ATS Corp /ATS (ATS) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Welcome, everyone, to Jeffrey's second day of our 2026 Industrial Conference. I'm Steve Gavalis. I run the industrial technology practice at the firm. I've been here about 15 years, and you're in for a treat. You have my favorite team and favorite company. Not that all the other companies in this conference are not beautiful in their own right, but I've been smitten with the ATS story, and at the behest of the team, we wanted to make this a bit more interactive and conversational. And so maybe with that, I'd love it if you could introduce yourselves to the group and then I can guide us with some questions. And if the audience has questions, please raise your hand. We can pass mics. But we will try to wrap this up a little bit faster just so everyone doesn't feel hurried as you're making it to your next meeting. So with that, Anne, maybe let me pass it to you.

Yeah, thanks, Stephen. I'm Anne Cebolski. I'm the interim CFO at ATS. I am one of many people at ATS who have been there for quite a long time and have seen the growth and trajectory of the company over my 17 years there. So super happy to be here today, and I'll let Sarah introduce herself.

Super, super. I actually talk really loud, so I may not need this. Hi, everybody. My name is Sarah Moore. I lead our, I'm a group executive for our life sciences business, which is about 50% of the ATS portfolio. I joined the organization about 10 months ago, coming from, I'm a lifer in healthcare, so I spent 16 years at Siemens and then the last seven at Danaher prior to joining ETS. So it's been great to be here.

Just make it a little interactive show of hands. Who is very familiar with ETS? Okay. That's wonderful because I think where I'd like to start maybe, Sarah and Ann, is a little level setting. Maybe just give the group a little bit of an overview on the ethos at ATS and what your North Star is.

Yeah, so I'll start and then Sarah can provide some color on our life sciences business, which, as she said, is about half of our total revenues of around $3 billion a year Canadian. So we've been around as ATS since 1978, but over the years we've grown the portfolio. We're a global automation technology player with really deep domain knowledge in the industries that we choose to serve in, which are primarily life sciences as well as food and beverage, energy, and what we call kind of consumer and industrial, so a bit of a catch-all of other industrial technology applications. And so over the years, we've pivoted away from our historical participation in the transportation, sort of OEM, ICE submarkets, and really focused on where we can provide value to our customers with automation solutions, products, services, focused on industries that have high consequence of failure, really important factors around delivery and efficiency, time to market, and generally tend to be more highly regulated. So if you think about nuclear or the life sciences space, food and beverage, those all fit the bill. About 80% of our backlog is in those more highly regulated spaces at this time. So Sarah, maybe put a little bit more color on the part of the business that you run, because it's a pretty exciting piece of the portfolio.

So as I mentioned, I oversee our life sciences portfolio. And if you look at life sciences, it goes all the way from discovery, which is a smart scientist has an idea and they say, gosh, what do I want to do with this? All the way through the development of whether it's a medical device, a drug, et cetera, all the way into production. How do you scale it once it passes some of the regulatory hurdles and regulatory boundaries? How do we scale this and get that capacity into the market for patients? Our portfolio in life sciences actually crosses from discovery through development into manufacturing. So the bigger part of our business is in the manufacturing or production in radio pharmaceuticals, in medical devices like auto injectors, contact lenses, automated pharmacy, spaces like that. because every novel therapy and medical device that reaches a patient has to be scaled in a reliable predictable way it creates a lot of complexity for companies and what I would say furthers that is we're operating at the edge of what's scientifically possible and that's where ATS fits versus your average automation player we actually play at the fringes of the frontiers of new therapies and new technologies. Radiopharmaceuticals is a great example of that. It's an enormous demand driver because many of you know you see the new therapies that are coming out, biologics, mRNAs, things like that. These things are very, very complex to manufacture and to produce, and that's where ATS comfortably sits because we manage very complex integrated solutions that bring those therapies to market at scale reliably.

Awesome. Automation is an interesting topic in the sense that it touches everything. And it's almost a challenge of riches as far as what you can pursue.

