Hamilton Thorne Ltd.

Welcome to the Hamilton Thorne Limited Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Before turning the call over to your host today, please be reminded of our standard public company policy on forward-looking information and use of non-IFRS measures. Certain information presented or otherwise discussed on this call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements may involve, but are not limited to, comments relating to strategies, expectations, planned operations, product announcements, scientific advances, or future actions. This information is based on current expectations that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Should one or more risks or uncertainties materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results, performances, or achievements could vary materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. These factors should be considered carefully and prospective investors and other parties should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The company assumes no obligation to update such forward-looking statements or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements unless and until required by securities law applicable to the company. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties is contained in filings by the company with the Canadian security regulators, including, without limitation, the company's management discussion and analysis for the quarter ended September 30, 2022, which filings are available under the company's profile at www.cdar.com. During this call, the company may reference adjusted EBITDA constant currency, and organic growth as non-IFRS measures, which are used by management as measures of financial performance. Please see the sections entitled Use of Non-IFRS Measures and Results of Operations in the company's management discussion and analysis for the periods covered for further information and reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to net income. Now, let me turn the call over to Hamilton Thorne's CEO, David Wolfe.

Thank you very much. Good morning, all, and welcome to the Hamilton Thorne Limited Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. I would like to introduce myself. I'm David Wolfe, President and CEO of Hamilton Thorne. I would also like to introduce Francesco Fragasso, who is on the call with me today. Francesco joined Hamilton Thorne as our Chief Financial Officer on September 1. Before Hamilton Thorne, Francesco served as CEO at several public and private organizations focused on manufacturing high-technology products. Francesco started his career with Deloitte, where he spent about 10 years in auditing and corporate finance advisory services. I believe that Francesco's global manufacturing and business operations experience at both an entrepreneurial division of a very large public company, as well as most recently CFO of a somewhat larger than Hamilton Thorne standalone public company, with complex worldwide operations will serve Hamilton Thorne well as we continue to grow. I would also like to take a moment to recognize and thank Michael Bruns, our retiring CFO, for his years of dedicated service to the company, during which our company grew from mid-single digits to where we are today, netting just about $60 million in sales. This morning's call will have the following format. First, I'll provide a summary of operational and financial results for the quarter and the nine months ended September 30, 2022. the focus on sales, markets, and operational performance. Francesco will follow with more detailed discussion of financial results for the periods, as well as a review of our financial position and liquidity, and I will return for a few minutes to provide some information on our outlook for the balance of 2022. We will then open the line up for questions. I would like to remind all that we do not provide financial guidance, so I'd ask you to limit your questions to either historical periods or general trends in the business. I'll begin with our sales results. The third quarter of 2022 was an extremely strong quarter for Hamilton Thorne. We continue to see strength in the fundamentals of our business with well above market organic growth of 17% for the quarter and 12% here today. I am also happy to report that supply chain issues eased somewhat in the quarter, leading to fewer delays in production and shipping. Reported sales results continue to be negatively impacted by exchange rate fluctuations in our European and UK operations. Our sales of $13.5 million were up 6% versus the prior year on a U.S. dollar basis, but up 17% on a constant currency basis, meaning that foreign exchange translation reduced reported revenues to the quarter by approximately $1.3 million. Let me give you some of the highlights from our performance. Sales, as I mentioned, increased 6%. year-over-year to $13.5 million for the quarter, and increased 14% to $41.7 million for the nine-month period. Sales and cost and currency eliminates FX fluctuation I mentioned earlier, increased 17% for the quarter and 22% for the nine-month period. Organic growth was 17% for the quarter and 12% for the nine-month. Gross profit as a percentage of sales increased 100 basis points to 48.5% for the quarter versus 47.5% in the prior year period and was 49% for the nine months ended September 30. Adjusted EBITDA increased 3% to $2.1 million for the quarter and increased 4% to $7 million for the nine-month period. Sales into the human clinical market grew significantly faster than our overall growth and continue to be the largest target market, coming in at about 90% of our revenues. Sales into the animal market, ART market, were also up for the three- and nine-month period, while sales into the research and cell biology markets were somewhat down for both periods. Sales into the Americas and the EMEA, your Middle East and African regions, grew for both periods, while sales into Asia-Pac were somewhat down, partially as a result of renewed COVID-19-related lockdowns in China. From a product perspective, our equipment business continued to have the largest growth in both periods, largely due to the addition of the IVF Tech product line, as well as growth of equipment sales in the EMEA region. Gross profit margins, as I mentioned, were up 100 basis points versus the prior year due to product mix, as well as the full impact of price increases that we instituted at the beginning of this year are being recognized. EBITDA margins were down somewhat somewhat down this quarter at 15.6%, in part due to the impact of currency fluctuations and as expenses increased due to continued planned investments and growth, as well as inflationary pressures leading to increased personnel costs and other expenses. Our operating expenses were generally in line with expectations, with travel and trade show expenses returning to historical levels and increased costs associated with maintaining investments in R&D and investments in sales and other personnel to support our growth. I will now turn the call over to Francesco to provide a more detailed discussion on the numbers.

