is required for immigration for the visa issuance. We expect this to recover already starting from quarter two. because I said this is related to the fact that some of the large labs have canceled orders in Q1 because they are to bring their inventory level back to where it's needed. We continue to see stable double-digit growth in U.S. and in Europe outside the commercial labs. And this has been driven by the launch of the new high-throughput version of the liaison quantiferon TB Gold Plus 2 test, which has been recently FAA cleared. As QIAGEN reported, we see no changes in pricing or competition. So quantiferon continues to grow double-digit in the hospital market, continues to grow double-digit in Europe, And we saw, again, this slowdown in the commercial lab in the U.S. Net of this impact, sorry, let me just add a couple of things. We also experienced in January and February, but with a recovery in March, of general softness of U.S. testing volume. As reported by some of the commercial labs, due to the severe weather conditions in the U.S., which affected some testing volumes in certain states, and we saw recovery of this from March and in April. The third element when it comes to immunodagnostic is that we continue to see the normalization of testing volume in Europe as we have been anticipated in previous calls. Net of these impacts of immunobasedness continues to grow steadily and perform strongly as discussed before. The U.S. hospital strategy continues to be on track, and we are now approaching close to 550 hospitals by mid-year and by year-end. We should get to the mark of the 600 hospitals, which actually was part of our 23-27 plan, and we are one year ahead. ahead of expectations for this strategy. Again, it's working very well. And the second element of this is that our specialty testing, which clearly goes into this installed base of systems in hospitals in the U.S., continues to grow. And there's a strong momentum in areas like gastroenterology and other, and some of the infectious disease specialty areas. If we look outside U.S. and Europe, as said before, the only geography where we are experiencing slowdown is China. China continues to decline, again, in the quarter, 22%. And what we saw is that on top of the VBP, that is hitting the industry. Now we see that some of the provinces and cities that supposedly were not supposed to be hit by VDP now has a combination of price policies driven by competition and or the fact that hospitals do apply the VDP policy anyway. We see that the price erosion continues to be very strong in China. Again, this, I believe, has been reported by everybody that operates in this sector. When it comes to our direct business, ex-U.S. and ex-China, so we are talking about Australia, India, Mexico, and Brazil, we continue to see a need to enhance these growth. S.p.A. S.p.A. Now let's move to the molecular diagnostic. The molecular diagnostic total franchise declined 12%. And as said before, this is fundamentally driven by the very weak respiratory system. As we have discussed previously, I will comment that different segments, different platforms, the Liaison NDX franchise, and then I will talk about our multiplexing franchise and make a few comments about the Liaison Nest. So let's talk about the Liaison NDX franchise, which annually represents roughly €100 million of revenues. The franchise declined 7%. But as we have discussed, there are different trends in this product line. We have the respiratory, which is declining 40%. Again, it's all volume-driven. We have the targeted specialty, which is growing 41%. And this has to do with the fact that we continue to benefit on the uniqueness of our product offerings. Today the targeted specialty represents roughly 45 million euro. So it's almost half of this franchise. And then we have the ASR. ASR is for us a relevant business. It represents 40% of this basket. It's reagents that we provide to hospitals and commercial labs to develop their LDT. It is highly affected by ordering patterns because clearly hospitals do buy these agents in bulk. In Q1, the business declined 10% versus last year, but we expect that this will normalize and get annualized to small growth starting from Q2 2020. Q2 this year. Then let's move to molecular multiplexing franchise, which is approximately, again, €100 million of annual revenues in Q1 is flat, and it is flat notwithstanding the fact that there is a good portion of this business, which is a respiratory, which clearly is very negative, but it's counterbalanced by the fact that we are growing the TLEX customer base. And so we have additional business and additional respiratory business, although it's, again, from a volume perspective, is not where it's supposed to be due to the weak season. And then we have launched the blood test. and the new panels, which clearly are not seasonal, and they contribute to the net growth. So if we look at the performance of this segment, which, again, is strategic, is flex-based, is flat, but it's also the matter that there is a strong growth, which is compensating the decline of the respiratory component of this business. When it comes to customer split, which is an information I believe we have been starting to provide to the market, by now 90% of the customer type are hospitals and 10% are commercial labs. Clearly, we expect this to shift even more toward hospitals, which is the fundamental market for this technology. When it comes to the contribution, though, to the total revenues, 30% of the contribution comes from commercial labs and 70% comes from hospital labs. And this has to do with the fact that as we have pressed the list, we have signed up and now installed our liaison plex in some of the major large commercial labs in the U.S. We expect the GI panel clearance within days, so I hope that we will be able to provide some good updates, good news, during our analyst day, which is going to happen on the 20th. Now, I was going to give some qualitative comments about the Inelios on this, because it has been just launched. On April 1st, we have both distributors, Thermo Fisher and McKesson, now operating in the U.S. with the liaison desk. Because of the way this business works, there is, in the next few months, we expect to install systems. And then the system's clearly going to generate revenues during the flu season, so starting from late Q3 and beginning of Q4. We're going to give way more color during the meeting on the 20th, but I am happy to report that the launch has been so far very successful. Now, last remark on LTG. As you all know, the LTG business for the Sorin is a B2B business. It's always related to bulk orders that are coming from our diagnostic clients as well as the life science clients. Because of the way of the ordering pattern in 2025 versus 2026, we expect that H1 is going to be lighter than last year, and we expect H2 to show strong growth compared to last year. And overall, we confirm our expectation that LTG will deliver Law to Meet Single-Digit Growth in 2026. One element that I would like to comment on is that we see an improvement of the life science sector. I think as reported by some of our clients in their comments of Q1 2020, Whereas the diagnostic business has always been traditionally very strong and clearly more predictable. I'll now comment on the Investor Day. So everybody is invited to attend to our Investor Day, which is going to happen on May 20th. We're going to host our Capital Market Day at our Innovation Hub in Milan where we're going to unveil our 2027-2030 strategic plan. This event clearly will offer a unique opportunity to experience our innovation percent, including live demonstration of all our platforms, which will be led by Thank you, Alberto. Thank you, Carlo. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody.

