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Grifols Sa Barc Ord New
11/7/2024
Hello everyone and welcome to Grifo's third quarter 2024 financial results conference call. My name is Dani Segarra and I'm Vice President of Head of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Today I'm joined by Grifo's Chief Executive Officer, Nat Shabia, and Chief Financial Officer, Rahul Srinivasan, as well as Roland Vandeler, President of BioPharma. Today's call will last about an hour, including a Q&A session. All materials used during the call are available on the investor relation website at griffols.com. Moving to slide two, I would first like to share a disclaimer on forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties. They are only valid on the day of the call and the company is under no obligation to update or revise them. GRU financial statements are prepared in accordance with EU IFRS and other applicable reporting provisions. These include alternative performance measures, also known as APMs, prepared under the GRU financial reporting model as defined by the guideline of the European Securities and Markets Authority. Please note that Grifols Management uses APMs to evaluate its financial performance, cash flows, and financial position as the basis for its operational and strategic decisions. These APMs are prepared for all time periods presented in this document. On today's call, Nacho will start off shortly with some introductory remarks and a discussion on business performance. Then Rahul will discuss the financial results for the quarter and year to date before turning the call back over to Nacho for his final remarks. With that, thank you very much for joining us today. Nacho, over to you.
Thank you, Dani. Good evening, afternoon, and morning to all of you, depending on where you are in the world. I appreciate you dialing in for our third quarter results call. Before I turn to the results, I would like to provide you with a few updates on key matters. First, please note that the focus in this session will be on Grifold's third quarter results, which, as you will see, are reflective of our progress and indicating we are heading into the right direction. We will not be addressing any questions or comments related to Brookfield or any potential transaction. As you are aware, Grifols entered into an NDA with Brookfield, whereby Brookfield was granted access to perform due diligence. And all what I can confirm is that it is ongoing as per today. Any further update will be communicated to the market in due course and in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. As always, the Grifols Board of Directors and management team are committed to acting in the best interest of all the shareholders. And we remain very focused on continuing to execute the company's strategies and deliver to our commitments. Please understand that we are not going to make any further comment on these matters on today's call. I thank you in advance and appreciate your understanding. The second key update I want to provide is regarding Spain's National Securities Markets Commission, CNMB, and the SEC as well. As we reported last month, CNMB has concluded the review on our financial reporting, having identified no additional elements to those initially reported in March 2024. The SEC has also conveyed that they have completed the review of the company's filing with no additional comments nor actions. Finally, I also would like to touch on some leadership changes. In September, we announced that Thomas Glassman would transition into the role of non-executive chairman of the board. This is another step in our previously announced governance enhancements, which we first began in 2022, and allows Thomas to fully dedicate his time to the non-executive chairmanship role. I would like to extend on behalf of the board of directors and the entire company, our deepest gratitude to Thomas for his time and dedication to Grifols in his executive role over the last years. Personally, I also want to show my strong appreciation to Thomas for his invaluable support during my first months at Grifols. Thank you, Thomas, and I look forward to continuing to work with you in your non-executive role. While I will miss sitting next to Thomas on these calls, I'm pleased to welcome our new CFO, Rahul Srinivasan, who has joined me on the call today and will introduce himself shortly. The addition of Rahul marks the completion of a broad management transition and represents the final piece to complete the new executive management team. Rahul brings a proven track record of financial success, and we look forward to benefiting from his expertise. Finally, and before starting the presentation, I want to take a moment to highlight and appreciate the many initiatives we've taken over the last two years as we work to transform the business and deliver strong results in a sustainable basis. Over the last few years, our business has faced a number of headwinds as it was heavily impacted by the COVID pandemic that led to a re-evaluation of our operations