Good morning. I'm Dan Rizzo from Jeffrey's Equity Research. Up next, we've got Aptor Group. With us today is CFO Vinicicanu, President Ted Theodorakis with the former division, and Mary Scafidis, who is VP of IR. There will be a 20-minute presentation, followed by time for some Q&A. So without further ado, one of you guys want to kick it off?
Sure. Great. Let me just make sure I know how the clicker works.
Fantastic.
Thank you, Dan, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to join us today and learn a little bit more about the Aptar So, if you haven't heard of us previously, then who is Aptar? We are a leader in drug consumer products, dosing, dispensing, and protection technologies. And what that really means is that we are an expert in the end user. We really do help to create the patient's experience and the consumer experience. We're also at our core technology company. We own the IP of everything we manufacture. We're truly global. We operate in over 20 countries around the world across four different regions, with Europe being our largest region. And for the end of 2025, as you can see here, we generated about $3.8 billion in revenues across our three primary segments. You can see here pharma was about 46% of revenue, about close to 70% of our adjusted EBITDA. Beauty was about 35% of revenue and about 18% of adjusted EBITDA. And closures was about 19% of revenue and 13% of our adjusted EBITDA. Today we'll focus a lot on pharma, but I'll also give a few key highlights across beauty and closures as well. Across each of these segments, the key thing to note is that we serve attractive end markets with really good long-term growth potential. Additionally, I would be remiss not to mention we have a very strong balance sheet. We're currently operating with leverage at about 1.4%. times EBITDA, which is amongst the lowest end of our peer group. And I would also add that having that strong balance sheet is, in fact, a competitive differentiator. When you think about the long development times in pharma, our customers want to work with a partner who they know is financially strong and has the balance sheet ability to work with them through decades of development and commercial cycles. We're also very proud of our track record of consistently returning capital to shareholders. In the last five years alone, we've returned about $1.2 billion to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. We're currently in our 32nd year of annually increasing dividends, which we're very, very proud of. And last but not least, we're also consistently recognized as a sustainability leader. And, you know, again, this is something that, you know, both our customers and our employees, you know, really highly value. And you'll see some of the awards here at the bottom of this slide. so let's talk a bit about our technology and industrial capabilities across our end market so what you see in this slide here is vertically these are the different end markets that we operate in and then you see horizontally how our technologies are leveraged across each of these verticals whether it's you know fine mist pumps which you can see you know from you know from beauty to pharma across the board and some of you might already know actually that our pharma business was actually born organically from our beauty business and so you can kind of see how the technology gets leveraged across the different end markets. Again, whether it's fineness bumps or dispensing closures, as you can see here, aerosol valves, bag-on valves, etc. And then when you look at the industrial capabilities, what you see here is, you know, precision injection molding, high-speed assembly, AI-assisted quality control being a key defining feature across every single one of our factories, irrespective of what segment we're talking about. So let's talk about the market opportunity. I did mention in the opening slide that we do serve markets that are attractive with long-term growth potential. I think that's really important because when we look at industries, one of the things we look at is, well, what are the secular trends in that industry? And when you look at the markets that APTAR serves, you know, we've got secular tailwinds in these markets. Starting with the pharma market, pharma packaging market, the total addressable market, there's $165 billion. And the market projected growth rate is about 7%. Now, that's not our forecast. That's the market projection in terms of, you know, that $165 billion. Beauty is a $38 billion TAM projected to grow at about 4%. Closures is a smaller TAM, $7 billion, but still important, projected to grow at 2%. And historically, when you look at our numbers, we've traditionally in the closures business actually beat the market growth rates, largely driven by our innovations, which actually helped to convert the market overall. Pharma, when you look at our historical growth profile, we've actually beat the market growth. And again, we see some great opportunities in beauty as well. And so when we think about Aptar being a growth company, you can see here that we are already serving very attractive markets with long-term growth potential. I also mentioned earlier that, you know, in the last five years, we've returned $1.2 billion of capital to shareholders. When you look at our capital allocation, you know, we are, I would say, you know, pretty well balanced between investing, you know, in our business. You know, as you saw from the previous slide, you know, we are a growth company, so we do invest in our business. Very important to generate that growth. And those are organic CapEx investments as well as M&A. And preferentially, we actually allocate a lot more of our capital to the pharma segments, just given the higher growth, higher profit attributes of our pharma business. We, of course, invest also in beauty and closures, but preferentially, most of our capital goes to pharma, just given those growth attributes. And then, so that's about two-thirds of our capital when you look at the last few years. And then roughly one-third is returned back to shareholders through dividends as well as share buybacks. Share buybacks continue to be the most discretionary part of our capital allocation. methodology. And so you might see some years where we're a lot more aggressive in share buybacks and other years where we'll be quieter in share buybacks. That's a lever that we pull on as and when required. All right. So let me just spend a quick minute on beauty. So our beauty business, a