and thank you again for joining the Q1 2026 NINCS call and also for the continuous interest that you're all showing in our company. In the next few minutes, I'm going to walk you through the financial performance of the first quarter of the year and then I will turn the line to the operator for the usual Q&A session. As we navigate through these results, you'll see that while we faced some expected headwinds this quarter, We also remain confident that we're gonna be achieving our full year guidance. So let me start from the revenues. Q1, 2026 total revenues came in at 287 million Euro, which is down 3% at constant exchange rates compared to Q1, 2025, which is in line with the trend and guidance we shared in the previous conference call and as Carlo just outlined. At current exchange rates, Current exchange rate revenue declined 8%, reflecting a significant forex headwind of around 17 million euros. As a reminder, Q1 2025 benefited from an extraordinarily strong U.S. dollar with an average of around 1.05 compared to an approximately 1.17 in Q1 2026. which is a difference of more than 10 cents. So overall, Q1 2026 was particularly impacted by the exchange rates, so given a very tough year-on-year comparison. Moving to profitability, Q1 2026 adjusted gross profit came in at 186 million euro, down 5% at constant exchange rates compared to Q1 2025. At current exchange rates, the decline was 9% with a headwind of €10 million due to the exchange rate. The adjusted gross margin remained, however, quite stable at around 65% at both constant and current exchange rates, slightly down from the 66% of 2025. and this is primarily due to the negative impact of the tariffs in Q1 2026 which as you all know were not yet present in Q1 2025. And this is also despite the unfavorable leverage of fixed cost which is also demonstrating the continuous capability of the company to deliver a diligent and rigorous cost management measures in order to maintain profitability. The Q1 2026 adjusted operating expenses S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. which we commented during the last call and accounts for north of $10 million for the full year. Q1, 2026 adjusted EBIT came at 67 million euro, which is down 17% at constant exchange rate, while at current exchange rate, the decline was 20% because of a forex that went up 3 million euro. The margin, the EBIT margin was 24% S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. Year-to-date adjusted net result came in at 49 million euros, which is 17% of revenues, and decreased by 16 million, or 25% compared to the previous year. Now let me move to the EBITDA. Q1 2026 adjusted EBITDA totaled 90 million euros, which is around 31% at both constant and current exchange rates. And this decrease compared to last year reflects some of the headwinds that were previously mentioned, namely the BBP carries as well as the decision of investing for the success of the next commercial launch, but most importantly and significantly the unfavorable operating leverage due to the lower revenues in the quarter. Turning to the balance sheet and the cash flow performance, we delivered a solid result despite the challenging revenue and macro environment. Our net financial position showed net debt of €711 million at the end of Q1 compared to €580 million at the end of 2025. These are variants of €131 million that primarily reflects on one side the good operating cash generation S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. For sure, the remunerations for a total cash outflow not exceeding €250 million. As of today, the company purchased over 3 million shares, completing roughly likely above 80% of the total program. Now, in light of the Q1 results, we are confirming our full year 2026 guidance at constant exchange rates for 2025. We continue to expect revenues to grow between approximately 5 and 6%, with adjusted EBITDA margins in the range of 32 to 33%. Please note that, as we mentioned already during the last call, this guidance does not account for further potential negative impacts from the prolonged military conflict in the Middle East, which could further impact the group. It excludes the possibly indirect effect of extended logistical and distribution difficulties, and most importantly, the potential future inflationary effect on material costs on one side and supply chain on the other, which were not significant in Q1. Now, before turning to the operator, allow me a quick update on tariffs. Because, as you all know, the U.S. government adopted an exceptional tariff framework in S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. I will now hand it over to the operator for the Q&A session. Thank you. This is the Coruscant conference operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press