and strategic direction. Grifold responded by double down on the fundamental growth of the business, strengthening corporate governance, refreshing executive management, imposing greater financial discipline, and reinforcing a culture of performance and accountability. SAC's actions are reflected in the positive results we are reporting today and are a direct consequence of the resilience and adaptability we've demonstrated during these times. I'm confident that these actions will keep leading our business toward performance expectations for years to come. Shifting to our financial results, we continue to build on our momentum with another strong performance in the third quarter. This quarter's results underscore our capacity to capture robust global demand effectively across our key markets and demonstrate how we are well positioned to sustain this trajectory moving forward. Revenue in the third quarter totalled nearly 1.8 billion euro, representing 12.4 percent increase on a constant currency basis over the previous year, while year-to-date revenues reached 5.2 billion euro, representing a 9.1 percent increase. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter came in €462 million, with a margin of nearly 26%. This increase is an improvement of 26.7% at cost and currency from the previous year. Free cash flow for the quarter improved to €127 million, and we continued our deleveraging path, reducing our leverage ratio to 5.1 from 6.8 in the first quarter. Looking ahead to our fourth quarter, we view our strong third quarter performance as a positive indicator of our ability to meet full year guidance. While we recognize that the upcoming quarter will be a demanding one, we remain focused in our commitment to ensure we close out the year in a strong manner. Plasma continued to play a significant role in driving profitability. Our cost per liter continued to decline in 2024, and we expect the trend to continue. We have managed plasma supply to ensure we are able to meet the growing demand. Going forward, we will continue to execute on its initiative to further improve plasma and manufacturing efficiencies, helping to reduce cost and expand profitability. Grifols continue to view innovation as one of its top pillars, and I am pleased to share that we are on track to achieve all our 2024 innovation milestones. Hitting these targets is key to continue building on our fundamentals for future growth. Of particular importance, fibrinogen regulatory process has seen significant progress, which I will cover in more depth later on this call. Additionally, I'm excited to announce that we were awarded the U.S. BARDA contract to develop GigaGen recombinant polyclonon antibody therapeutic platform. We have made significant strides in corporate stewardship as we advance our sustainability agenda, achieving our highest score ever in the 2024 Standard & Poor's Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment and being awarded a global medal by EcoBedis. Turning to slide six, let's take a look into our key financial metrics, which shows a clear sequential growth across the board. As mentioned, we achieved nearly 1.8 billion in sales in this quarter, representing a 12.4% increase on a constant currency basis. On the profitability side, adjusted EBITDA for the last 12 months reached €1.7 billion, which margins increasing to 25.8% in the third quarter from the 21.6% reported in the first quarter of the year. Free cash flow generation continues to be a priority, and we are pleased with the sequential improvement we've seen over the years. As discussed on my first quarter earning calls last May, optimizing of working capital was a pivotal driver for improved free cash flow in 2024. This is reflected in our third quarter positive free cash flow generation of 127 million euro. We significantly breached the gap towards our full year 2024 guidance. That said, we expect additional working capital consumption in the fourth quarter as we will be building up inventory to meet the strong underlying demand we expect in 2025. Finally, we continue to reduce our leverage ratio per our credit agreement, led by the repayment of senior secured debt following the receipt of 1.6 billion euro in Shanghai RAS funds, as well as the significant EBITDA improvement. Rahul will delve deeper in this and other relevant financial metrics later in the presentation. Turning to top line, you will see that total revenue year to date has increased 9.1% on a constant currency basis. driven by strong performance across all business units. Revenue growth has continued escalating from 5.5% in Q1 to 9.3% in Q2 to a remarkable 12.4% in Q3, all in constant currency basis. This acceleration was steered by biopharma, growing at 12.1% for the quarter and 9.1% year-to-date. The Immunoglobulin franchise continues to show strong results with double-digit growth driven by IBG and subcutaneous IG. Our Alpha 1 trend is improving as well in Q3, reversing the impact of prior quarters, and albumin also performed well. Growing demand in the U.S., Canada, and rest of the world