1/29/2026

speaker
Operator
Hold Message

Thank you for holding. We look forward to talking with you soon. Please hold the line and we'll be right back with you.

speaker
Operator
Hold Message

Thanks for holding. We appreciate your time and patience. Please stay on the line, and we'll be back in just a moment.

speaker
Operator
Hold Message

Thank you for holding. We sincerely appreciate your patience. Please stay on the line, and we'll be back in a moment.

speaker
Andrew
Conference Moderator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining Eurofins 2025 full year results. Please note that this call is being recorded and will later be available for replay on the Eurofins Investor Relations website. Throughout today's presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation 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 to register for questions. For operator assistance, please press the star key followed by zero. During this call, Eurofins management may make forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements with respect to outlook and the related assumptions. Management will also discuss alternative performance measures, such as organic growth and EBITDA, which are defined in the footnotes of our press releases. Actual results may differ materially from objectives discussed. Risks and uncertainties that may affect Eurofins' future results include, but are not limited to, those described in the risk factors section of the most recent Eurofins annual and half-year reports. Please also read the disclaimer on page two of this presentation, subject to which this call and Q&A session are made. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dr. Gilles Martin, Eurofins CEO. Please go ahead.

speaker
Dr. Gilles Martin
CEO, Eurofins

Thank you, Andrew. Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining our full-year 2025 results call. I will keep, we have a long slideshow, but I will not go through every slide. I have to give apologies for our CFO who is not well today. So I will not go in great detail through the financial slide and this time for questions. If I start on page five of the slideshow, I'm happy to report on a strong year 2025 where we achieved all our objectives or exceeded them. Eurofins, as you know, is every five years defining a plan for the next five years and sharing with investors what we are trying to do, what we will do in the next five years. We just completed year three of that five-year plan where we are building a truly global network, fully digital network of laboratories organized in a hub-and-spoke structure. So we get the benefits of scale in our large hub laboratories. And we have a network of local laboratories to collect samples close to our clients, serve our clients in their country, in their language, and yet be able in the large laboratories to implement automation, artificial intelligence, and all the things that make our services much more unique and faster and more reliable than what others do and will do. So this is continuing to proceed at pace. I'm happy to report that I can confirm we should be done by 2027. There's been massive investments and we start to see some of the benefits of that in our operating leverage, which is continued to improve every year. It improved well in 2025. Overall, our margins, reported margins and our adjusted margins continue to improve year on year. Our EPS has shown a remarkable growth, 24%, and I think it's just the beginning because we still have heavy investment, heavy OPEX investment, especially in our deployment of digital solutions, development of digital solutions, which should give us significant and the cost of which will go down. We have generated before those investments to buy our sites because we prefer to own our sites. This is linked to the long-term view that we have. We think over the long term, although they provide a lower immediate return on capital deployed over the long term, we're going to use them forever. It's a great benefit to have them because we can expand on those sites. But before those investments, we have generated more than $1 billion of free cash flow to the firm. So our group is starting to generate serious cash, and it's just the beginning of that. And so if I move to page 6, The nice thing is that it's accelerating in the second half. Organic growth is still not where it will be, we think, and we'll talk about that later. But it's still accelerating quarter and quarter and half year and half year. Our EPS growth in the second half even reached 30%, which is quite remarkable. And our free cash flow has grown also much faster in the second half than in the first half. On our investment program on page seven, you see that we are starting to be done we still have massive IT investments that post 2027 should be less and and more importantly we should get the benefit of that we're still adding some some startups but you see the investment has started from the peak of it so it's starting to be less so all of that is running according to plan we still will add a few large and very efficient sites to our network over the next two years and They are being constructed right now, and we think the delivery will take place over the next 24 months, more or less, for our current perimeter that should take what we need in our program. On page eight, we provide a bridge on the evolution of margin, and you can see we've had a nice underlying operating leverage. As we had flagged, we have some dilution from the acquisition for a very low amount as compared to the profits we think we can generate in two or three years of the network of clinical laboratories of SYNLAB in Spain. We are merging it with our network and we're taking a lot of cost out. We've had a lot of exceptional costs for that. And that should, the first phase should be completed by the middle of next year. We think we will create significant value from this combination, but