The first question comes from Aisha Noor with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening, Carlo and Alberto. Thank you for taking my question. My first one is on QuantiFeron, which you mentioned on the call was growing 6% globally. From my understanding is QIAGEN last week reported a 5% decline in their QuantiFeron franchise. So what is explaining this difference? And could you quantify the impact of the destocking effect for QuantiFeron in the quarter for you? My second question is on the diagnostics market outlook. So we heard from BMARIA a few weeks ago that the instrument sales development in the market has been weaker than expected due to cost pressures in IVD. Just wondering if you are seeing a similar dynamic and if you could remind us what the kind of split in sales or what was the development of instrument sales versus consumables for you. Thank you.

I'll take the call. I'll take the question. On the quantity theorem, unfortunately, you cannot really compare our revenues to the QIAGEN revenues for two reasons. First one is that they report CLIA and they report ELISA. And so when they see the overall franchise, and so when they show a decline, and I think they've been talking about the effect of fenders in the Middle East, they clearly refer more to the ELISA technology. And therefore, and this has been really impacting the overall franchise, whereas we only see the And so now this slowdown, as we discussed, is primarily driven by commercial-led segment in the USNG stockings. North America has been soft in that sense, so it's been declining. Quantiferon minus 3% as a combination of that effect. So I cannot give you the destocking value, but I give you enough data that you can do the math yourself. My observation is that Starting from the beginning of Q2, which is what we experienced so far, we see that there is a normalization in quantiferon volume. So this has been, again, some of the last labs that are actually doing all this VISA testing. that had a lot of inventory that they decided to consume, so they stopped ordering for almost a quarter, and now they started again. When it comes to the instrument cell comment of Guillaume Herrier, and again, I believe, I don't know, I believe you are referring to the spot fire, correct?

No, I think the comment was on broader instrument appetite for instrument TAPEX in the diagnostics market overall. So this would also be relevant for the immunodiagnostics business.

Look, I would say that the vast majority of our business today is only agent rental, both certainly across all the European countries. In the U.S., there was, after COVID, I believe we went back to the normal course of business. And so I would say that 80% of our placements today are all original rentals. So the sales really make a small portion of our revenue. So on the liaison net, Sorin S.p.A. There was a viability, cash viability by these customers to buy the systems. Today is 90% reagent rental because, for a very simple reason, the customers cannot predict the revenues that they're going to be generating because it's seasonal. So think about this season, right? Okay, thank you so much.

The next question comes from Odisseas Manezotis with BNP Kariba. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for taking my questions. Firstly, on the coastlines, I mean, considering sales seem to have come a touch below, but EBITDA seems a bit above. Could you give us a bit of color on how the different coastlines move and why you stopped disclosing them? And secondly, on... The... Sorry, one second. Yes. On the NetSanger so far, a car line that's done, you don't have a lot. We're trying to get a good feel of the interest so far, but from the few clients that you might have gotten appealing, what are the few points of differentiation of the platform that have been appreciated the most so far?