gives us confidence in our upside potential moving forward. In diagnostics, we saw a 1.3% uptick on a constant currency for the quarter, landing at a 1.7% advance year-to-year on a like-for-like basis, guided by blow-typing solutions. I will also cover more on this business unit later. Biopharma continued to be the main growth driver in the third quarter. The IG franchise remains the highest growth protein, with up to 16.6% in the third quarter and 14.3% in this year, both on a constant currency basis. IVIG growth was driven by strong demand in the U.S. and international market. At the same time, subcutaneous IG continues to gain traction and grew a remarkable 52% on a constant currency basis year-to-date. reinforced by a strong performance in the U.S. and multiple launches within the European Union. Albumin was up 11.7% in the third quarter and 10.3% year-to-date, both on constant currency basis, caused by a higher demand in China. Alpha-1 and Specialty Proteins revenue improved by 3.8% on a constant currency basis from last quarter, bringing our year-to-date growth to 1.3%. In the U.S., our Alpha-1 franchise is regaining momentum following the transition of a specialty pharma distributor, while demand for Ravis treatment has increased this quarter. Now I would like to show an overview of our priorities to further enhance our performance, which focus upon efficiencies to strengthen our leading market position in both the commercial and plasma center operations. First, we further build out our portfolio as our subcutaneous IG Shembify gains further traction in the European market, with eight launches executed so far in 2024. We see that our IG product offering with both Gamunex and Shembify is well-received, reflected by momentum in pull-through across geographies. In addition, we are reinforcing the value proposition for Alpha-1 patients, which is already offering expanded capabilities to our pro-lasting users. We're seeing increased momentum in the U.S., and our commercial strategy continues to focus on growth, both in existing and new key accounts. In Europe, our teams again excel, reporting another quarter of double-digit growth. Product lifecycle management, paired with new product development, also continues to be key. We secure approval for Chemvify by weekly dosing from FDA in July, and enroll our first patient for Alpha-1 antitresib, 15% subcutaneous phase 1 and 2. Furthermore, we are progressing in our filing for Fibrinogen, which I will cover in the next slide. Finally, we're enhancing the performance and accentuating the talent of our teams. In line with our strategic efforts across the company, we're currently building skills and new capabilities in our commercial team in the U.S., while enhancing customers' and patients' engagement. In addition to these key efforts that are fueling our strengthening market positions, we continue to improve our operational effectiveness. As part of this, we are optimizing our global plasma center network, which comprises 405 plasma centers around the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Egypt. Additionally, we're working to leverage new technologies and implement process efficiencies. We've been increasing our AG yields through the deployment of Nomogram and development of a roadmap to expand continuous improvement initiatives. While implementing these strategies, we're also prioritizing enhancing the donor experience and improving donor satisfaction. Turning to slide 10, let me reiterate that innovations continue to be one of our main cornerstones. And as I mentioned earlier, we're on track to accomplish our 2024 innovation-related milestones. For the first three quarters of the years, we've completed all but two of these milestones, which we anticipate we'll see positive updates by year end. In July, ChemB5 by weekly dosing received FDA approval. In September, GammaNex InVax began conformance load testing. In Fibonacci, there are some exciting advancements in the European Union, where the marketing authorization application was successfully submitted through a decentralized procedure, including several countries. Additionally, the U.S. regulatory pathway is progressing well, maintaining its scheduled pace. This development marked important milestones in bringing this protein to the markets, ultimately benefiting patient care on a broader scale. We have also begun clinical startup activities for investigational new drug application of GIGA-2339, which is a next-generation antibody drug targeting anti-hepatitis B virus following the receipt of a DA approval. We're excited as well with the contract awarded to GIGAGEN by the U.S. BARDA to develop a recombinant polyclonin antibody therapy for two proteins. This contract marks a milestone and will additionally support Grifols in the manufacturing and phase one trial and has a value up to $135 million over the next six years. Turning to slide 11, our diagnostic business remains an important part of our operations, and I wanted to shine a spotlight on the business and what we envision for further growth. Currently, our