nonetheless, short term, It has been dilutive, especially in the second half. First half, we're only at three months. Second half, we're at six months. We have a bit of an impact from the FX because we make more profits in North America, although we want to improve profits in Europe as we finalize this IT program and site consolidation. So a good improvement of margin, good drop through on page nine. If you see the trend, well, the COVID peak is well behind us, but we are catching up. Our revenues now are over, the peak revenues from COVID. Our margin is catching up. And I think we're very confident in exceeding 24 percent margin in EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA in 2027. And considering the benefit of that beyond 2027, I think there is some room to at some point maybe achieve or get close to the margins we had during COVID. So that's also encouraging. If you see, if we look at the CAGR, we've had since 2019, 8% revenues CAGR, 35% CAGR of free cash flow to shareholders. And that's ultimately the most important thing, while we still carry huge amounts of investments. And I think those investments, once we have built our network of labs, we have them for the next 20 or 30 years. So the the growth of the EPS and the cash flow per share should be for quite some time over-proportional to our total revenues growth. On the financial numbers on page 11, you have a breakdown. I think I will go back to that as part of the question and answers. Main point is our profits are going in the right direction, are growing faster than revenues, and the EPS is growing also faster than revenues. We took the opportunities for us. You know, the fact that our share price is massively undervalued is actually an opportunity. And we took advantage of that opportunity to acquire a lot of shares last year, which is even further boosting our EPS. And the impact of that, once we hit in 2027, our target margin targets and cash flow targets will be compounded. On page 12. you have a bridge of our revenue evolution, which generated 250 million of organic growth. Of course, it has been a bit diluted by the effects of impact. And we have a sequential increase quarter on quarter of growth. And I think that will continue because now the comps that were strong in some areas, I can talk about it a bit later, will not be there next year as we enter. or this year as we start 2026. On the page 13, we give a bit more breakdown by area. I think all our areas are doing well. Life areas are doing well. Food and feed and environment are growing both in Europe, North America and Asia. Biopharma, and I'll come to that on next slide, is starting to recover. It's still being soft. It's still being far from what we think we can achieve long term. Diagnostics could do a little bit better, but it's starting to show in many areas some recovery. Q4, of course, didn't get the negative base effect of tariff reductions in France. Consumer has been hit because consumer and technology includes some material science testing, microscopy, etc. This had a big boost in 2024 from a lot of tools companies were looking at potential stricter export restrictions, both from Europe and North America to China. And there was a lot of anticipated buying of tools. from our clients in the 2024 that gave us a boost on that in 2024, which has not recurred in 2025, but now we think 2025 has hit a plateau and we should grow from there. That explains the only 2.3% growth in consumer and technology. Consumer was better than that. On biopharma, and here we have, I think, the last year of a mixed picture. The bulk of it is our biopharma product testing where Eurofence is global leader and that has continued to do well, mid single digit. We have done at times better, close to double digit or double digit on that. There is some potential upwards and we have a good outlook for next year. We are adding a lot of capacity where we will be expanding our big site in Lancaster, expanding our site in the Netherlands. We'll have more capacity coming online in the next couple of years. So there is some upside potential in biopharma product testing, but the growth has stayed solid, quite solid during the time where biopharma is reevaluating its pipelines. It hasn't been affected like discovery. In discovery, this is, we think, plateauing now. It's still a little bit down in the second half of the year. Genomics is still hurting from... cuts in research fundings, but again, we think we're hitting now a plateau and we can grow from there. Agro-science is a part of the ancillary activities and that is still down significantly. So we have made significant efforts to cut our footprint. There has been massive restructuring or for the size of the business, significant restructuring. That's also part of our STI. we've closed a number of field stations to basically fit our capacity to the demand. There could be at some point upside when the agrochemical companies, agro-science companies and the seeds company have more visibility on regulations to get their products approved, especially in Europe. So we keep that activity where we are global leader, but that has suffered. And between genomics and the and agro-science that explain a large part of the overall softness of biopharma. Otherwise, biopharma would be at the same level of growth as our life activity, area of activity. So our CDMO did well in the first half of the year in the US because we, or in Canada, because we filled a tranche that got completed at the end of the year before. It's a bit less in the last quarter because now it's full and we're going to have a next tranche coming up online in the next 24 months. CDMO was a bit softer in Europe. It was a bit more on smaller biologics clients, but we think this will pick up in the next few quarters too. So that's for the ancillary activities for biopharma. We have, of course, in biopharma, some clinical works, large contracts, and our clients are positive. on