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone. I'm Francesco Fragasso, CFO at Hamilton Thorne. I'm very excited to join Hamilton Thorne team. I will briefly highlight the third quarter and September year-to-date financial results. David already provided an update on sales and gross profit, so I will focus on other elements of the income statement. as well as the cash flow and liquidity of the company. Operating expenses increased 20% to $6.7 million for the quarter and 21% to $19.1 million for the nine-month period. Expense increases were primarily due to the inclusion of IVF stack expenses post-closing of the July 2021 acquisition, and increased costs associated to the investment in SAVES and other personnel to support growth. The return to pre-COVID level for SAVES and marketing activities is also a factor for expenses increase. Overall increases in operating expenses were in line with our expectations. Interest expense in the quarter decreased 11% to $103,000 due to repayment of outstanding principal on term loans and increased 15% to $322,000 for the nine-month period due to the additional term loan incurred in July 2021 to finance the IVF tech acquisition, partially offset by interest we earned on the company cash deposits. Income tax expense for the quarter decreased to $337,000 credit and decreased to 185,000 expense for the nine-month period. This was primarily due to the reduction in income before taxes. Income tax expense included deferred income tax recovery expense of 431,000 in the quarter and 367,000 in the first nine-month period. Those are non-cash increase of the company deferred tax assets. Net income for the quarter was $99,000, a decrease from net income of $249,000 in the prior year. Net income for the nine-month period decreased to $930,000 from $1.6 million in the prior year. This is primarily due to increased operating expenses. Adjusted EBITDA, which we consider an important metric for our financial performance, increased by 3% to 2.1 million for the quarter, and increased 4% to 7 million for the nine-month period. This was mainly due to revenue and gross profit growth, offset by the negative impact of foreign currency exchange headwinds, as well as planned increase in operating expenses. As a reminder, adjusted EBITDA is a non-IFRS measure. Please see our reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to net income for the quarter and year-to-date in our management discussion and analysis report we filed today. Turning now to the company cash flow and balance sheet. The company cash balance at the end of September was $15.7 million compared to $17.9 million at the end of December 2021. The decrease of 2.2 million in cash balances was primarily due to reductions in U.S. dollar in cash accounts maintained in European currencies due to fluctuation in exchange rate of approximately 2.4 million, as well as working capital fluctuation, including continued investment in growing inventories to support expected growth and mitigate potential future supply chain issues. The company generated cash from operation of $908,000 in the quarter and $471,000 in the first nine months of 2022. The return to quarterly positive operating cash flow shows that the company has recovered from COVID-19 impacted quarters. Cash used in investing activities in the quarter was $1 million and $1.9 million for the nine months of 2022. Those were related to the ongoing investment in product development and capital expenditure for equipment and demo units. Priorial uses of cash included the total cash payment of $6.7 million in connection with the 2021 acquisitions. Cash used in financing activity in the quarter was $350,000 and $800,000 for the nine months of 2022. Those were mainly related to payment of scheduled term loan and lease obligations. Net of about 900,000 proceed from working capital line of credit. Note payables and term loans outstanding total 5.4 million at the end of September 2022. At the end of September 2022, the company continued to have a strong liquidity position of 27.4 million. including 15.7 million in available cash and 11.7 million in additional borrowing capacity. This liquidity availability makes us well positioned to support our acquisition program and financing the expected growth. I will now turn the call back over to David to comment on the company outlook. David.

Thank you very much.