fairly material business. You can see here 1.3 billion of revenue for the company. When you look at 2025, we had about 2% core sales growth and 12% adjusted EBITDA margin. Very global in nature. You'll see there about 60% of our revenues in beauty are actually, you know, in Europe. That being said, a large part of those, you know, sales in Europe actually do end up in other countries as our customers, you know, ship those products elsewhere. You'll also see that, you know, we're fairly well represented in North America, in Latin America and Asia. And Asia continues to be a really good region for us as well in terms of future growth potential. And then you can also see here that we do serve a lot of the large brands that I'm sure you know and recognize L'Oreal, P&G, Unilever, to name but a few. We do expect, as we said on our Q1 earnings call, that we will see some growth in beauty in 2026. We've done a lot of work around cost measurements or cost reductions, rather, in the beauty segment. And we did have some short-term timing impacts in terms of some supplier impacts that impacts our Q1 margins. But we certainly We expect, you know, the 12% margins to be improved as we get into, you know, the sequential quarters for 2026. On the closures side, this is actually a fairly newer segment. Closures was formed in 2023 by combining our food and beverage and personal care elements that were previously managed elsewhere. And we combined that and created a new segment called closures. And it's actually been doing, you know, doing fairly well. You can see here for 2025, we had 1% core sales growth. Closures, you know, core sales growth is impacted by the timing of risk and pass-throughs. And so in 2025, we had lower risk and pass-throughs. That's going to change in 2026 with, you know, all the raw material cost increases, which we actually tend to pass through and we are passing them through. But if you sort of look at the pure product sales in closures in 2025, they were actually at 4%, which, again, going back to what's the market opportunity, it's a higher growth rate than the market, right? So we've been doing pretty well in closures. EBITDA margins at the low end of the long-term target range, and we continue to work with our closures team to actually see margin improvements as well over time. Again, you'll recognize a lot of these names in terms of customers that we serve, Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, et cetera. Okay, so now let's talk about pharma, and let's focus on pharma. Pharma is our core growth engine. It's the largest server segment, the fastest growing, most profitable part of our portfolio, and really our market leadership here is anchored by our proprietary drug delivery systems and that's what Alex will talk about a lot more momentarily. That's about 70% of the revenue in pharma followed by injectables at about 19% of revenue and active materials solutions at about 10% of the revenue. We have decades of regulatory and technical expertise in this part of our business which have made us the partner of choice to bring a drug from formulation straight through to patients. We also have you know over 4,500 active and pending patents in pharma and that's something that we're very very proud of going back to my earlier comments around you know we being an IP driven company and innovation tends to be how we differentiate ourselves across all our segments and even more so when we look at our overall pharma segment. And then you know as you can see here you know we deal with all the leading pharma companies on a direct basis and we often also supply their CMO partners as well so our differentiated position here is again built on intellectual property being deeply involved in the regulatory process which ultimately leads to lock-in of our devices right in the drug master file and that is a key differentiator for us that's what makes our revenues in pharma very very sticky is that lock-in in the in the drug master file again Alex will talk about that momentarily and also as a manufacturer the engineering and the science and the know-how you know of how we make our products, but also how they interact with the drugs. Ultimately, how they also help patients is absolutely critical, and that's part of the moat that we've built over time in this part of our business. And that's based on, you know, 40 years of expertise and, again, starting the business up organically from our beauty business and then augmented by acquisitions over time. And this gives you an additional view of how the portfolio has also evolved over time. This slide gives you a view of total drug sales, how they break down by route of delivery. And, you know, we have a very strong position in inhalers. You can see, you know, respiratory, smaller share of the overall, you know, drug sales, but something where APTR actually plays a very big role. One of the things that our current CEO, Stefan, often says is if it goes through the nose, APTR is involved, and he's absolutely right. So smaller slice of the total pie, but we have a very big share of that pie. And then, of course, you know, we're also present in dermal, ophthalmic, and, of course, injectables, which I talked about earlier. And oral, we are present through our active material science solutions. So the end result of all of this is a very attractive growth rate. So when you look at the revenue for pharma over the last 10 years, we're looking at a 9% CAGR, fully supported by our 7% to 11% long-term target growth range, which is anchored in our historical performance, but also supported by what's currently in our pipeline, which Alex and I will talk about also momentarily. And then you look at the adjusted EBITDA, which has also grown meaningfully over time as well. When you look at 2025 and 2026, you know, we've talked a bit about some temporary headwinds that we're facing in emergency medicine, a de-stock. We quantified that de-stock impacting 2026 by approximately $65 million. So that is definitely, you know, a temporary impact to our revenue growth outside of emergency medicine. And by the way, we're tracking very, very strongly to that estimate. So no surprises at this point in time. Outside of our emergency medicine portfolio, we continue to see broad-based growth, and we're very excited about what our growth rates, excluding EM, would look like for 2026 and, of course, beyond that. So with that, why don't I pass it over to Alex to dive a little bit deeper into his part of the business, PDDS. Thank you, Vanessa.
Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you, Dan, for the invitation. As Vanessa said, I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about proprietary drug delivery systems. My role as Aptar is to look after our prescription division, and together with consumer healthcare makes up the PDDS, as we say. The other two circles you see there, injectables, I'll touch on that a little bit, even though that's not within my direct scope. Active material solutions is an interesting acquisition we did several years ago, a company called CSP that provides barrier container technology to scavenge, to protect drug products and food from various elements. And am I hitting the green arrow?
Yes, you are.
You actually see those three pictures encompass fairly well what we do in PDDS. The first one's a nasal spray, with the example of being of Narcan, a pretty high-profile nasal spray that's come out recently. An aerosol inhaler, in this case Ventolin, that delivers drug to the lungs to treat asthma, COPD. And then third, an eyedropper. So those are the main families of product technologies that we offer and the types of therapeutic areas that are being addressed with those delivery systems. Allergy, pulmonary, this is really where we got our start many, many years ago. And more recently, things like systemic nasal drug delivery, eye care I mentioned. Dermal is a different one. could have showed a picture of a dermal container there that's a smaller segment form for us but nonetheless it's part of aptar pharma as well this slide shows you the life cycle of a nasally delivered molecule over a pretty long period of time we're not naming the drug but if you do a little homework it won't be that hard to figure out what we're talking about what's interesting about this life cycle first of all this is not an exceptional example we have quite a few of these, but it shows pretty well the longevity and the growth of the revenue that we see over time. First thing to know about our delivery systems is that it takes a fair amount of time to develop, and so we're in contact with the customers early on. This particular case shows six years. That's actually at the short end of our development cycles. It's not uncommon for us to take seven to even 12 years from initial contact with the customer until the product hits the market so at some point the original launches a product in this case enjoyed exclusivity on the market for 12 years grew the product nicely over that time at some point generics hit in this case the generics hit a few years after the patents expired why because nasal drug delivery is not easy it's tough so even though the patents expired same things with dry powder inhalers and so forth, just because the patents have expired doesn't give you a green light to get to market. It's complex, and it takes them time. So generics come in. The brand comes in with a brand extension. Eventually, the originator goes OTC, then the generics go OTC. So all this long story to say that over 30 years, Aptar continues to not only generate revenue from this particular molecule from different sources, But that revenue continues to grow to this day. So it's an example of how one single molecule can create sustained revenue over long periods of time. How we got started with this, Vanessa mentioned that the origins of our product technology really came from the perfume, cosmetic, personal care market. In the 1980s, somebody decided to try to spray them in a vertical direction to get stuff into the nose, and they found it worked quite well. And our early pump systems were basically copies of the perfumery pumps. The first indications that were being looked at were allergy, asthma, COPD. Little by little, we started getting into different types of things. People realized that spraying something up your nose wasn't just to deal with an issue in your nose. It could actually get very effectively absorbed into the bloodstream and take care of problems throughout the body. migraines were one of the first things that launched in that manner on the market. Not much happened for a number of years. Until probably 10 years ago, there was a renewed interest in what we call SNDD, so systemic nasal drug delivery, using the nose to deliver drugs that get absorbed into the bloodstream and work elsewhere in their body. And in the past five or six years, we've seen an explosion of launches on the market for products that use exactly this pathway. And what this shows is that our next block, nose to brain, I'll talk a little bit about that next. We keep adding blocks of technologies to the previous ones. The previous ones continue to grow. So it's really an incremental, accretive type of business that we're in. speaking of nose to brain uh it's not difficult it's not easy to get drugs even if you give them intravenously to get them into the brain there's a blood brain barrier there that's specifically there to protect the brain from external