And even within your focused end markets, there are probably some areas that are more geared towards growth or maybe where you see the company doubling down as you're pursuing growth maybe maybe touch on a few of those areas yeah so I can I can talk first about the broader portfolio and and as I said we've so we've really shifted from what you might imagine is more of a custom integration shop back in you know 15 years ago into a broader portfolio of services products and then the kind of legacy custom integration business um service is a really important play when it comes to automation and Sarah can give you some great examples from the life sciences space in terms of how she sees uh the benefit there both from a growth perspective but also from a margin standpoint with our with our customers um where again just to kind of anchor back to the the key end markets that we play in we tend to like to uh be in markets that food's a little bit of a lower growth market for us but it's it's good and it's stable, grows at around GDP plus one or two percent. But some of the markets that are in the life sciences business over time should be in the high single-digit organic growth range. So those are, again, the complexity of the markets, the growth of the end markets that we're pursuing. That's where we really serve our customers well. And with the complexity that Sarah described, as well as some of the new tools that are available to us as we provide those services, we see good opportunity from a longer-term One thing that you may be aware of is because we do have some larger projects that flow into our numbers, we do see some, call it give and take in our bookings intake and our top line, but in this world that we operate in with the customers we serve, we view that as par for the course. but through the evolution of the portfolio, where our CEO comes from, he's seen companies with more of a 40% aftermarket entitlement. And particularly in Sarah's business, we see that as an opportunity for growth. There's a lot of secular dynamics that are working in our favor. There's a lot of noise around macro and tariffs, but we are a global diversified company and that has served us well in terms of where our footprint is. So, Sarah, maybe just speak a little bit about some of the trends you're seeing in the life sciences space to put a little bit more meat on the bones.

Yeah, definitely. The question of automation is a really good one. And sitting in healthcare, healthcare is undergoing a lot of transformation, and that transformation is being accelerated by the role of automation and the role of digital. Those two elements are going to dramatically change the landscape of healthcare and life sciences. In life sciences, there is a lot of complexity. There's a lot of waste. And automation plays a very central part in how we manage that complexity. And maybe I'm just going to give a very brief example for those who don't sit in healthcare every day. If you look at the production as an example of a statin, right? That is, I hate to say it pretty easy. It's chemistry. It's like baking. Once you figure out how to bake the cake, you bake the cake the same way every time and you get the same cake. You want more cake? Buy more ovens. It's that easy, right? So it's fairly basic science. When you get to biologics, biologics are alive they're living so it's you think of it like if you we owned a brewery and you had to get the same exact output every single time but you were dealing with a living object and that's the complexity of biologics is you have to deal with a basically something that's living and as you take that complexity and put it even further into radio pharmaceuticals uh or or maybe personalized medicine, we all hear about the role of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is coming at us at force. It can't be done manually because of the complexity. Everything is an N of one, and how do you scale an N of one? So personalized medicine would be like going to the tailor to get a suit made, right? My suit's not going to look the same as Ann's suit, is not going to look the same as your suit. And this is the challenge in personalized medicine, is how do you scale this to the masses who need the medicine? Probably the most confounding example is radiopharmaceuticals, which is experiencing meaningful growth. It's a real growth driver for us in life sciences. And in ATS, we sit at a very unique intersection, being a leading provider in the radiopharmaceutical space. But take that same example of I'm making a suit, and while I'm making a suit, the fabric is dissolving in front of you. That's the reality of it, because you have half lives you deal with, right? And so the drug is actively becoming less effective as you are building it. And so the complexity of that means that you need to use automation and digital tools in a profoundly different way. And it requires an elite organization that understands how to bring technical solutions, digital solutions, services to Anne's point. Aftermarket service becomes an incredibly important part of this because you can't manually make a lot of the drugs that are coming out today. It really requires a deep embedded automation to get there. And it's the combination of those things that is going to pave the way for the next round of growth for ATS and in the industry.

And Stephen, just before you ask your next question, just a couple of other trends from an automation standpoint across the rest of the portfolio. So we deal with customers who are in the nuclear space. So of course, we're working right now to support reactor refurbishment programs primarily on can-do reactors but we're technology agnostic there and as you know the tailwind there is the energy needs that are that exist and general government support for for nuclear in the markets we serve and we have a really good uh heritage there that is not um we're not we're not prohibited uh based on our you know the technology that we have been serving it's really about your relationships your qualifications your licensing in the countries that you serve so as new reactor builds both large scale and smr come on come on board we can participate there and then within our food and beverage portfolio some of the some of the the expectations from our customers there are really around energy efficiency and yield optimization and so again we we have a we have a good set of businesses there who can understand how to deliver those services and products to our customers.

I love that. Sarah, you touched on complexity. The world is getting faster, more complex, demanding solutions. Maybe speak a little bit about ATS culture, because I think that dovetails in how you're able to deliver some of these unique solutions.