Looking forward into the balance of 2022, we continue to feel that we are in a strong position. We expect solid sales performance based on positive industry trends in our field that we've discussed many times in past calls, and as demand and growth in general have returned to pre-pandemic levels in nearly every market that we serve. Fourth quarter bookings continue to be strong, and barring new supply chain issues, we expect to continue to achieve well above market organic growth. We feel that we are well-positioned to continue to execute on our strategy of driving long-term growth and EBITDA expansion by investing in our organic growth while building scale, enhancing our product offerings, and expanding our geographic and direct sales footprint through acquisitions. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, supply chain issues did ease somewhat in the third quarter. Perhaps more accurately, we built our inventories and processes to be better equipped to handle them. That being said, I don't think we are out of supply chain issues going forward, and we continue to see the possibility for continued quarter-to-quarter variability in sales and margins as we continue to work to manage supply chain issues, as well as inflationary pressures, all of which, though, I would mention are the type that we believe are affecting all the market participants in our field. Finally, I should mention that while European currencies have strengthened recently against the dollar, They are still down significantly versus Q4 in 2021, and this weakness will continue to affect our reported results for the quarter. Regarding our M&A activities, we have an extensive pipeline. We're actively working on multiple acquisition opportunities. As Francesco mentioned, with $27.4 million of liquidity and additional debt capacity, we feel we're well-positioned to be able to complete the types of transactions we have in our pipeline. In summary, despite the various issues that we face on a day-to-day basis, we feel good about our market position and our confidence in our team's ability to execute on our strategy of driving long-term growth and EBITDA expansion, and while building scale and expanding our geographic offerings.

We'll now open the line up for questions. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Kyle McPhee from Cormark Securities. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just on the topic of margins, you had to move down for EBITDA margin percentage versus what we're used to seeing from you. Can you kind of give us color on quantifying that split between kind of the labor inflation and it sounds like growth and investments that are triggering this lower margin? And also, do you plan on taking more pricing to offset this kind of higher OPEX level costs?

Yeah, so I'll comment briefly. In terms of gross profit margins, again, they were actually higher versus last year. So we have seen the effect of our pricing actions take place. I will say that our goal in increasing pricing as we did in the first quarter and then I'll address what our plan is for next year was to maintain margins so we did not see this as an opportunity for for margin expansion that's a strategy position that we make we do intend to have Price increases, again, taking effect in the first quarter of this year. Similarly, our strategy will be the same, which is we're doing our best to address both past price increases and what we perceive to be future increases. It's a little bit of, as you can imagine, a crystal ball. I think in hindsight, even though margins dropped a little bit in the quarter versus last year, there probably was more price increase we should have or could have or should have done in order to maintain margins. So I think that had overall had an effect on margins as certain things such as labor costs, inflationary costs, shipping and the like continue to increase. There's also beneath the surface a fair level of uncertainty impact of mix on both margins and EBITDA margins. And finally, as we mentioned, our expenses reflected both a return to more normal expense levels, particularly around trade show and spending. So that was certainly an increase versus last year, as well as some investments that we've made in I would say, you know, again, each of these is relatively small but important in improving our business, extending our capacity. For example, bringing on Francesco while keeping our former CFO online for a period of time, so some double payments in there. So in many events, it's a number of small things.

Got it. Okay, that's helpful, Culler. That's it for me. Thanks.

The next question comes from David Martin from Bloomburton. Please go ahead.

Good morning. You mentioned that the consumable, well, the equipment growth was the strongest, so I'm assuming consumables lagged a bit. Is that a leading indicator that maybe IVF procedures are slowing down a bit? Could we be seeing an impact of economic downturn?

So we don't believe that's the case. I should have probably put a little more color on this in that most of our consumables, as you may know, are sold into European markets. We have been, and we've been talking about it, trying to increase substantially our consumables in the U.S. And while we have increased them, it's still a relatively small number. So consumables on a constant currency basis, actually growth was fairly strong. consumables on a reported basis were significantly impacted by particularly the euro versus dollar changes.

Okay. As far as trying to increase sales in North America of the consumables, are there things that you're doing, special programs to get that done, and do you see an inflection for that market? category of products at any time soon?