the start of those programs. Of course, that would switch completely the growth of the ancillary activities. If we look at the especially central lab bioanalysis, we do think at some point in 27, we should have a significant boost from those activities. That's also hurting our profits because we keep capacity that is in excess of what we have as volume right now because studies should start relatively soon. We have significant demand from clients. So we're optimistic on that. And in any case, we're now at a baseline where we don't think that would go down anymore and affect our biopharma growth anymore in 2026. On page 15, you've got a split of the margins. So the margins are growing everywhere, especially in the rest of the world. The rest of the world is catching up with US margin. Europe has not been improving as much as we wanted. We've had an impact, of course, in Europe of the reimbursement cuts in clinical diagnostic in France that occurred in 2024 that affected the comparable with 2025. We've got the dilution from SinLab. We've got a number of other things. We think we have a big upside in Europe to increase the margins and make them move much closer to U.S. margins, which will also reduce the FX impact on the translational results and margin. So we're optimistic over the next two years to significantly increase the margins in Europe. Another thing that we do is describe on page 16. So we have labs that are well integrated, where we have deployed our IT solutions, where we that have been in the group for a long time. And then we have a number of startups that we launched over the last few years. The peak startup investment is behind us, and the startups of the peak startup years are starting to be profitable. As I mentioned earlier, we are opening fewer startups now. They have a smaller impact on our results. So that's part of our non-nature scope. On that scope, we also have companies like SynLab that we just bought and we are restructuring it. And what is interesting to see is the impact of that non-mature scope on our overall results is starting to be less and less. We have a target that SDI at EBITDA level will be less than 0.5% of our revenues, and we think we will achieve that by 2027 as planned. Anyway, even in 2025, the impact on the group EBITDA is starting to be negligible at 2.7%. We will continue to show it separately and our reported results and the mature scope result will converge. It's nice to note that our mature scope is already achieving the 24% margin we are targeting for 2027. So overall, very encouraging results. On page 17, you see that we are self-financing all our investment, including our M&A. with 150 million left after that. And we've had, of course, in 2015, the purchase of the related party buildings. I'll come to that in a minute. And that was an exceptional one of investment. We spent 540 million to buy back our own chairs. And from next year, our cash flow should be such that we will have a lot of headroom for our cash flow to to finance further shares repurchase, for example. Building repurchase is done. We won't have to spend money on that. So we can have a very compounding, very well compounding model where with our cash flow, we can continue to do M&A, finance not only our capex, but our capex will be less. So we'll have more room for M&A financing. and even more room for returning to shareholders and preferably through share buybacks as long as our share price remains so seriously undervalued in our opinion. On page 18, you see that our teams are starting to do a better job in managing networking capital. We've got a good result this year in managing networking capital and there is still potential of improving things further. We're certainly not best in class there, but we're making progress, and we think we can do more. On funding, on page 19, we've continued our prudent financing management. We are well-funded for the next few years. Our leverage is very reasonable, considering our cash flow. Also, our EBITDA will increase over the next two years, we believe. So that will naturally bring the leverage down. We'll generate some cash. So we're confident on maintaining our leverage between the 1.5 to 2.5 multiple range that we have set for ourselves as an objective. On page 21, I illustrate some of the new sites that came online. We can talk about that. On page 22, we can have a summary of our footprint. We have a quite large lab footprint. We are very far. along in building and completing our hub and spoke laboratory network in Europe and North America especially. We still will have opportunities in Southeast Asia and Asia generally for the next 10 years or 20 years. Also a little bit in Latin America. We can still add a few locations in North America. We don't have 100% coverage yet. the impact of what we need compared to what we have will be very modest past 2027. And now we own most of our big sites. And what is planned for the next couple of years will mean that by 2027, we'll own our big sites and we usually have land next to that existing building so that if the demand increases for those hubs, we don't have to move. We don't have to lose all the investments we did in those buildings. which was our life for the last 10 years, as we had to consolidate a lot of acquisitions that were not where we found them. They were not necessarily where they should be, and they didn't necessarily have the focus that we wanted or that was optimal for best efficiency. Now we have that footprint, and that will stay, and we can just incrementally add capacity on the same site as we need. So we're quite pleased about the progress. That was a 10-year program. Now we own what we need to own. On page 23, some discussions on return on capital employed. I think that would be more for one-on-one meetings for those of you who are interested. But obviously we have a mix of assets on our balance sheet. We have the labs that have grown organically and