Sartorius St Bt Unsp/Adr

Welcome to the presentation of Sartorius and Sartorius' TED in biotechs on the preliminary results 2025. Please note that the call is being recorded and streamed on Sartorius' website. Your participation in this implies you consent with this. A replay will be available shortly after the call.

Please note that management comments during this call will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainty for discussion of risk factors. I encourage you to review the safe harbor statement contained in today's press release and presentation. With that, I'm pleased to hand over to Michael Forster, CEO of Sartorius. Michael, please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Petra, and a warm welcome also from my side. And thank you all for joining us today for our preliminary full year 2025 results. Before we begin, I would like to sincerely thank all of our colleagues across Sartorius for their commitment and dedication over the past year. Their passion, professionalism, and strong focus on execution are clearly reflected in our results we are presenting today. I would also like to personally thank everyone who has made it such a smooth and rewarding experience for me to step into my role as a CEO, and particular thanks as well to my colleagues here, Alexandra, Renee, and Florian from the executive team, It's been really a great journey up to now, fantastic work on the strategy, and great things to come. And I don't want to miss out as well on saying thank you to the team here from investor relations, communications, and finance, because I think the workload over the last couple of weeks and days has been tremendous in order to get us all prepared and get our reporting in place. Thank you all for that. Now, let me briefly summarize key messages that we would like to share with you today. First of all, 2025 was characterized by return to normal demand behavior for consumables and continued cautious investments, activities by our customers. Combined with an active operational management in a still challenging environment, we delivered improved operational and financial performance. Am I on the right? Okay. All right, supported by the improvement, improving demand trends mainly on the consumable side and the operating leverage inherent in our model, Sartorius achieved considerable profitable growth. For the full year, we delivered results slightly ahead of our upgraded full year 2025 sales guidance. Profitability landed in the upper half of our initial guidance from April and exceeded our October EBITDR target with a margin of 29.7%. This performance reflects growing volumes, operating leverage, and strong execution. Now growth was once again driven by our recurring business across both divisions. In bioprocess solutions, strong double-digit growth in recurring revenue more than offset continued softness in equipment, which, however, stabilized over the year. In net products and services, performance improved gradually as expected. Growth in H2 was driven by recurring business, while instruments showed positive momentum, also supported by product launches in bioanalytics. Our operating performance allowed us to further reduce our leverage ratio, underscoring our commitment to financial discipline and a strong balance sheet. Overall, in 2025, we laid a solid foundation for the year 2026. For the group, we expected sales growth of around 5% to 9%, with an underlying EBITDR margin slightly above 30%. Let me now turn to action we are taking to enable future growth. Let's talk about innovation and partnerships. We have made tangible progress in two key areas, innovation and the expansion of our resilient global R&D and production capacity. We launched several new solutions across both divisions. In bioprocessing, we made progress in more sustainable product design with the launch of SatoPoreEvo, a PFAS-free filtration solution which addresses growing regulatory and customer expectations around the elimination of persistent substances while maintaining the high performance and reliability our customers require. We also launched the SatoCon Cassettes, further strengthening our offering for efficient and scalable downstream processing, particularly for viral vector purification. Now on the equipment side, we introduced a pioneering continuous bioprocessing platform developed with Sanofi, which faces high customer interest. This platform supports the industry's transition from traditional batch production to continuous processes, enabling faster, more efficient, and more sustainable manufacturing workflows. And our teams advanced our bioanalytical portfolio, including the only live cell imaging system with confocal microscopy inside an incubator, a really important step forward for the work with complex 3D cell models. We further strengthened this area also through the acquisition of MATEC, expanding our portfolio of advanced 3D cell models that more closely mimic human tissue, deliver more predictive and reproducible results, and help reduce the need for animal testing. And we entered into a partnership with Nanoteam Technologies, enhancing our capabilities in cell expansion and activation to support next-generation biologics. In parallel, we continued to invest in a resilient global manufacturing footprint. We completed the expansion in Oman and progressed with the expansion in Germany, as well as with the construction of our Greenfield site in Songdo, South Korea. ensuring scalability, supply reliability, and proximity to our customers. Taken together, these actions strengthen our ability to support customers as markets normalize and position for Sartorius for sustainable innovation that grows over the coming years. With this, let's take a closer look into our numbers.