So we have had pretty good success with increasing some categories of our consumable products, particularly our glass micro tools, the pipettes that we sell, which are under the guide in the name. And we've increased sales of those fairly significantly on a percentage basis. And it's now becoming I wouldn't say it's a huge number, but it's now becoming a meaningful number. As we have discussed on a number of occasions, one of the larger opportunities for us is to increase our media sales in the U.S. Again, the cell culture media, which is the liquid that supports the cells while they're outside the body. We have seen progress on that, particularly in the last two quarters. and I'm therefore a little more hopeful that we're going to see some meaningful sales in that, but I would say the numbers are still very small. For 2023, we intend to put significantly more effort into all consumables in the U.S., and including both external programs to promote sales, which are sales, marketing, and promotional, and internal programs to promote those sales, which would include incentive schemes.

Okay, great. And then to the supply chain issues, how many basis points would you say the supply chain issues took away from the gross and EBITDA margins? And do you think you'll get those back once supply chains have normalized?

Yeah, so that would be, unfortunately, a fair amount of speculation for me. I don't know. Maybe I'll turn it over to Francesco after I babble on for a bit. But I believe there are some areas where it's easy to quantify. For example, freight in absolutely can be as much as 100 basis points. Freight out gets paid for, as you can imagine, for the most part by the customers. There are some costs that we, from a personnel perspective, we absolutely increased some of our labor costs increased because we feel it's incredibly important to maintain our a loyal, dedicated, and skilled workforce versus employee turnover. In fact, our employee turnover is extremely low. Others are much, much harder to calculate. So my estimate, which I'm not sure I would want to stand behind, is probably 200 basis points, but it's, again, a little bit of an estimate, not as mathematically derived as I would like.

And it sounds like some of those things, like the increased labor costs to keep the personnel, that may not reverse even once things get back to normal, I guess.

So I would say that's not going to reverse. But on the other hand, we don't see that happening again, if that makes sense to you.

Yeah, got it.

Would you say then that like 15% to 16% is the new normal for EBITDA margins?

No, that's still, I would say, on the low side for what we would expect to see on a normalized basis. Now you're asking a little bit about predictions about what next year is going to do from a – we have a lot of things that we can't control, which are some of the supply chain issues and costs and inflation. So I would say next year is still going to have – likely to have some EBITDA that's going to be lower than our historical – levels and lower than our longer-term goals. But I wouldn't say that's structurally permanent. Again, I think it's going to be a 2020, last half of 22, first half of 23 phenomenon more so than anything else.

Okay.

And then much like you... Much like your revenues where you see some seasonality, a seasonal uptick in Q4, you also tend to see that in margins as well. I assume that's because you're selling more on the same-sized overhead. Is that correct? What I see in the EBITDA margins rising in Q4, is that correct?

Yeah, because in the short term, again, we have essentially the same fixed costs, and Q4 tends to be a much bigger number. So I would say that's accurate.

Okay. Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Okay, if you have a question, please press star, then 1. Our next question comes from Justin Keywood from Stiefel. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. Just on the foreign exchange headwind, quite substantial in the quarter, and I think I heard in the opening remarks that this is expected to persist. Are you able to give any context to that comment? And also, if there's anything that Hamilton can do as far as hedging to try to negate that headwind?

Yeah, so let me respond briefly, and then I would like to turn it over to Francesco to maybe amplify it. So in terms of headwind, just to give you by way of example, we, for purposes of our P&L, we use the average exchange rate for the quarter. For the balance sheet, we do it a little bit differently. And so just to give you a sense, in euros, the average exchange rate in Q3 of last year was almost $1.18. This Q3 of this year was about $1. So, you know, a huge, you know, huge swing. The average exchange rate in Q4 of last year was about $1.14. This is all U.S. to Euro. And so far this month, it's slightly under a dollar. It's shown some strength, so it may be coming back. So that's compressed a little bit, but it's still pretty significant difference. So it went from 17% difference to 14% difference. So those are still meaningful numbers. But as you start to lap that, Q1 of this year, had a much lower exchange rate in Q2 and Q3, so eventually those become less significant. Francesco, do you want to add anything to that? I'd welcome that.

Yes, yes. And to clarify, those are not actual realized losses. Those are differences that emerge by translating our business in Europe, where functional currency is mainly the euro, to US dollar. So you will see in our quarterly report that there is a substantial unrealized difference on exchange rate both on the cash flow and on other comprehensive income, which is exactly by translating to a lower exchange rate revenue that would have been translated to a different rate last year. Of course, looking at the future, we cannot make any prediction where the exchange rate is going, although we are seeing a slight improvement of the foreign currencies versus the US dollar.