that have very high return on capital employed. We have the lab that we acquired until twenty eighteen. We built your offense for a lot of acquisitions. So we incurred goodwill. And of course, that provides lower return on capital. We have a substantial amount of our capital on our balance sheet, which is those buildings that we own that have a book value of one point three billion. Probably if we were to do a sale list back, it would be more like two billion or more. And that has, of course, a lower return. So we give on page twenty three. an analysis of the returns of our business as we can see it. But it confirms that the business we run has a very high return on capital employed. And if we deploy additional capital, especially if we deploy it organically, we're looking at very significant returns. On page 24, it covers the startups that we've made over the last few years. And peak startups of 2022-2023 as a whole are starting to be profitable. So we have and that can only amplify going forward. So we are very satisfied with what we have built and the impact it should have on our performance, our service to clients and financial results over the next two years and later. On page 25, we give a list of some of the acquisitions we did. So we continue to be active. We think we also should add about 250 million of revenues next year from acquisitions at Reasonable multiple that means a lot of small Bolton acquisitions. Maybe not the bigger ones that would be sold at a much higher multiple But the world is big enough and we have enough opportunities We continue to be innovative or labs invent a lot of new tests and new capabilities That's on page 26 and I will not go through all of them. You probably have heard of the baby food latest baby food contamination with which could be caused by botulinum toxin. This is not a test that people were doing routinely most of the time. It normally doesn't happen. But when the crisis started, we developed the test very quickly. We developed a test that's actually more sensitive than what was available before in the market because most of those things come from encapsulated. In this specific contamination, it comes from oil that is added to vitamins or that is added in the form of oil encapsulated and measuring it you have to break the encapsulation to get to the full amount and the true amount so we make a nice breakthrough here in developing within very short time when the crisis started the right test and and the most sensitive test in the market we believe but we can go deeper on that if some of you are interested in q a page 28 well basically we can only confirm that Our objectives for 2027 are realistic. We think we will exceed them. The plans for CAPEX are in change. And BioPharma will pick up in the next few quarters, we believe. So we're still confident that we can revert to the typical organic growth we've had for decades of 6.5%, just to give a number, but higher, mid-to-high single digits. And we are building the network for that. And also the efficiencies and quality of service we are building should enable us to grow significantly faster than our competitors and at the market. On page 29, we give some ideas about the returns that we are generating. So we were We are pleased to have returned 1.5 billion to shareholders since 2021. So not only are we quite profitable, but we return a lot of cash to our shareholders already. Although we are still building the house, we return a lot. And we built Eurofins through a lot of acquisition until 2018, which caused us to incur a lot of goodwill on our balance sheet. But since then, we bought some companies, but much less. And if you look at the return on capital, on the incremental capital we've added, since then, after this big M&A phase, and you see that even including the goodwill, we already have 23% return on the incremental capital, which shows that we are reasonable in what we pay for acquisitions. We create value from our acquisition, and our stock of businesses continue to improve. So we're... We're very satisfied about the performance of 2025. We're very optimistic about what we think will generate over the next two years and especially beyond. In fact, I think we are building something that's going to be quite extraordinary in our markets, more and more focused. We've been also reviewing our portfolio, shedding a few small things. So over the next two years, we'll continue to do that, to be a true leader in our industry. to the most innovative in our industry. I don't have time to talk about it now because it's a result presentation, but we're investing a lot in new technologies, in AI, in automation to create real competitive advantage, a real differentiation in the speed and quality of our service, which should make us really the partner of choice of all the multinationals around the world in the industries we are serving. And I don't think anybody else is doing the type of investments we're doing. So I'm very positive and optimistic as to our performance post-2027 when we are done building that. When we are building that, you know, this causes a lot of disruption to service when you deploy new IT solutions. The last two years where we started deploying heavily new IT solutions, we've had a lot of disruption to service to clients with This is not the best when you change the digital tools in a company to show the best performance to clients. But this is now more and more working, and we're going to see the back end of that. And then we see the opposite, much better performance, faster performance, and that should help us also in growth and gaining market share post-2027. And where we have in the countries where we are done already, already in 26 and 27. That's my introduction for today. Sorry for the very quick speed of my speech and presentation. Now I'm happy to answer questions and Hugues Bossy is here too if we have some financial questions that I don't know the answer of.