primary segments in transfusion medicine are blood typing solutions and nucleate acid testing donor screenings. The transfusion medicine market is a critical field that ensures that safe and effective supply of blood and plasma to patients in need. Within the BTS segment, Grifo's focus is to become the leading player through capitalizing on our current position and expanding through improved profitability. Execution of our commercial plan, focusing on our core markets, and continuous development of the next generation of instruments. Our performance in the third quarter is reflective of our progress. We have grown double digits in our core market. Our flagship Aflexis instrument continues to gain market share in conjunction with successful tenders in key markets. In our NAT segment, testing for diseases and viral markets are critical to ensuring a safe blood and plasma supply. This is an important segment. We are focused on driving steady growth through lifecycle management of our Proclase Panther instrument, maintaining and strengthening our strategic accounts, and developing immunocyte technology for blood and plasma screening. Our performance in the third quarter reflects our near-term goal through steady levels of donations in the U.S., solid progress in the tissue and organ testing segment, and successful tenders in growth market. With our near-term focus of strengthening or growing our core VTS and NAT segment, we envision a broader expansion by our diagnostics business. Leveraging our expertise in transfusion medicine, we view expansion into the clinical diagnostics segment as a natural progression. Driven by increasing prevalence of chronic disease, emphasis on preventive healthcare, and advancement in technology, this segment is growing on an area where we can explore leveraging our IBD expertise and focus on the development of new testing platforms. Finally, an additional area of growth is expanding our testing capabilities internally to provide a best-in-class and seamless support model for our biopharma business. Creating farther synergies between our largest businesses will allow for accelerated testing and new drug development. And with this, I would like to turn the call over to Rahul. Rahul?
Thank you, Nacho, for the warm welcome and for all your help with my transitioning since my start at Griffles a few weeks ago. It is an absolute privilege to be here in this capacity for Griffles, and I'm aware with this privilege comes the huge responsibility towards the company and all its stakeholders, including the critical institutional investors across our equity and debt complex. Moving to page 13. As some of you might be aware, I have followed the Griffill story for a number of years from a different vantage point, from where I developed much admiration for the company's commitment to its inspiring mission of improving patients' lives globally and serving our donors, as well as the company's growth mindset. And by doing so, delivering not only for all our stakeholders, but also to society. The strong momentum and growth prospects that the company benefits from today is as a result of the bold and visionary actions taken in the past, giving us a solid foundation and a market-leading position with significant scale in a highly attractive industry that is characterized by secular tailwinds and high barriers to entry. Notwithstanding all the challenges and considerable distractions that the company has faced this year, to grow our top line by almost double digits and EBITDA by circa 25% speaks to the attractor's business fundamentals and the resilience of our over 23,000 teammates and the company as a whole. As a senior management team, we are now in a fortunate position to be able to harvest over the coming years this highly defensive portfolio with very exciting growth levers and related cash flow prospects. And in this fortunate position of being able to harvest our various growth legs, there is much greater focus on analytical rigor and general discipline, be it financial, cost, or capital allocation discipline. and to continue our relentless efforts on deleveraging and improving free cash flow generation. An aspect that has been particularly great to see in these initial weeks since I started is the organization's focus and progress on continuous improvement and operational excellence to drive efficiencies. The success of the operational improvement plan and evidencing its conversion into significant actual cash EBITDA has been the catalyst for this mindset change across the organization, and it bodes well for the quarters and years ahead. Moving on to the last point on this page, from everything that I've seen in my first few weeks here, I continue to have a very strong conviction for the Griffill story. And I believe that we have a significant communication and engagement opportunity to share the strength of the story in the coming months with each of our various stakeholders. For all these reasons, I had no hesitation in making this significant professional change after receiving Nacho's and