Understood. Thank you for the context. And then my other question, we saw in the quarter Walmart to start offering a IVF services as a benefit to its US employees and I imagine there will likely be other corporations that follow suit for, I think historically, services that have been pay out of your pocket. I'm just wondering if you're seeing this type of announcement translate into any increased activity in the States and And how do you see that trend playing out if that's anticipated to perhaps lead to even more robust organic growth going forward?

Sure. So that's a great question. I would say particularly we're focused on the U.S. here, and then we could talk about other markets, and it may be worthwhile talking about Japan as well. But in the U.S., as you know, IVF is largely an out-of-pocket cost. It's private pay. There are a handful of states, a relatively small number, that do require insurers or employers to offer IVF benefits. But that's a minority. So there's been a little bit of a hodgepodge of response to that. So one example is private insurers that have They prefer to be called benefits managers. I think of them as insurers that offer employers who want to offer an IVF benefit either because they're self-insured or because they are in a state that doesn't have a mandate. They want to offer it to their employees, and that's been a trend that has increased pretty substantially. Mostly it's been taken up by larger corporations, often those who are in, I would say, in the higher end of the revenue or maybe pay scheme from an employee perspective. So knowledge worker companies like banks, insurance companies, Facebooks, Googles of the world have begun to offer these kinds of things. And just to give you some numbers, those there are, I believe the most recent numbers are somewhere between five and six million covered lives on that, which has probably doubled over the past couple of years. So you can see that trend continuing. The Walmart situation, I think, is interesting in two respects. One is Walmart is the largest private employer in the U.S., so just from, you know, it's going to have a significant impact, and their employee census tends to be a little bit different than the times of people who've been getting these private company benefits in the past. So it may augur, well, for, you know, continued growth I guess, democratization of these benefits, which, again, clearly, just to put in context, clearly the more public pay there is or private insurance or public insurance, however it's sponsored, put it the other way, the less it's out of pocket, there's a much proven greater correlation to IVF usage. So clearly more subsidization, however it's not of IVF, increases the overall usage of IVF and will have a positive impact on our business. In terms of seeing that, certainly the Walmart announcement's a little bit too early to tell and just given the geographic scope of their operations, I'm not sure we would ever be able to see it in such a clear way. That being said, just to give you an example, New York, The state of New York in 2020 mandated that employers offer IVF coverage, large employers, employees with over 100 employees, offer IVF coverage to their employees so that a significant number of new lives were covered by IVF coverage. And in that case... Hard to quantify, to be fair, but we absolutely saw a, into 2020, you know, again, 2020 was an average year in some ways, but as 2020 developed into 2021, continued a greater than expected growth in that market, both in terms of sales, but particularly in terms of, you know, lab expansions, new lab activities, as the labs saw much greater usage than they had previously seen. So I hope that was, I know, somewhat of a long-winded answer, but I hope that covered the waterfront of your question.

Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. Sorry, you mentioned something about Japan.

Oh, yeah, so that's a good point. So, you know, we tend to be focused on the U.S. in some ways, but remember that our business is truly an international business with over 70% outside the U.S. So in spring of this year, Japan, which has, as most people know, a very significant demographic challenge with low birth rates and not being able to replace the population. And unlike certainly Canada, to an extent the U.S. is not very welcoming for immigrants. Japan instituted basically subsidies for IVF and mandated insurance for IVF. So Again, almost 100 million or more Japanese now are covered by IVF. Obviously, population needing IVF is a smaller number than that. So that's an example of a very large country expanding IVF overnight to address, in this case, a very specific demographic problem. We're also seeing, as long as we're on the topic of geographic, greater geographic expansion, we've also seen heard about transparency is not as good as it is in Japan that there are some regions in China that are beginning to experiment with our piloting is probably more accurate doing pilot projects to pay for IVF again because you know the cause is different because Japan China fall back on the one child policy but also I know we have a country facing a huge demographic shift thank you very helpful

Thank you.

The next question comes from Christopher Poo from IA Capital. Please go ahead.

Good morning, David and Francesco. Thanks for taking my questions. I'm calling in for Chelsea. I just got a question on the M&A side. So regarding the kind of the current pipeline that you have, like the UC, perhaps taking advantage of U.S. dollar strength and going after maybe geographies specific geographies, and just kind of wondering, like, in the pipeline, the things in the pipeline, are they kind of similar with the sizes of acquisitions in the past, or how does it compare with what you looked at in the past?