speaker
Operator
Q&A Facilitator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will begin our question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on their touch tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. If you are using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. Thank you. Our first question. is coming from Tom Burlton with BNP Paribas. Your line is live.

speaker
Tom Burlton
Analyst, BNP Paribas

Hi, Gio. Thanks very much for the question. I've got a couple just on Biopharma to kick off and there's one on cast allocation. So on Biopharma, specifically within ancillary activities and the central lab bioanalysis business, you referenced these awards. Is there anything you're able to give us in terms of additional details on sort of how big, anything slightly more granular about phasing and so forth, because I was originally expecting some of these to start coming through in sort of mid-2025, and it feels like they got pushed to the right, I guess, because of client positioning and things like that. And in your opening remarks, you talked about anticipating potentially a significant sort of boost in demand, but you said by 2027, and then you went on to say that some of those could ramp up quite soon, so I'm just trying to understand the timing there and what's going on because it feels like that when it does come through it could be quite a big driver to biopharma and then to group organic growth. The second one still within biopharma just on the discovery part of the business it looked like through the back end of last year we've seen a bit of a pickup in terms of the biotech funding and I think that only really accelerated to kind of through Q4. We don't have the kind of longer run, I guess, data on your discovery business by quarter. How would you think about the sort of normal leave lag time as to when that should flow through to your business, your network? And we'd really start sort of seeing it in numbers, just still trying to gauge the sort of, I guess, the cadence of biopharma growth as we go through 2026. And then just on capital allocation, keen to understand how you're thinking about buybacks, as you mentioned towards the end of your remarks. You've been active in buying back shares and returning cash to shareholders. The share price has developed, I guess. You've got fairly fixed targets in terms of your added M&A revenues and your leverages, I guess, within the target range. Would you expect buybacks to be a kind of ongoing feature? Maybe not at the levels they were in 2025, but how should we think about kind of ongoing return of cash, and whether you'll be kind of pragmatic or consistent about that? Thank you.