sources and so to get a drug into the brain to do its thing on certain types of diseases is a real challenge what scientists have found is that But there seems to be a connected pathway, a bypass, a shortcut, directly from the nose to the brain, bypassing the blood-brain barrier completely. This offers extraordinary opportunities to deliver all kinds of drugs to the brain to treat diseases that have been notoriously difficult to get at, specifically for that reason. I mentioned here Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all kinds of neurodegenerative disease, Parkinson's, depression, and so forth. So for us, we really see this as the next big thing. It's obviously still in the early stage. The basic science is being looked at, and we're taking part of that. One thing you need to know about Aptar is we don't just supply devices. We also get involved in the science. We've partnered with Wake Forest to demonstrate that intranasal insulin, as an example, can be delivered successfully directly to the brain through this pathway. Over the years, APTAR has acquired several different tuck-in acquisitions, mostly service entities that allow us not just to be present at the very beginning with a customer to give them samples and later on to commercialize, but throughout the drug development processes. So whether it's formulation development, analytical method development, clinical trials, regulatory filings, we now have entities that are able to assist the customers throughout that process. These are not extremely meaningful revenue generators for us, but obviously it allows us to work more closely with the customer from an early stage to understand what they do. By better understanding your customers, you're able to be a better partner to them. And this is just, it's not, we didn't throw every possible disease on this chart. Every disease you see listed there, there is an active project in our pipeline that tries to deal with these diseases. Just a couple of years ago, I could have never dreamed of putting a slide like that on there. Some of these products have launched and are on the market recently. Just last year, two products were launched to treat heart diseases. We have a product that was launched to treat depression a couple of years ago. But people are working with our device on all these different therapeutic areas. So a very bright future for systemic nose delivery. Just a quick word on injectable solutions. Here we're talking about componentry, elastomeric components, stoppers, plungers, rigid needle shields. So a bit different than the fully integrated device solutions that we offer in PDDS. But nonetheless, this allows us to step outside of our niche and be exposed to the injectable world, which allows us to understand the customers, the markets, the requirements, and so on we've increased capacity significantly in the past couple of years the FDA has been pushing for over a decade now to significantly upgrade sterile manufacturing conditions here in the U.S. the Europe followed more recently with Annex 1 it's pushing everybody to upgrade their plants but also to upgrade their packaging and their componentry so we invested significantly not only in capacity, but specifically on what we call high-value premium services and components. Rapid transfer bags, ready-to-use components, anything that will allow our customers to remove the operator as much as possible from their process. And speaking of high-value products, GLP-1s, obviously, is one area where there's a tremendous amount of excitement and activity, just to give you an idea of what our revenue has done in the past couple of years granted we've started from a fairly small base but we've nearly doubled our revenue from glp1s just in the past couple of years if you take all of our high value products in general lump them in with the glp1 that revenues increased roughly 60 percent so the base business is growing nicely but in addition to that we're able to get on new products and transition customers to higher value products at the same time. I think we said that, Vanessa, you were going to take this on, but I think this is something that I've already presented, right? So these are the top therapeutic areas in our pipeline today, and you see that respiratory, which I didn't talk about an awful lot, but inhalers for asthma, COPD, are at the top of our pipeline in terms of opportunities. There's an important propellant switch that's going on right now that we're very much involved in. Biologics in second, systemic nasal delivery first. So the takeaway here for us and for you guys is that there's a significantly diverse pipeline in terms of therapeutic areas where nasal sprays are no longer just used to treat allergic rhinitis and decongestant, but for a wide variety of diseases. We have a large and growing pipeline, and injectables is taking an increasingly important role in our revenue and our growth. Do you want to take on the last slide?