I will take the second question, and I will leave to Alberto the first one. I think then he has just one clarifying question for you to be able to answer. So you're asking about NETS and why we think NETS is different. I hope you're going to be in Milan next week, or actually two weeks, but I will show you why NETS is different. NETS is a very simple platform. is really like a Labazza coffee machine, to be chauvinist. And you just put inside the cartridge. You push a button, get the result. If you look at the Spotfire, for example, there is hands-on. It's been a very successful platform, by the way. But there is hands-on time, hands-on that customers have to do it. The fuel space, again, four weeks under my belt, but it's a very unsophisticated space. And I believe that the advantage that we have today compared to some of the legacy systems, Abbott is a good example, or even more recent systems is that we are really hands-free. Let me remind you that this system was designed originally for Walgreens. When we started this, it was a Walgreens system for pharmacies. And I believe that today what customers experience is two things versus a paid, pretty much it takes 17 minutes versus 40, 38, versus other competition that provide results in similar timeframe. It's simplicity. Okay, but I hope you're going to be in Milan next week, and I'll show it to you.

Alberto. Good afternoon. Allow me just to clarify whether you were asking for the split of the coastline, so the OPEX split, or did I misunderstand your question?

Yes, I was looking for a feeling of how the coastlines moved in the quarter. Okay. And, yes, the feeling of whether there were substantial decreases in any of them to justify the stronger margin than our expectations.

Okay. Okay. So let me start from the cost line. As I mentioned before, the growth in our operating expenses was 4% compared to previous year. Now, this is the combination of fundamentally two things. On one side, the salary increase that we discussed and commented in the past, and I saw it is done in July every year. So in Q1, we had an impact roughly a third of the increase, of the overall increase is simply given the salary increase, the carryover effect of the salary increase that we had in Q3 of the previous year. The second element, as I mentioned before, in terms of OPEX, is the investment for NEST launch, which, again, north of $10 million for the full year. And we started very early with investments since the beginning of the year. We hired the team, almost the full team since the beginning, so that contributed around one-third of the increase, and then one-third is purely given by the normal increase of expenses, infraction increase of expenses that we usually have. From a gross margin standpoint, as I said, we have a gross margin that is substantially flat and similar to previous year. We closed 2025 adjusted gross profit at 66% while we closed Q1 this year at 65%. The 1% difference is fundamentally driven by the tariffs while at the same time we were able with strong cost management to offset Thank you. And are you going to continue not disclosing the lines going forward? And could you give me a feeling of whether anything changed on the R&D side, please? So in terms of disclosure of data, we're going to be consistent with what we have disclosed so far. So you're going to receive the same level of information and data that we've been providing.

From an R&D standpoint? From an R&D standpoint, let me just make a comment. We've been investing a lot in our platforms. In the last three years, there has been a surge in R&D spending, which has been very significant, and clinical spending because we've been taking to the market three platforms. So what you have to expect, and I think what you will start to see from second half, is that there is going to be a normalization of R&D expenses, which doesn't mean that... The next question is,

comes from Kavya Deshpande with UBS. Please go ahead.

Good evening, Carla and Alberto. Thanks for taking my questions. My first one is just around the reiteration of guidance. So it implies slightly faster revenue growth than previously over the rest of the year, but... S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. What do you expect them to continue over the rest of the year? And then, Carlo, just on your expectations for China, given everything that's going on there, on the last call, I think you said you were expecting a €5 million decline there. Is that expectation also reiterated as part of your guidance?

Thank you. Let me take China first, Kavi, and then I'll let Alberto discuss about the rest. Look, China... I am – you need to concede that we have been very clear about China a while ago when everybody else was a little bit ginger about it. And I'm telling you, the situation is not improving. And it's not improving as a combination of a couple of things. A, we all thought and hoped that the GDP would be – would actually – S.p.A. S.p.A. S.p.A. Sorin S.p.A. with the fact that if it's not 5 million, it's going to be 7 million, okay, but it's a relatively small damage. I believe that when it comes to the whole industry, there is going to be another level of pain that will surface in this market moving forward. It's a combination of three things, the market becoming, again, very aggressive, S.p.A.