speaker
Dr. Gilles Martin
CEO, Eurofins

Thanks a lot, Tom. On biopharma, yes, central lab and bioanalysis, we have some fairly large contracts. Our best guess now maybe would be H2 20, that we are talking about, would be H2 2026 for start of that. It's always difficult to time. They have to recruit patients, et cetera. So that's our best guess, as we can see. What is clear is the comp that is now. So going forward, we don't expect anywhere those revenues going down. And if you do the math, if you have a negative 20% or negative 30%, even on a small part of the scope, that has a big impact on the average growth of that scope. So that we don't think we're going to have any negative, especially not of that magnitude going forward. And that should have an impact on the overall growth of biopharma this year. And in the second half, hopefully, if we get those programs to kick in, it could become quite substantial. And maybe with, I said, 2027, I think overall biopharma, even our core biopharma product testing, could grow more than the mid-single digits where it is now. And that could also increase. When would that be? That's why maybe I say 27. Overall, biopharma, I don't see why biopharma as a whole shouldn't grow faster than life. It has been the case for a decade. And we've had phases like this, again, in 2012, where the pharma industry was re-evaluating pipelines and so on. The industry was a bit soft for a couple of years, and then we've had a decade of, of much faster growth. So I think that will return. And why will it return? Because simply the research is providing so many new products that are so powerful that it's just worth it for the pharma industry to spend money to develop those drugs. Because they will make a lot of profits with it. Even at lower reimbursement, they will make a lot of profits. Discovery. Yeah, the lag time. That goes from from company to company, project to project, but it's not immediate indeed before a project starts. What is it, six months, 12 months to get things to flow through depending on the project and the products in actual work for even the coding. It takes two, three months to design a study, to design a project. It's not something that you buy off a catalog. All those studies for biopharma, they are bespoke and they take time to define. It's like you build a house, you need to get the plans, get the plans approved before you can start building it. Capital allocation. Well, you know, if you look at, we're an active buyer in the market, and we also have our own assets that sometimes will get approached by people who would like to buy some of our potentially non-core assets. So we know what those assets are worth. If you look, ALS is trading at 15 times EBITDA. UL is trading at 19 or 20 times EBITDA. A lot of transactions are in that range between 15 and 20. Even with the recent re-rating, our stock is trading at 10 times. So obviously, if I have extra capital to deploy, it's a no-brainer to buy back our shares. I know what I buy. I know the potential of the profit increase of what I buy. We don't have to do a due diligence on it. We know what we're buying. And so... Once we've done the M&A, we think we'll be accretive and we think we can get our return over our hurdle rate. And if we have extra possibilities, we are going to continue to do buybacks. And I think we will generate a lot of cash. And actually, we might buy even more this year as we bought last year. Of course, that will depend on how the market view our share and share price, etc. But in spite of the recent good run of our shares, on those metrics, if you just look like the multiples of that people pay for assets in the market, either public assets or private assets, we're anywhere between 30 and 60%, 70% undervalued. And in the capital allocation policy that our board follows and we talk about, buying back our shares appears very attractive at the moment to us. We're insiders. Maybe if you're an outsider, there are other considerations that apply. If you're an insider, we will continue the buybacks.

speaker
Tom Burlton
Analyst, BNP Paribas

Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Q&A Facilitator

Thank you. Our next question is coming from Suhasini Varanasi with Goldman Sachs. Your line is live.

speaker
Suhasini Varanasi
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. A few from me, please. So you mentioned the serolite testing that you had launched in January. Have you seen increased demand for that testing given the recalls seen in the market? And is it possible to quantify the proportional benefit to revenues? That's the first one. The second one is on the margins. Your reported EBITDA margins have seen very strong underlying improvement in 2025. Can you perhaps provide some color on the scale of the expansion that you expect in 2026 and maybe the key risks around this? FX, obviously, is a little bit of a risk. We can't quantify that. SYNLAB, maybe the drag is a little bit less than last year, or maybe additional M&A. Just some color around that would be helpful. Thank you. And I think in your prepared remarks, you had indicated something around EBITDA margins could potentially return to peak COVID levels beyond 27. Just wanted to understand, get some clarity on that, and is it a medium-term target potentially beyond 27? Thank you. Thank you.