the board's offer and to leave the safety and the considerable comfort of my prior role to take on this invigorating challenge and deciding to relocate my family from London to Barcelona. With that, let's now go through our Q3 and year-to-date financial performance on page 14. Before I go into our Q3 and year-to-date financial performance in 2024, please consider 2024's relative performance to what was a record financial performance in 2023, given the sales and adjusted EBITDA records that Grifols achieved in 2023. With that important context to frame our 2024 performance, year-to-date and Q3 2024 revenues are up very strong versus our record 2023 by over 9% and 12.3% on a constant currency basis, respectively, taking our year-to-date sales up to $5.237 billion and very much tracking to our $7-plus billion revenue guidance for the year. Year-to-date gross profit was up 14.5% versus 2023, and year-to-date adjusted EBITDA was up 25% versus the record 2023. Three of Griffill's best ever quarterly adjusted EBITDA results have been achieved in the last four quarters, which hopefully is not lost on all our stakeholders that follow our financial performance. I will elaborate on the drivers of this growth in the next page. As a result, our year-to-date reported net result has swung from being meaningfully negative in 2023 to positive $88 million. That said, financial expenses in our P&L are higher than 2023 year-to-date for three reasons. non-cash one-off impact of deferred financial costs of 50 million that is linked to the redemption of senior secured debt from the Shanghai RAS proceeds in keeping with our commitment to delever. Two, non-cash one-off FX impact of over 30 million related to the Shanghai RAS transaction. And three, higher cash interest expense from the 1.3 billion senior secured notes principally used to repay the senior unsecured notes maturing in 2025. As Nacho mentioned earlier, the free cash flow generation excluding the effect of the Shanghai RAS transaction continues as we expected with a strong Q3 and year-to-date free cash flow being significantly higher than 2023, and we remain on course to achieve our guidance. I will go into more detail about the free cash flow generation in a subsequent slide. And finally, on leverage. Our total net leverage per the credit agreement has declined further from 6.8 times in Q1 to 5.5 times in Q2 and now to 5.1 times at the end of Q3 with the debt repayment from the Shanghai RAS proceeds and our continued strong momentum in EBITDA driving this significant deleveraging in only a couple of quarters. In addition, I also wanted to draw your attention to our net secured leverage ratio, which stands at 3.1 times per our credit agreement, and at one of the lowest levels that I can ever remember it being for Grifols. and the significant secured capacity buffer that exists to the extent that it is ever needed and in contrast to the past. So the meaningful strengthening of our balance sheet continues at pace and continued deleveraging and improved cash flow generation remain key priorities for Grifols. Moving on to page 15. We highlight the significant momentum in our adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA margin for Q3 24 is 25.8%, with the margin up 260 basis points versus Q3 2023, and a quarter-on-quarter growth of 26.7%. We see similar strong momentum if you consider the year-to-date performance, with the year-to-date adjusted EBITDA being up 25% on our record 2023. This momentum across gross margin and adjusted EBITDA margin is primarily being driven by volume growth in biopharma, the continuing improvement in the cost per liter, the benefits of our operational improvement plan coming through via plasma and manufacturing yield improvements, and finally from operational leverage, which I will touch upon on the next page. As Nacho mentioned, we need to achieve similar growth versus 2023 in this final quarter to achieve guidance. The momentum within the business is certainly there and the entire organization remains very focused on that objective. Moving on to page 16. Notwithstanding the very robust bounce back in adjusted EBITDA margin from the COVID years, we remain below our pre-COVID margin levels. We expect an improving trend in our margin levels in the years to come, and we will share more details in our next earnings call with respect to guidance and targets for 2025. The drivers of the adjusted EBITDA margin over the years are similar to the drivers I mentioned on the prior page. In addition, it is our expectation that the adjustments to EBITDA will reduce as our transaction activity and the restructuring activity reduces. And finally, our track record of converting adjusted EBITDA to actual cash flow quickly is very positive, often occurring in less than 12 months. On the right-hand side of the slide, you see the clear benefit of our operational leverage momentum coming through. These numbers appropriately exclude the one-offs, and you see that our OPEX as a percentage of sales is even lower than our pre-COVID levels. And we believe that there is