Thank you. So just to put it in context, the way our field is, you know, in terms of the companies that supply the kinds of products that we supply to IVF clinics, the way it's broken out is there are a relatively small number of large players, of which we're one of the larger players, you know, sort of less than 10. And then a long list of, you know, round numbers, 150 plus of companies that are 20 million or less in revenues, most of which are, you know, under $10 or $15 million less in revenues. Also, given the historical nature of IVF, where it began in Europe and has much higher per capita usage in Europe, a lot of the companies that we would even look at as targets tend to be based in Europe. So I would say that in terms of size, the size of transactions we're most likely to do would be consistent with what we've done in the past. But that's not necessarily because that's all that we target. It's because that's what's most likely to happen because there were just so many of them, more of them available. In terms of geographic location, and I think, by the way, this would apply to maybe specialty of product as well. While there are a large number, 150 plus, and about half of which we qualify in as solid targets that we could be interested in doing something, it's a big enough number to feel that you can have confidence that you can complete a transaction. But it's not such a big number that you could say, well, this year we're going to focus only on this geography or this year we're going to focus only on this product or service category. And maybe the intersection of those, you might end up with only one company that's in a particular country or a particular product. So we tend to cast a wide net. We've got a very structured and formalized program to stay in contact with all the potential targets. And we then, therefore, as those targets work through the pipeline, we can be fairly systematic and thoughtful about which particular company we may want to engage in or go accelerate which ones we may want to slow down for whatever reason. So I think the overall point is probably accurate, which is because of, you know, the On average, we're more likely to do transactions in countries where our currency is favorable, but it's not all that we're working on.

Okay, great. Just a quick follow-up question to that. Does your company have maybe like a long-term target, like leverage ratio or debt ratio at all?

So we've been pretty conservative on a leverage basis. We've been generally two to two and a half times in the total debt to EBITDA and feel that that's a comfortable ratio. We certainly would extend that in certain circumstances. For example, if we were to look at an acquisition that, because of the size and the nature of our balance sheet, required more debt, we would look at extending that But generally speaking, given our relative conservatism, it would need to be an asset that had very, very strong cash flow and therefore was going to bring us within ratios that we're more comfortable with relatively quickly, or I suppose that we thought we could bridge to an equity offering relatively quickly, but that's a more speculative thing. That being said, and maybe I'll defer again to Francesco to talk about this as well, I think in today's market and today's interest rate environment, We're still comfortable with debt because we think that's obviously lower cost of capital in many ways, but today doesn't feel like the time we should be getting too far over our skis and leveraging ourselves up.

Francesco, do you have anything you'd like to add?

No, you described very well. We continue to have a strong cash flow, so that will support potentially to leverage more, but we are taking... relatively conservative approach we are also in an environment where our outstanding term loan are at an average interest rate that is about four percent going forward that cost is expected to increase so that will be also a factor in the decision of financing M&A going forward but as we said in our opening, we have a strong liquidity position today between available cash, unused line of credit, and additional capacity we can tap into to fund the right opportunity.

Okay, great. Okay, thanks, gentlemen, for answering my questions. I'll jump back in the queue.

Thank you.

Again, if you have a question, please press star, then 1. Our next question comes from Tanya Armstrong-Whitworth from Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. First off, just to follow on your past line of questioning on the private coverage, I guess on the alternate front, if we do see any kind of mass layoffs, especially in those larger companies that you were talking about in the tech industry particularly, I guess what is the impact to cycle volumes? Can you talk to what you saw in past economic downtrends, whether that comes from out-of-pocket pairs or privately covered lives, how we saw the cycle volumes trend?

