Tecan Group

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the TCAN Group Half Year Results 2026 Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants have been listed in only mode and the conference has been recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. Webcast viewers may submit questions in writing by the relative field. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Martin Brandle, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communication and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. And good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call this morning. We are pleased to share and discuss our results for the first half of 2026 with you. Joining me on the call today are our Chief Executive Officer, Monica Manotas, and our Chief Financial Officer, Camila Japur. Before we begin, let's quickly go over a few formalities as usual. The press release announcing our financial results was issued this morning at 7 a.m. Central European Summer Time. Both the press release and the 2026 Interim Report are available on our website, tecan.com, under the Investor Relations tab. Additionally, the PDF of the presentation slides, which we will be discussing during this call, is available for download. I'd like to remind you that this call is being webcast live on our homepage, and the link to the replay will be available shortly after the live webcast on our investor webpage. With that, let me now turn it over to Monica Manotas. Monica.

Thank you, Martin. Good morning, everyone. And thank you all for joining us for our 2026 Have Your Results presentation. As Martin just said, I'm joined here today by Camila Japur, our new CFO. Welcome, Camila. You hit the ground running from your start on June 1st, and it is great to have you here and also as part of the leadership team. Together, we will take you through our performance for the first half of 2026, our views for the rest of the year and beyond, and also give you an update on our transformation program rewired. At our capital markets update in March, we explained to you how we intend to reignite growth at TECAN with our rewired transformation program. And I am pleased to say that our solid results with above market growth in the first half gives us good reason for confidence. Let me quickly walk you through today's agenda. I will start with a short introduction and the headline financial highlights for the first half of 2026. Camila will then take you through the financial results in more detail. And after that, I will come back to give you an update on our rewired transformation program outlook for the rest of the year and our targets for 2028. As always, at the end, we will have time for your questions. Our performance in the first half was solid. I'm pleased about the above market growth in both segments. Profitability is sound, yet reflects the cost of our rewired program and of IT investments. A look at our results. Group sales came in at 427.5 million francs, up 3.4% in local currencies, with both our life sciences and partnering segments contributing to comparable growth. Order entry was 444.3 million francs, up 3% in local currencies, keeping our book-to-bill ratio above one in both segments. Adjusted EVA DA was 64.5 million francs, corresponding to a margin of 15.1% of sales, slightly ahead of last year. Basic EPS was 99 cents, and adjusted EPS was 2 francs and 62 cents, both below last year's levels. Here, FX was an important headwind, but Camila will take you through the drivers. Operating cash flow was 17 million francs. As Camila would explain in more detail, the significant decrease in the first half of 2026 was mainly due to changes in working capital. These factors are non-structural. Operating cash flow has historically been strong, and it will remain strong in a future-proof TECAN. Overall, a solid first half with good above-market growth. There are areas for improvement, which we are addressing with rewired, but we remain financially very strong, and this allows us to invest in future-proofing our company while returning capital to our shareholders in line with our capital allocation strategy. Let's now take a look at our end markets. As a reminder on the format of this slide, this slide is intended to show how we expect our end markets to perform this year. The arrows in each customer segment represent the expected change versus last year. There are two arrows for each segment representing the lower and the upper end of the expected range. Overall, In H1 trends developed as we expected. Markets have been largely constructive and continued to recover. Now let me share some color on how we performed in each segment in H1. I will start in the middle with the biopharma and diagnostics since they are the most relevant for us. In biopharma we grew high single digits. We are seeing the recovery we were expecting. The diagnostic segment continued to grow steadily, and we delivered mid-single-digit growth in this segment. Now, moving on to academia and government, there we saw a double-digit decline. Relative to our expectations, our view is that for lab automation, this segment performed on the lower end of the range. And finally, in medtech, we grew in the mid-single digits. We continue to see healthy growth in the market for this segment. However, concentration of our business among a few customers means our growth can reflect single customer decisions more than the overall market dynamics. Now looking out to the second half of 2026, while we have seen some signs of acceleration in the market, we believe it is too early to call a change in trend. So with that, our assumption is that for the full year 2026, the markets will perform as we anticipated at the beginning of the year. On the whole, I'm pleased with the development of TECAN and of the market environment so far this year. Our performance has been solid. We are confident in our ability to grow above the market, yet we remain prudent. And with this, I'd like to hand over to Camila Japur, our CFO, for the detailed discussion of our results.