Why don't I do that for the STAC team? And I really do hope that the slide on the pipeline composition resonated because I think that is really, really what gives us confidence in our long-term growth. And I really want to highlight the diversity, as Alex said, of this pipeline. It's respiratory, biologics. I mean, the list goes on, and the way this pipeline has evolved in the last five years is really significant. So when people ask what makes you confident that you can, yes, thank you for showing us the last 10 years, and you're 90% CAGR, what have you done for me lately? It comes back to this. This is why we feel confident in the 7% to 11% long-term growth rate. So the key takeaways are clear. You know, the pharma fundamentals are quite strong. You've seen the pipeline. It's really what's really underpinning that is the is the the breadth of our pipeline, which, you know, really continues to grow in both scale and scope. Injectables doing really, really well. And you may have heard us talk about, you know, we see this business on a long term basis being high single digits to low double digits in growth. And if you look at our historical results, particularly in the last year or so, you're seeing that we're really capitalizing on that and posting some really good growth rates in that market, which we expect to continue. You've heard a lot about our innovation overall, and that's backed by, you know, a fairly robust IP portfolio. And, you know, of course, we continue to expect to participate in this growth. Beauty closures, you know, we do expect improved performance, particularly as we get into sequential quarters of 2026. And last but not least, coming back to the very strong balance sheet. And that strong balance sheet gives us a lot of optionality and the ability to not only invest back in our business, which is so critical for us, but also, you know, to return capital, you know, back to shareholders and meet our commitments. So with that, I'll leave it there, Dan, and you can open it up for any questions.
Okay, so we have about four minutes for questions. If there's anything for the audience, please let me know, or I can just kind of go ahead here. So I guess just to start, guys, you mentioned doing some capacity expansions in the past few years, but seeing what the opportunity is in GLP-1s with NEFI and with Biologics, I was wondering if there's any necessity for more investment in manufacturing or just capacity expansions to meet what should be a fairly robustly growing business over the next few So maybe I'll take that.
Absolutely. As you called out, we've seen growth in GLP-1, Biologics. You saw the pipeline, right, where Biologics are in the top three. I think it was in the second spot, so a key driver of future growth for us. In terms of capacity expansions, we've made quite sizable investments in the last few years. We call them big box build-outs, which is the big factory build-outs. We've done that, and we don't see that being a necessity in the near term. Of course, we'll continue to add lines as required. We continue to invest in capex, in automation, driving more automation on the factory floor, driving more efficiency in our manufacturing processes. So there is CapEx, but we don't foresee any sort of the big build-outs as we've done historically.
And then one of the things you did also point out was the kind of the opportunity from Annex 1 compliance. I was just wondering what your products do specifically that address the needs for that new regulation.
Alex, you want to take that one?
In terms of Annex 1, the whole idea is to try to get the operator as far away from the product and the process as possible. So what does that mean for us is we can deliver ready-to-use components to get bags, port bags, and simply connect them into their clean rooms. That's one area. They're also expecting cleaner components. So we have different types of processes that are able to offer premium fill type components.
And so one of the things that's interesting is the services or the digital health component of your business. Do you see this as a growth opportunity? or is it more of a thing where it's just an evaluated service that kind of increases the moat for your products? I guess is the way to think about it. Is it more about growth or more about just protecting and stopping competitors?
Definitely the latter. Today it's too small to provide meaningful revenue or profit to the company, but it's an extremely strategic acquisition for us a couple of years ago to increase the moat, to deepen the moat, as you said, but also it gives us access to a completely different level of people at our customers.
Decision makers.
Oftentimes with the devices and components, we're talking with R&D guys, formulators, purchasing people. Here, you have access to C-suite people at the pharma company, even from a small entity like our digital health group. They want to talk directly to us. So there's a lot of other things that I could talk about, but to me, the C-suite access to key decision makers on itself, of its own makes this acquisition valuable to us.
All right. We have one minute. If there's any questions from the audience.
Can I ask about the injectables unit specifically, the sort of growth between the GLP ones?
Oh, thank you.
Hopefully that's better. Thanks for the time and the presentation. So my question is about the injectables unit and just trying to get at, I think you guys grew on an organic basis, 11%, full year 25% and 20% or so in the first quarter, so pretty good growth rates. How much of that growth is driven by GLP-1s versus ex-GLP-1s in the injectables unit? Thank you.
Do you want to take it, Alex? I can add color if needed.
I think that the first thing to know is maybe compared to our competitors, GLP-1 is still a relatively small portion of our business. So we're not as exposed. And we're talking, one number I could give you is in the past three years or so, we've practically doubled the sales of our GLP-1 associated components. And then even more if you include also our high-value products for Biologics, Annex 1, etc. So we don't communicate specifically specifics on GLP-1.
From a small base.
But from a small base, we've nearly doubled.
All right. Thank you, guys. We are out of time here, and we really appreciate you guys coming today. So thank you, and thanks, everyone, for listening.