an opportunity to continue to squeeze that going forward. Equally, we do expect some of our SG&A savings to be reinvested into R&D in the coming years to be able to better monetize some of the exciting opportunities that we see in front of us. Page 17, the all-important free cash flow slide. The bottom line of this page is that we are very much still tracking to our guidance to the market to be free cash flow breakeven by the end of the year. We took a big step forward towards achieving that guidance with 127 million of free cash flow generation pre-Shanghai RAS in Q3. Whilst it might be tempting to extrapolate the Q2 and Q3 free cash flow progression to an even bigger number in Q4, we would caution against that approach and would simply reiterate our breakeven target. The various cash flow optimizing initiatives that have been implemented are yielding results, be it our working capital and inventory management focus or our disciplined approach with respect to cash across the board. Like we saw in Q2, you will see interest paid in Q4 to be higher than Q3 to reflect the interest periods of our debt instruments. And at the bottom of the page, The extraordinary growth capex is almost entirely due to Immunotech payments, and I will touch on this further on the next page. Transaction and restructuring costs, whilst elevated in 2024, is expected to decline significantly in 2025. Our liquidity at the end of Q3 stood at $704 million. We used some liquidity during Q3 to repay debt at the buy test level, and in doing so, optimize our consolidated interest expense. Page 18. On the left-hand side of this slide, We show our CapEx evolution over time, and I also make the distinction between maintenance and growth CapEx each year. We have typically guided the market to annual CapEx that includes both maintenance and growth CapEx to be around 300 million. Some years slightly lower and other years higher, but around 300 million on average. The extraordinary growth capex in 2024, which we expect to be around 280 million for the full year, almost entirely relates to Immunotech. And we expect this extraordinary growth capex to halve in 2025 and then further halve again in 2026. On the right-hand side of the slide, we summarize the evolution of stock turnover days to show progress on inventory management. As you might be aware, in 2020 and 2021, during COVID, we suffered inventory shortages that resulted in artificially low inventory levels. Given the characteristics of the industry, as you are aware, the length of stock turnover period is quite high, which is entirely normal, but what this chart does reflect is some of our recent improvements on the back of initiatives to better balance the leader. Given the strong growth tailwinds, we do expect to continue to invest in having the right levels of inventory, but the combination of our operational improvement as well as taking a more dynamic approach to our inventory levels, the aspiration continues to be to remain efficient going forward. Page 19. We've had a number of questions about how we use the Shanghai RAS proceeds. The entirety of the net proceeds we received went to prepay our secure debt as shown in this table. And we summarized the tranches that were paid down. This contributed significantly to our deleveraging progress. And finally, our near-term priorities. Number one, achieving 2024 free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA guidance. Number two, continue our relentless focus on deleveraging. Number three, the process to extend our RCF is already underway, and we have received very supportive feedback from our bank syndicate in general. Number four, terming out our 2025 senior secured debt maturities, for which we have a number of different options, unsurprisingly, given the strong momentum we continue to see and the lowest secured leverage that we have had that I can remember. Let me wrap this up. by leaving you with the following final points. The momentum of the Griffill story has meant that it has grown back into its capital structure rapidly after a once in a hundred year pandemic. The resilience of this business is very clear and has been proven. The outlook continues to be very encouraging and the entire Griffiths team is focused on capturing the tailwinds that we observe across our different business segments led by Biopharma. This next phase of the Griffiths story is very much a harvesting one and capturing the full value of the portfolio that enjoys high growth potential, strong margins, and high cash flow conversion prospects with meaningful momentum from our operational improvement initiatives that are clearly yielding results. The entire organization remains very focused on continued deleveraging and improving free cash flow generation. I have significant conviction for the Griffill story, and as a senior management team, we look forward to discussing our perspective with all stakeholders in the coming months and quarters. And with that, I will hand over to Nacho to conclude the presentation.
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