Thank you, Carlo. So going back to your first questions related to gross margin and what is our expectation. So allow me to start from the end and then I'll walk you through some of the elements. Fundamentally, yes, we do expect our gross margin to be stable and then the EBITDA to improve so that we go back within the guidance range of 32 to 33 as the effect of the operating leverage. So let me now further clarify. We do have positive and negative elements affecting our gross margin. On the side of the negative elements, of course, we're going to foresee a negative and unfavorable mix coming from the growth of the molecular franchise that, as we know and we discussed in the past, is dilutive in terms of margin for our group. So the growth of the revenues in that franchise is going to be slightly dilutive for our gross margin, as well as, as Carlo already mentioned, a further deterioration on China. Now, we plan to offset those thanks to, you mentioned it as well, Germany, the closure of Germany, so the optimization of our industrial footprint, the fact also that in the second half we're going to have a lower impact on tariffs compared to what we had in the second half of last year. and simply the positive effect of the operating leverage.

Thank you. And if I could just clarify on the German factory closure, I think PG had previously said we expected a 6 to 8 million euro benefit. Is that still the expectation?

Yes, indeed.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Jan Koch with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. You mentioned in your press release that you expect several headwinds to ease from Q2 onwards. What gives you confidence that this actually happens? And then secondly, on Quantifon, and sorry if I missed that, but how much of your Quantifaron revenue is exposed to immigration testing in the U.S. and in the Middle East region? And then finally, on the phasing of your sales growth this year, Do you think that you can already be in line with the four-year guidance range in Q2?

So, I'll start from the guidance. So, when we disclosed the guidance last month, we already showed the progression, and so We showed the progression quarter on quarter, and you can see that while we were expecting for Q1 to be slightly negative, we also expect Q2 to be slightly positive. We're going to be within guidance by the end of the year, thanks to the contribution of the second half. So by the time we close H1, we're not going to be yet within the 5% to 6% growth.

I think the question is different. Look, I understand what you're saying. So you're asking what are the headwinds that you're not going to have. I think primarily two. One is an assumption that I think everybody is making that we're going to have normal flu season in Q4, right? Second element is to do with the LTG. As explained last year, if I remember correctly, LTG grew 15% in H1. It declined 14% in H2, and eventually the growth was around 1%. We expect that overall, by year-end, the business will grow low single-digit to mid-single-digit. It really depends how life science will perform, but growth anyway. Q1, I think it goes with minus 7%, again, which is all to do with ordering patterns. So this is... S.p.A. Sorry, did you have another question?

Yeah, on quantiferon and exposure to immigration testing.

Look, as you know, as you very well know, quantiferon is a Cajun business, and so I cannot really comment too much on quantiferon. I know that Thierry had a quantiferon day yesterday. And unfortunately, I didn't have time to listen to it, and so I don't know what he discussed about immigration, whether he quantified, but I really invite you to actually refer to what Cajun discussed yesterday.

Got it. And one follow-up, if I may, on the commercial investments for the NAS launch. How much of the planned 10 million investments were already booked in Q1?

Less than two. Okay, cool.

The next question comes from with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask about the reiterated guidance in the context of the quarter. Do you still see a pathway to the high end, or should we be thinking more about the low end for this year? And then also appreciate you aren't including Middle East impact in your guidance, but if you could help us directionally with the exposures. I think last quarter you said every month the price of oil is about $100. That's a $5 million impact. Is that still the right way to think about it? And do you have any levers to offset that impact? Thanks again for taking the questions.

Han, look, believe me, I'm not in a position now to say I am, no, I am. I'm saying that... S.p.A.

As we mentioned before and during the last call, during the last call, Carlo already mentioned that there are, we've estimated at least 5 million of potential increase between the supply chain cost and also a further potential increase on materials that we have not quantified coming from the increase in material cost due to the increase in plastics costs. Now, this is not included in our guidelines because it was not material, not significant in Q1, and we cannot make an estimation of what it could be within 2026 yet.

But one, just one clarification, there was no impact into one, correct?

Okay.

Yep.

The next question comes from Natalia Webster with RBC. Please go ahead.

