BICO Group AB (publ)

Welcome to BICO Q4 2025 report presentation. For the first part of the presentation, participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO Maria Force and CFO Jacob Thordenberg. Please go ahead.

Hello and welcome to BiCo Group's Q4 2025 earnings call. I'm Maria Fors, President and CEO and I will together with BiCo's CFO Jakob Thorndenberg present this year's end report. Here's today's agenda. I will open today's session by summarizing 2025 and also describe how BiCo serves the world's leading pharma and biotech companies with solutions that transform how labs operate, innovate and solve our customer challenges. Following that, I will summarize the full year 2025 as well as Q4 2025 and Jakob will then present the group's financial performance. We will then proceed and comment on our performance in the two business areas, Life Science Solutions and Lab Automation. I will also comment on our R&D pipeline with our ongoing product development efforts. Additionally, I will highlight product launches made at SLAS, the Society of Lab Automation and Screening Congress that took place last week in Boston. The session will conclude by highlighting our focus for 2026 before we open up for Q&A. When summarizing 2025, we can conclude that we finished the year on a strong note with double-digit organic sales growth in lab automation and a strengthened cash position. After the quarter in January 26, we successfully raised new capital, enabling investments to support further growth. 2025 has been a year of strategy execution. We have delivered on all key strategic initiatives and the impact is clear. A portfolio focused on lab automation, significantly reduced debt and a strong cash position. We have leaner operations and a more focused and customer-centric product portfolio, providing a strong foundation for 2026. And before commenting on our performance, I will present how BiCo serves the world's leading pharma and biotech companies with solutions that transform how labs operate and integrate. Our customers share one ambition, reducing time to market and increasing the probability of success. With Biocero's leading software suite, Green Button Go, together with the off-the-shelf automation products as well as bioprinting, our portfolio is in the sweet spot of meeting that ambition and solve the core challenges with long and costly development cycles. Our solutions enable smarter, faster and more efficient labs, and here lies an underlying strong demand. Pharma and biotech companies all face the same fundamental challenge, long, costly development cycles for new therapies. The development of a new therapy often takes more than 10 years and costs between two and four billion US dollars, with probability of approval after phase one at just 10%. To overcome this, our pharma and biotech customers are investing heavily in automation to increase efficiency, speed and quality, to bring innovations to market faster and at a lower cost. Our products and services enable our customers to connect data across systems and apply AI tools to plan, run and optimize experiments in real time. And already today, we're enabling AI driven drug discovery workflows through a green button go platform. We are at the core of this transformation, connecting workflows and data streams and enabling AI powered experimentation. And this is what our vision and mission is all about. Our vision is to enable and automate the life science lab of the future. And our mission is to be the first choice lab automation partner and provider of selected workflows to pharma and biotech. During the fourth quarter, I visited several pharma customers who use BICO lab automation solutions. And they consistently reported measurable gains in productivity and reliability, including reduced hands-on time, faster turnaround times, and higher instrument utilization. and hearing this directly from the scientists using our system every day was both energizing and validating let me show you one example that emphasizes our mission our strategic direction and the value that we deliver to our customers the data shown here are from one of the top 20 pharma customers we are serving they kindly share their efficiency improvements by using our lab automation solutions downstream process and assay development time was reduced by 75 percent The capacity with the existing equipment they already had was revved up by 400% because parallel processing and variable driven robotic processes just allow for more uptime to be squeezed out of each piece of the equipment in the lab. And ultimately, these productivity increases means that their scientists are able to achieve 200% of their original productivity This is because automation was coming alongside them, supporting them and taking over the manual steps and running concurrently in ways that a person just can't manage alone. And this is just one example of a lab leveraging Green Button Go and every lab we work with is looking to see numbers like this. The interest in integration services is strong and it's because we're taking technology and using it to augment the work of humans. We're using technology to get to innovation faster. So to summarize, we lead the way in solving the challenges in life science with speed, accuracy and efficiency. All in all, our customers can run their process faster, improve the quality of the data and ultimately make better decisions. I will now move on to the next section and summarize the fourth quarter as well as the full year 2025. 2025 has been a turnaround year for Byco, building a strong foundation for 2026. Across the industry, 2025 was marked by a challenging market environment. The political developments, including tariffs, created uncertainty and led customers to take a more cautious approach to capex investments. The US academia segment was hit hard by significant NIH funding cuts. FX headwinds with a weaker dollar and euro also weighed on the margins. The diagnostic market normalized, consumables continued to grow, and the instrument sales remained muted but recovered increasingly over the course of the year. I will now present key metrics for the full year and the fourth quarter, and Jakob will later in the presentation give more details about the financial development. Sales for 2025 amounted to 1 billion 497 million, corresponding to a negative organic sales growth of 8%. Adjusted EBITDA amounted to 5 million, corresponding to a margin of 0.3%. And cash flow from operating activities amounted to 68 million. And let's turn over to the fourth quarter, where sales amounted to 451 million, corresponding to a negative sales growth of 4%. Adjusted EBITDA amounted to 56 million corresponding to a margin of 13%. Cash flow from operating activities amounted to 52 million and networking capital in relation to the last 12 months sales was 13%. In late January 26 we issued senior secured bonds and I will now hand over to Jakob to comment further on this.