You know, one of the interesting things when you read about, I'll use an example of digital enablement. In digital enablement, you have tools, But then you have the way that humans operationalize in a different way. And believe it or not, that can be the hardest part of the equation is how do you – you've got all these great new tools and people continue to interact the same way they do or they don't operationally change. And one of the things that makes ATS unique that we are doubling down, and Doug is an advocate for this. Doug is our CEO. And coming from Danaher, I spent a lot of years in the Danaher business system. And this framework we call ABM, it is a very well-grounded framework. I've seen it work, but it requires disciplined operationalization, so to speak, very complex word, and to be able to do that. And so how do you take these new tools, these new ways of doing things where you're integrating automation, digital tools, and wrap an operational structure around how you deliver on it routinely, Mainly the discipline that exists in an organization to bring those tools at scale in a reproducible way, whether it's partnering with customers at a cellular level upstream or whether it's manufacturing ramping and being able to help us see problems sooner that then help them see problems sooner.

I like from an M&A standpoint, I love the softer attributes of any business, but I'm mindful of our audience. So maybe we can tie that back to how you think about growth with an eye to profitability.

Yeah, so I can start, I mean, broadly across the, for those, for those of you who know us well, you know that our growth has been pretty good. We've had a good track record of adding a number of companies to our portfolio. We've been able to take advantage of some, you know, opportunity in a couple of different areas. some you know some of those opportunities didn't really work out the way that we maybe would have hoped for in the long term but with the portfolio that we're building I really believe that we can we we can improve our overall performance particularly from a margin perspective so we've we've disclosed recently a fixed cost transformation program we got a lot of questions from people on well isn't this just another you know set of restructuring actions really it is fundamentally a lot intended to allow us to take advantage of the scale across our decentralized business with very clear operating models in place including a focus on ROIC so we call it cash return on investment if you're familiar with Roper and though that kind of set of companies that's a tool that's been used very effectively in that realm for a number of years and we've rolled that out internally and really focusing our teams on okay we're going to invest where are we investing and why and what's driving shareholder return and it's changing the the mentality internally around how do we how do we create that value making sure that we're participating in the markets where we have the deepest domain knowledge the best technology the ability to serve our customers throughout their life cycle but we do recognize that we have a lot of work to do and understandably given the the mix of the portfolio over the last number of years and some of the fluctuation in the top line more recently. We understand that there's skepticism, so we would like to, our plan is to execute on this program, continue to develop and diversify our funnels, including in Sarah's business, and the team is very much aligned to that mandate.

Great. Let's get a bit more specific.

The company's long-term EBIT margin, has been about 15 percent that's pulled back recently a little bit how do you think about your confidence interval getting back to those levels what are some of the key levers and drivers you see yeah so i mean from our starting point which isn't a starting point that we love given where we were a number of years ago uh we you know we're sticking to our 15 target for now But given the background that Doug comes from and the opportunity that we see both from a top-line perspective but also from an efficiency standpoint, over time we would love to be able to kind of be up in the high teens range. But right now to achieve that 15%, we're breaking it down as about half coming from call it self-help or this fixed cost transformation program, which is really about de-investing where we've over-invested if we have too much capacity or becoming more efficient in how we operate across our businesses. We also have a lot of runway from an aftermarket perspective. Some of our businesses are already at that kind of entitlement level that I talked about, which is, you know, 40, 50 percent. The life sciences business, which is the biggest part of our portfolio, has room there. And on average, we would see about half of the remaining half of the margin expansion coming from aftermarket services. And finally, we do have the ATS business model. We have a lot of really good bones from a supply chain perspective. We are going to continue to drive those areas and mature the tools that we have in place. And quite honestly, we have a very good set of tools available. It's how we leverage them and how we use those operating models to identify which levers are the right ones to pull in each business. because it can't be a paintbrush approach depending on where each business is.

And I would just want to add to that, you know, on the fixed cost transformation, the benefit our businesses have is we have a lot, if you looked at a Venn diagram, we have a lot of overlapping skill sets and that makes site rationalization and some of the decisions that we make, most notably starting in Europe, more straightforward because we've got complementary skill sets and our industrial automation team as life sciences the reality is complex automation is complex automation so that enables us to really get after that we have a high degree of confidence that that that 50 we we have a plan and we're marching to that plan uh i want to i want to put a little extra emphasis on what uh anna's calling out as it relates to after market services it's an enormous opportunity and uh you know the batting average for ATS is 40%.

About a third of our businesses is service driven, but we have room.

And right now in the life sciences, we are batting below that. So there's some real opportunity to accelerate that. And that's high margin recurring revenue. It's a very solid revenue profile. A lot of opportunity, as mentioned with the complexity of the work our customers are doing to have accelerate that entitlement, which will create less volatility on the revenue line and a better profit profile.