Yeah, so there's sort of two different questions embedded in there. One is sort of the more general, which I'll answer, and then I can maybe get some indications on the specific about, you know, how maybe the tech layoffs might affect the other coverages that they get. But in general, what we've seen in the most recent, you know, measurable, COVID had obviously, it's very different. So I'm leaving the last couple of years out of this. So we look at data from 2008 to 2010, which was the most recent, very significant economic downturn. I'll leave it to the macro crowd to determine if there is a recession coming, which I guess some people even still question how deep it will be. But I would say other than the most pessimistic bears among us. Most people aren't viewing that, well, we'll see what happens with crypto, I suppose, but most people aren't viewing that there's going to be the kind of potential global meltdown that we saw in the 2008 time frame. So I would say, you know, what happened in 2008 to 10 might be indicative, but, you know, I don't think anybody's expecting the same kind of results on, again, on a macro basis. As it affects our sector, we have good data from U.S., as you know, one of the things we like about this field is virtually every country has national registries where most of the clinics, in some cases all the clinics, register their results so you know what actually happened. It's not guesswork about, let's say, cycle counts and usage. So in the 2008-2010 timeframe, we saw a flattening of demand, or flattening of cycles, say, in the U.S., and obviously it would be related to demand. And i i think there was you know a couple of uh one one year where it was down one percent but not you know the kind of trough you might see in things like uh you know which are similar costs in some ways from a household perspective like um you know say housing or automotive where you know the the you know the the demand curve dropped off completely so we think you know the field is somewhat nothing's recession proof but you know fairly recession resistance And given that, and then, you know, coming out of that, we saw much higher than average growth rates. So, again, pent-up demand and a return to, you know, some normalcy. In Europe, where there's much more social coverage, whether it's insurance or subsidies or state-run clinics and hospitals, we didn't see, we saw, again, a slight contraction in growth. but we still saw growth during that period. I won't say the U.S. is, I guess it's more similar to Europe than it was, now we're talking almost 13, 14 years ago, in the sense that there is more coverage, but it's not as insulated as Europe is. So I would say if we see a really significant recession, you know, you will see some contraction in demand. I think it would be hard to believe that we would be completely recession-proof. But on the other hand, this is a field that, you know, the clock is ticking for users, and, you know, they have, you know, forcing people, frankly, to make some, you know, I guess difficult choices. I will say, and this is anecdotal, I guess, in your first question about how things like layoffs could affect this, one of the major companies that does do this benefits management, again, for the Facebooks and Googles of the world, who at the same time, as you said, notice maybe laying off people, just announced their results, and their perspective is, from the employer side, they are not seeing people retreating from offering this as a benefit or reducing their, you know, reducing coverages. They're seeing their uptake to be as strong or stronger. They also measure actual utilization, and utilization's been pretty similar to what it's been in prior periods. So, you know, again, you know, we're mindful of potentials around, receptionary issues, but we certainly haven't seen it today.

Okay. That's very good, Tyler. Thank you, David. And then secondly, I don't think I saw it anywhere in the written remarks, but have you added any new direct sales people in any of the geographies that you entered? I guess last year it would have been Australia and the Nordic countries. Are you selling more of your kind of legacy U.S. products into these nations directly?

So we don't normally comment on, like, you know, individual hires. I'm not happy to answer the question. You know, we try to keep them to more, you know, kind of bigger picture if we enter new territory or enter new things. So just to let you know in the last year, and I want to make sure I've got my dates right, but certainly over the last year we have hired another person in, and again, this is either sales or field support. in some of our newer territories in Nordics and in France. We've just extended an offer. I don't think she's started yet to a new person in Australia from a sales perspective. So we are, you know, kind of, you know, expanding. But, you know, again, as you know, our general approach is to be more incremental than, you know, an evolutionary than revolutionary. So you're not going to see us say, hey, we're going to make a huge commitment to this market and go hire 20 reps and try to smother a market. We're much more of a, you know, add judiciously here and there. So, yeah, we continue to add people. We added somebody in the U.S., well, just to give you a sense, in the first half of this year. So we're still adding as needed.

Excellent. Thank you. And then just lastly for me, I think you disclosed this last quarter, which is why I'm asking again for this quarter, you were able to provide the FX impact on revenue for Q3. Are you able to break out the FX impact on EBITDA?

Yeah, so Francesco and I were having a debate about this earlier trying to quantify that. My sense is maybe there are too many moving parts to do it as effectively, but I'll certainly let Francesco comment on that.

Yes, I can address that question. On the revenue, just to start with the top line, the effect of the exchange rate has been $1.3 million in Q3 and $3 million for the nine months of 2022. So by translating revenue in foreign currency to the prior year exchange rate, revenue would have been higher by $1.3 million in Q3 and $3 million for nine months. When it comes to the EBITDA, there is the same effect on the rest of the cost. So we estimated that the EBITDA, the net effect is way smaller. I'm talking the adjusted EBITDA. And probably we are at less than $100,000 on the quarter and less than 200 or about $200,000 for the nine months of 2022.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you so much, Francesco. That's all for me.