Thank you, Maria. As just mentioned, we issued senior secured bonds on January 28th with a total nominal value of 40 million euro. The bonds have a tenure of four years and carrying a floating interest of three months euro plus a margin of 5.9%. The bonds were issued at 96.81% of par and were placed with a consortium of Swedish institutional investors. The new capital puts us in a position to support further growth and capture market recovery while navigating ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty. The transaction also serves as a clear testament to the capital markets continued confidence in Baico. I will later in the presentation describe what this means for Baico in terms of cash reserves post settlement of our current convertible bonds. I will now give some more details to the numbers just presented by Maria. Sales amounted to 1 billion 497 million, which corresponds to an organic sales growth of negative 8%. With most of the portfolio being instruments and the industry-wide capex restraints, as well as a muted academia market, the week first half of the year could not be fully compensated by a stronger second half of the year, despite increased demand. Improvements in Cyanian and Cellink strengthened the results while the week first half for BioZero and challenges in the US academic segment impacted the full year results substantially. BioZero has gained positive momentum with new ways of working, new management in place and finished the year with double-digit growth in the fourth quarter. The adjusted EBITDA was 5 million corresponding to a margin of 0.3%. The updated cost estimates in ongoing projects in business area lab automation and declined gross profit were the main factors impacting the adjusted EBITDA margin compared to prior year, while continued cost control had some positive effects. Operational cash flow amounted to 68 million. In Q4, our seasonally strongest quarter, sales amounted to 451 million corresponding to a negative sales growth of 12% and a negative organic sales growth in constant currency of negative 3.7%. The nine percentage points difference can be explained by FX headwinds with a weaker US dollar and euro against a stronger Swedish krona. It is also worth mentioning that the corresponding quarter last year was strong in lab automation And the life science solutions we saw, especially in the US, significant budget release prior to the installment of the new US administration. Adjusted EBITDA amounted to 56 billion, corresponding to a margin of 13%. During the year, we have continued to be very cost conscious to mitigate the adverse effects of lower sales. When looking at the module development, it is also worth mentioning that we have had a more conservative approach on which R&D costs we capitalized due to a more comprehensive R&D governance with the implementation of a gate stage project model. BICO will continue our clear focus on structural cost reductions and tight expense management in 2026. And if we move on to cash flow in Q4. Cash flow from operating activities amounted to 52 million, impacted by working capital changes of negative 12 million. Total cash flow during the fourth quarter amounted to 36 million. Cash reserves by end of the year was 1 billion 282 million. These cash reserves will be used to settle the remaining balance of our current convertible debt of 1 billion and 8 million. The original debt amount of 1 billion and 500 million have over the years been reduced by early bond buybacks to an nominal amount of 482 million, resulting in savings of more than 50 million. Following the settlement of the existing bonds, based on Q4's cash reserves and all else equal, Veike will have a strong cash position of around 670 million. Maria will later in the presentation describe how we plan to allocate this capital. As mentioned on the previous slide, the effects of changes in working capital amounted to negative 12 million for the quarter and out of this operating receivables increased by 62 million Inventories decreased by 26 million. Operating liabilities increased by 24 million. In percentage of last 12 months sales, networking capital in the quarter corresponded to 13%, confirming that the continued operational excellence actions have been successful. The quite low levels of net working capital is primarily an effect of less net working capital by zero due to decreases in receivables. Long term, we expect working capital in relation to sales to be in line with industry standards of closer to 20% of sales. I will now hand over to Maria to present the results in our two business areas.