speaker
Dr. Gilles Martin
CEO, Eurofins

Yeah, Sara Lee, this is just starting. We don't know how big this crisis will be, how many charges, how many lots were affected. I'm not sure it will become a routine test because that was apparently caused by a contamination from contaminated oil from China. So hopefully that will stop and be put under control. And considering the size of Eurofins, for something like that to become material, it would have to be a really massive, massive global recall of all the milk in the market. So we don't expect any impact, any material impact on our revenues. But still, it's good for our clients to know that when there is something like that, we are there and we have the most sensitive methods, much more sensitive than the ISO method. So if they want to check their supplies, we can do that for them very well. Yes, we've gone on the advice of many of our investors and potentially analysts. We've gone away from giving specific margin targets and some companies do that. We've done it for 2027 and we stick to that because they were there and we believe in it. And hopefully we can do better than that. So for this year, what we've said, we will improve. And as you say, some of the factors that you mentioned will play a role. FX, we don't exactly know what it will be. M&A, we don't exactly know. We have a number of startups. We have to see exactly how fast they ramp. New buildings, when they come online, et cetera. What we can say is we think we will improve, we think we will achieve or do better than the 24% margin next year in 27. I can't be more specific this year. What is clear is we have massive investment in IT that we hope to largely complete this year, so that should help definitely next year. How fast all those programs get deployed, all those software gets deployed, how fast do we start to accrue the benefits of it? is also a little bit difficult to plan quarter by quarter. And what I said about margin, maybe don't get too excited too quickly, but it has always been the case that our best scopes have a bid-down margin in excess of 30%. The whole of Eurofins will never be there, but there's no reason why 24% should be a cap. Of course, we will talk about that once we complete that period. And depending on our perimeters then, on potential M&A we might do then, et cetera, we'll try to set objectives beyond 2027 when we publish 2027 results. But all things being equal, staying in our market, staying in our current perimeter, there's no reason why we shouldn't go beyond that. Because every year we're improving, and there's a very long, if I look at what we plan to achieve this year, there's a very long list of things we are doing that will improve our results substantially. And if on top of that, biopharma starts to pick up a bit, it could be even more faster and more meaningful.

speaker
Suhasini Varanasi
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

That's very clear. Thank you very much.

speaker
Tom Burlton
Analyst, BNP Paribas

Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Q&A Facilitator

Our next question is coming from Delphine Lalouet with Bernstein. Your line is live.

speaker
Delphine Lalouet
Analyst, Bernstein

Yes, hello, hi, good afternoon, Gilles and everybody. A couple of questions on my side and a bit of a clarification regarding the infant baby formula product and how big that is actually today into the food business and sticking with the food business with a broader vision. Where are you... taking the most market share or where have you been taking the most market share over the course of 25 when it comes to segments or region into that field. And second question dealing with the CapEx envelope for next year and probably the year after in the range of 400 million euro. I was wondering how much of that is dedicated to the regular, let's say, IT ongoing and to the IT transformation? You're coming to a close now. Can you detail that a bit more, please?

speaker
Dr. Gilles Martin
CEO, Eurofins

Thank you. It's really hard to say where we gain share or where we don't. I think we gain share, especially in the markets where we are strong in North America. I think we continue to gain share in many European countries. We do, too. And this baby formula testing, this test is not something we were doing in the past, by the way, we just developed the test, but it's not going to be a huge market. I hope so for the milk industry, although from time to time there are issues in the milk industry. There were issues in North America and a lot of recalls in North America. We helped our clients a lot to go through the shortages to help them mitigate the shortages of the meal powder in North America over the last few years. What we do is essential. People forget it, but there are segments of the population who are very fragile, and when they eat contaminated food, it can be fatal, and especially babies. We also test a lot of supplements, sports supplements, If you put not enough or too much vitamin in certain products, it can be toxic. It's not only the bacteriological contaminant. So this is more like a reminder of you can't stop testing food. If you stop testing food, bad things happen. And actually, it shows, maybe nobody could have guessed that that would happen, but it shows you have to have very broad testing programs because even if a contamination hasn't happened in five years, it doesn't mean it won't happen again. And if you have a brand problem, that is valuable, you don't want to be the one whose products are contaminated. I think that's maybe one of the many wake-up calls. It's not because you haven't had a problem with your products in the last five years that you won't have one tomorrow. So testing is important. It's like having a fire detector. Maybe you haven't had a fire in 20 years, but you have a fire detector in your house or in your home.

speaker
Dr. Gilles Martin
CEO, Eurofins

That can still happen.

speaker
Operator
Q&A Facilitator

Apologies, ladies and gentlemen, we appear to have lost our speaker line. One moment, please, while we try to get them back.

speaker
Tom Burlton
Analyst, BNP Paribas

Once again apologies ladies and gentlemen we are trying to get the speaker line back in one moment please.

speaker
Dr. Gilles Martin
CEO, Eurofins

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we have just heard from the speakers.

speaker
Tom Burlton
Analyst, BNP Paribas

They are trying to reconnect, so please hold.

speaker
Operator
Q&A Facilitator

They'll be with us momentarily.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

-

-