The next question comes from Stephan Quenville from Echeron Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just a quick modeling question. I see that CapEx has sort of ticked up a bit to about a $3 million run rate for the year. It's a bit higher than it's been in the past, and obviously you guys are investing in growth. Is it reasonable to keep it at that level kind of going forward?

Yeah, so I'll jump in and then just kind of directionally.

So we've got a number of projects that we've been working on, particularly this year, that are more infrastructure projects, including systems enhancements and the like. We've also – you know, CapEx includes investments in – you know, the capitalized portion of R&D. So I would say that on a, that number and, you know, is probably, as you said, as you know, it has increased substantially this year. But on a percentage basis, it's probably not a whole lot different than what it's been historically. I would think that's likely to be where we are. I don't know if Francesco, again, you'd like to expand on that.

Yes, the main investment, of course, there is the usual update, upgrade of equipment, some demo unit, but it's really the capitalization of some product development expenses. And those are not, they might vary according to the stage of the development. There are stage of development that are equipment intensive, others are more type of labor in engineering work. So I don't think it's a trend. It really depends on the ongoing activity and what is the ongoing project in terms of product development. And the IRIs are pretty strict in dictating the requirement for capitalizing those type of activities. So we have also a conservative approach. Okay, great. Thanks, guys.

Our next question is a follow-up from David Martin from Bloomberg. Please go ahead.

Yes, thanks for taking the follow-up. I wanted to go back to Tanya's first question. You mentioned in economic downturns, the number of cycles annually didn't get affected that much. What about your business, equipment sales? Did they stay relatively stable as well? And I guess that would extend to lab build-outs as well.

Yeah, good question. So I would say I'm happy to answer the question because I can answer it factually, but I'm not sure how relevant it was in the sense that if you cast your mind back to the 2008-2010 timeframe, Hamilton Thorne was a very, very different company. We were single digits revenues, 95% capital equipment, Nearly a third to half of our business was focused on general laboratories, and you may remember, for those who've been around, there was a lot of emphasis on, you know, which was an interesting idea, but never really has panned out as well. We stopped doing it on a stem cell market. So, you know, it was a different business, so I'm not sure I would generalize it too much from it. That being said, it was a challenging time for CapEx at that point. You know, we saw that certainly the general lab customers and some of the more, you know, some of the startups were having trouble financing products. We didn't see it as much, I believe, in the IVF clinics, but that's a little harder for me to frankly certainly remember. We might be able to find the data. And at that point, we weren't at all involved in full lab buildups. So I would say I can't give you any comments on that.

Okay. I guess the U.K. right now is having more economic difficulties than a lot of regions, and you bought Planar a couple of years ago. What are you seeing in the U.K. as far as your business?

So, again, there's some confounding factors there, but I'll answer very optimistically, but then put the button there very positively. So our U.K.-centric business has grown dramatically over the past couple of years. And this year, it continues to grow. It's primarily a kind of our, I'll call it a legacy business, the long-established planer business that has been around for years and years and years, where we continue to support those customers, and the addition of primarily consumables products over the past, really, since the beginning of 2021. That has been by far our largest growth area of those consumable products. That includes both HTL-branded consumables, primarily the Guy Med products, as well as third-party consumables. So, you know, again, I think that's a confounding factor because when you enter a market, you're bound to see significant, I would say, significant growth. That being said, as we've reached a level of, I wouldn't say maturity because it's still and we've been doing this for a couple of years, that we're not seeing anything that indicates a slowdown in cycle usage that's recession-based. And by the way, contrary to maybe what you might expect, the UK is largely a private pay market. The NHS has Slowly but surely over the past several years, decreased funding in the local councils, which actually administer the funding, have decreased funding. So it's becoming a market that looks more like the U.S. in terms of both demand and pay factors than, let's say, it was even five or ten years ago.

Okay. Okay. Thank you for that, Culler. That's it for me.

Thank you. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to David Wolf for any closing remarks.

All right. Well, thank you very much. I would like to reiterate my thanks to all of you on the call and most importantly to our company, our employees who continue to show remarkable resiliency and dedication to our business as well as to our customers who ultimately support and the patients who are the backbone and the drivers of demand in our field. For the Americans on the call, I'd like to wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving and look forward to, again, seeing you all on our next conference call. Thank you very much.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.