Excellent. Time flies when you're having fun. So I have a couple more topics I want to touch on, and then we can wrap it up before Q&A. We spent a lot of time on the organic side of your business. Let's touch on M&A.

I view you guys as one of the more prolific, automation-driven, technology-driven public compounders touch on some of the M&A you've done and how you see that being a part of the story going forward yeah so I can cover that briefly and then I'd like Sarah to give a little bit of color on some of the more recent acquisitions in the life sciences space so yes true statement doesn't mean that everyone has performed the way that we want it to but on balance the portfolio that we've built we think is supportive of what we want to do going forward to take advantage of the trends that are happening in the industries that we serve. So one in particular that I'll highlight, which has been very important and will continue to be important to our growth, is our common share business in Italy. We bought them in 2019. And I think there are some questions about how they were going to serve the portfolio. They're an extremely important player in the radiopharma space that Sarah described right now. And as they've come into the portfolio, they've really taken on board some of these lean operating tools and also they're a really great example of how proximity to the science and the development of these drugs can serve us very very well we can't control the timing of when there's going to be a breakthrough from on a new therapy but if we know exactly what's happening in that space then we can participate all the way along and commentary is a great example of that and maybe you could just kind of spend a little bit of time talking about radio oncology and how they serve in that space beyond that yes we've continued to to acquire businesses both within the life sciences space and elsewhere and we do expect to continue that trend obviously with our

with kind of where we are right now our focus is on executing on this transformation program continuing to build and diversify our funnels but M&A will continue to be a focus for us in the future so maybe a little bit more about radio oncology what I would say is in in life sciences the ability to span the end-to-end process what makes comature very special if you look in radio radio therapeutics having the same radio isotope that does the diagnosis as does the therapy is a is a key area science history focus because that gives you a lot better connectivity from the diagnosis through to how you're going to scale and treat that patient. And that's what makes coma chair unique. Coma chair is at the diagnostic end with a radioisotope that they sit on the diagnostic process for PET scanning and imaging all the way through the standup of the therapy. And the therapy is like a targeted missile, so to speak, instead of kind of blasting the body with radiation where it kills all the good stuff, not just the bad stuff. This is targeted specifically at a very certain type of tumor, type of cancer, and it's much more potent and creates far less collateral damage. ComaShare is a unique example of a company acquisition that plays because they're at the beginning of that process and the end of that process. There's a meaningful pull through, and that puts you closer to the scientists as Anne talked about. That's a core part of our strategy. If you look at, again, discovery, development, and production, we know what is coming up the pipeline because we're sitting alongside those scientists and the development and the regulatory processes to get these drugs to market.

AI and robotics, go. No, it's easy. No, that's obviously a huge part of the public discourse right now. And again, on the topic of automation itself is massive in its approach. Where do you think the world is going right now, and how is ATS capturing some of that value? And we have about three minutes, so.

All right, I'm getting my 30-second spiel. AI and those solution sets are going to transform life sciences. I mean, my two cents. There is so much waste in the process of medical device for drug discovery and development, and AI will help us know sooner, help us optimize the most likely drug candidates to the top, and give us the greatest chance of getting drugs to market sooner with higher efficacy.

Excellent. Last thing I want to end on, and then any final thoughts from you, and then we can open it up to the audience.

Can I add one more thing? I'm so sorry. Yeah, of course. One thing that would make ATS uniquely qualified in AI, because there's a lot of people out there that have an ability to do AI. Because we make the machines, we have the application scientists that are sitting alongside the doctors, and we have digital twins and digital solutions. That unique combination, understanding how to tie together the interoperability of the ecosystem, that can't be done by just any AI provider. And I want to really drive this home. It's not that ATS is bringing great digital solutions that are going to compete with straight AI providers. We are uniquely positioned because we have the technical expertise of making every machine they're working with, coupled with the ecosystem, all of the control systems, everything that sits there, and the application knowledge. Steve, I just wanted to drive that home because it is a fundamental differentiator for ATS over other proxies in the space.

I mean, that's a great point, right? Because it feels like the barriers to creating an AI model or compute are lowering. And it's really the acumen, the data, the way that you can apply that, which dovetails well into my next question, which is the voice of customers always been important to ATS. I can argue that even more so now as solutions are getting more digitalized and more intimate, what are you hearing from your customers?