Hi there. Thanks for taking my questions. I have three, please. The first is on the immuno business. Just following up on immuno U.S. growth. Appreciate the numbers around quantiferum, but Are you able to provide the level of impact that you saw from the adverse weather in Q1 and then what the underlying US growth looked like, excluding both of these effects? I'm interested to hear on what you're expecting for both quantifier and growth and underlying US growth for the remainder of the year. And my second question is on immuno growth in Europe. You previously talked to normalization volumes and specifically mentioned that German testing volume fell to around 1% in 2025. Has this stabilized in Q1 or do you see further downside risk here? And then thirdly, just following up on that last question on the Middle East impact, I appreciate you say that the impacts weren't material in Q1, but are there certain mitigation measures that won't necessarily continue going forward? And are you able to just help us a bit around the potential exposure if you're not able to offset these in the longer term? Thank you.

Let me start from the last. We know for sure that our business in Iran most likely is going to suffer from this situation, right? Roughly, Iran did represent for us 3 to 4 million euros. And so far, clearly, we are not able to ship anything to the country, nor we know what is going to happen at the end of this, because we had a distributor there, and honestly, we don't know what the distributor is these days. So that is an element. The rest of the region, we assume that the problem today is more to do with the logistics. Actually, we know it's logistics because Dubai was our port of entry for many of these countries, and with slowdowns, distributors have been working with the inventory that they had. So depending on how long this will continue, clearly is going to get to a point where they're going to run out of inventory and then that is going to be a problem. So today I don't know, it can be temporary or you can have an effect moving forward. When it comes to the volume, look, today What we see, when we said normalization in Europe, it means that we continue to experience quarter-to-quarter growth, which sits as low as 0.5%, as high as 2%, clearly. Again, you need to be difficult on a monthly basis, and this is why we are saying it's around 1, 1.5%. But really compares to last year where you were around 6%, right, in certain quarters. So this is why I'm saying we believe that we fundamentally, reading these numbers, we are back to pre-COVID time where the European market was growing to this level. And I don't know. didn't pay attention. I don't know if any of our competitors gave any indication about volume. U.S. growth, let me make it simple for you. If you strip out these two effects, which is the stocking plus the weather effect, and the weather effect, again, did hit some of the states because others were no problem. But unfortunately, in some of the states like the East Coast, we have very large customers. I would say that if I look at March, March pretty much normalized. And therefore, if we strip out quantifieron and you strip out the weather effect, the rest of the business has been delivering in line with what we have seen in the previous quarters.

Thank you. And just on the quantiferon growth going forward, are you expecting this to improve into Q2 and H2?

Listen, I said before, don't shoot the messenger. I believe you should be talking to and listening to QIAGEN and just following the indication about what they expect the quantiferon to be. Again, the only thing you need to be cautious is that they have an ELISA component to it, which clearly is sold in a certain environment, whereas we only have CLIA. And our business is fundamentally U.S. and Europe, whereas their business is global because in many geographies they sell ELISA. When you talk to them, I think you need to ask from them more color on the geography in case you're interested.

Okay, thank you. The last question comes from Philip Omnu with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Just one more technical one. The DNA charge in Q1 had come a bit lower, at least versus what we expected. And I know you guys have spoke to higher DNA, given the launch from NAS. So can you give us a bit more on what we should expect as a runway going forward from here? And then second question, just on concern again, and I know you guys don't want to talk too much given this is a collagen business, but it would help us understand if there's anything baked into the four-year guidance three sort of incoming conditions in the latent TB testing area?

I'll take the second one. We honestly We are eagerly waiting to see what Roche is going to say. I think in their diagnostic day. But to be honest with you, I don't expect any material competition in 2026. So our guidance does not take into effect any effect from the launch of Roche.

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First question.

You take care of it. I'll do it. Thank you, Carlo. So from a DNA perspective, we can confirm the expectation of growth in the second half. Just please, you mentioned two components, the launch of the new products, which for us is in two components, the NAS and the Plex. Why do I mention both? Because on one side, NAS, was officially launched on the 1st of April. So you don't see the full impact and the full effect in the first quarter. And second, because we do have also the expectation for the GI panel to be registered and launched in a matter of weeks and days. And so we will also start the depreciation amortization of those panels. This is from an intangible standpoint. And then from a tangible standpoint, again, given the fact that the NAS had just been launched, the installation of instruments is going to happen in the coming weeks and months, and so we do expect that with the success of the platform, you're going to see also an increase of the precision amortization related to the instruments that we will be placing in reagent rental.

Okay, thank you. That's it, Claire.

Mr. Rosal, gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time.

Thank you, operator. Take care.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over. You may disconnect your telephones. Thank you.