And how is that feedback loop helpful to the solutions you're providing i'll start and let ann go our customers in life sciences are sitting at the intersection of having to absorb quite a bit of risk because time to market matters when they're bringing drugs it's like an arms race to get these new drugs to market and they want to be the first and so oftentimes they're placing bets they're doing things simultaneous and they need us to provide solutions that have a high degree of flexibility such that as we create these automation solutions and we embed them, we have an ability to do many different types of drug formats on the same system such that if they run into regulatory delays, we can pivot with them. So flexibility is a core component of differentiation for our customers.

Yeah, and I think that's broadly true to our entire customer set across all of our end markets with some nuances depending on what their needs are and what they're specifically looking for. But the other thing that I think that is important, especially in the macro environment that we're dealing with, is Sarah talked about flexibility. We do have a global footprint, and so that allows us for some flexibility to lift and shift certain types of work where we have fungibility with our resources and among our sites.

Wonderful. And Sarah, any final thoughts for the audience before I walk around with the mic?

I'll let you go first. someone? Listen, you know, I'm 10 months in the seat in ATS, and I have to say I am excited for the future. We're doing a lot of work to diversify our portfolio, the spaces we play even within operating companies. There's a lot of role for high-end complex automation, and as we diversify and we come closer to our customers with after-sales service, I see a lot of exciting futures in the near to long term for our organization.

Yeah, and I would add from a financial perspective, we're very clear-eyed about where our overinvestment has been and where we need to focus. I'm really happy about the deployment of these tools internally so that we're aligning our external objectives with how we're executing. So I think I share the excitement that Sarah has for the future of the company, especially with what's happening more broadly within the automation realm.

Wonderful. I've dominated the mic. Can I open it up to the room for any questions that the audience might have?

Just in the context of the fixed cost reduction you've announced, that's a lot of change operationally, particularly in some regions. And so just your ability to kind of execute on winning business and not seeing slippage and, you know, getting projects delivered in the context of, you know, a very large and maybe needed SG&A reduction.

Yeah. So, Sarah, why don't you take that one? Because I think you really spoke earlier in one of our discussions around the importance of staying focused on the commercial part of the business while driving this. And I think you have experience in leading that type of a change.

So, yeah, you know, I think you've got duality in what we're doing. The first is do no harm as it relates to anything that touches a customer. So when you look at your ability commercially to deliver, to service support them, that area of the business, in fact, through this fixed cost transformation, it's not just – what we're not doing is an exercise in scorched dirt. What we're doing is an exercise in thoughtful, dynamic allocation, reallocation of resources. And so that's allocating more resources to sitting at the interface with customers in our commercial and services end of our business. Programmatically, we have very clearly defined programs. And as I mentioned, because we have a high degree of overlap in skill sets that sit between sites, so as an example, the sites in the Americas, there's an almost one-for-one parallel and overlap of skill set with our European sites. So being able to get the work done and make this less visible or invisible to customers becomes easier because we have the footprint, the global footprint that we do. So we're taking a very thoughtful approach to it in how we pull these businesses together to rationalize in places where we have an overlap of operational skill set while maintaining a thoughtful balance and careful balance of continuing not just the current investment, but to double down investment on anyone who is at the interface of customers.

And I would just add, we will also put from the center or the corporate team, we'll put resources behind this so that we're supporting the teams, the business operations teams in this and looking for areas where we should be collaborating and coordinating to take advantage of our scale.

Very good. Maybe one more question right here.

Within life sciences and the aftermarket growth that you see, is that simply doing more for the customer, taking things off their plate, or do you have to go in and try and displace a different vendor?

Do we have to displace other vendors? Is that what you – I'm so sorry. I want to make sure you got that.

I think the question was, is the way that you're growing in life science in healthcare by growing more of the pie, whether it's identifying new customer needs and finding new ways to serve them, or is it definitionally for you to grow, someone else has to contract? Is that kind of the question?

Specifically in aftermarket. So aftermarket, I think it is both net new implementations in customer environments. They're wanting to see the interoperability, and so we have an ability to come in then not only service our equipment, but service the ecosystem because of the interoperability of tools. So that is a net new opportunity. But as Anne mentioned, we have less entitlement than we should against our own installed base. So some of it is just going back to our partners and our customers we're already working with and saying, hey, we have this great portfolio of services. And it's not just what I want to drive as well is this isn't just break fix stuff. And this isn't just spare parts orders. I mean, this is bringing new tools to come alongside them to help make them more effective and efficient to reduce scrap and some of the things they deal with every day. Yep, so it's an and.

Anne, Sarah, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for everyone's time here as well.

Thanks, everyone.