Conference Transcript - QDEL 2026-06-02

Brian Blaser, CEO

Everyone here today, as well as those of you joining us on the webcast, I'm Brian Blazer from Quite El Ortho, the CEO of Quite El Ortho, and today I'll provide an overview of our portfolio, the growth opportunities we see across each of our businesses, and the actions we're taking to drive sustainable growth, profitability, and cash flow over the long term. But before I get started, I would point out that we will be making forward-looking statements during this presentation, and we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the description of these financial measures and statements in the presentation, including factors that could cause materially different outcomes. So let me begin with the overall healthcare environment. Growth in diagnostic testing is underpinned by important long-term secular drivers that are impacting all of us. An aging population, the continued decentralization of healthcare, expanding investment in emerging markets, and a rising focus on wellness and preventative care. And these forces are reshaping healthcare demand and driving steady long-term utilization of diagnostic testing. And our products are positioned to benefit from these trends. We support customers throughout the entire patient journey and across virtually every care setting around the world. So with that context in mind, let me turn to the specific market segments that we are targeting and why we believe they offer compelling opportunities for sustainable growth. Quite All Ortho holds differentiated positions in the most attractive segments of the diagnostics industry and we are well positioned to generate sustainable long-term growth through innovation, execution and disciplined management. Our portfolio spans the full continuum of care, serving customers from physicians offices and clinics to hospitals and large reference laboratories that diversification provides both stability and exposure to multiple testing environments and growth drivers we have one of the largest installed bases in the industry with over 145 000 instruments placed across 75 000 customers in 140 countries we also have five commercial regions with north america being the largest at 55 percent of full year 2025 revenue value, and good growth opportunities across geographies. What makes this business particularly attractive is the durability of the operating model. These are high value, patient critical testing platforms that generate ongoing demand for assays, reagents, consumables, and services. And as a result, 96% of our revenue is recurring, supported by strong customer attention, long-standing relationships in a large global installed base. And together these characteristics provide a strong foundation for growth, profitability, and long-term cash generation. Within the broader diagnostics market, we're focused on roughly 50 billion of highly attractive segments where we hold strong competitive positions and see opportunities for continued growth. Our portfolio spans four key areas, and what makes it so compelling is the strength and quality of each business within those markets. Labs remains our largest business and provides a stable foundation built on long-term customer relationships, high retention rates, and strong customer satisfaction. This business, which was 55% of total revenue last year, is a highly predictable growth driver, consistently growing in the mid-single digits, built on seven-year contracts, renewal rates in the mid-90s, and strong new business win ratios. Immunohematology is a global market leader with significant installed base advantages and opportunities for continued menu and workflow expansion. And while it is a smaller market at $2 billion, it is a steady, low single-digit growth business with opportunity to grow in the mid single digits with some further investment over time point of care and molecular diagnostics represent some of the fastest growing areas of diagnostics and we believe our portfolio is increasingly well positioned to participate in that growth in point of care which is a nine billion dollar market segment we offer a full menu of near patient tests in respiratory as well as cardiac immunoassays we have a leading market share in U.S. respiratory for flu, RSV, strep, and COVID testing, and we are a leader in point-of-care cardiac testing. Now I'd like to dive a little deeper on each of our key platforms that are driving both near and longer-term growth. In our labs business, our Vitros product line offers scalable and integrated systems to meet the needs of our customers, primarily in reference and hospital labs. Our sweet spot is small to midsize hospitals and while we are the fifth overall behind the high throughput competitors, our share is higher in the midsize hospital segment and we have more than 15,000 systems installed worldwide. In our immunohematology business, our Vision Swift and Vision Max platforms continue their leadership for blood typing and antibody screening worldwide. We maintain leading positions across respiratory diagnostics and point-of-care cardiac testing, supported by a large installed base and strong customer adoption. Our SOFIA platform remains one of the largest professional point-of-care platforms in the market, with more than 100,000 cumulative placements worldwide. Together with Triage, QuickView, Lyra, and now new Lexa, these platforms position us well across both traditional point of care and emerging molecular testing opportunities. And lastly, the adoption of new technologies is an important long-term driver. The molecular diagnostics market today is two and a half times what it was in 2019 and continues to expand, which is why we want to capture that growth opportunity. And we're very excited about expanding our presence in the molecular market, which is roughly nine billion dollars in size and growing in the high single digits. Turning to our recent acquisition of Lex Diagnostics, the new Lexa system delivers the fastest molecular respiratory test on the market, delivering PCR quality results in approximately six to ten minutes. As a CLIA wave platform, new Lexa is uniquely positioned for point-of-care implementation, complementing our existing portfolio and expanding our ability to provide highly accurate molecular diagnostics in decentralized care settings. By combining laboratory quality PCR performance with unprecedented speed and ease of use, Nulexa enables clinicians to make informed treatment decisions while improving workflow efficiency and supporting better patient outcomes. And And importantly, we believe speed, workflow, simplicity, and economics position Nulexa to compete effectively where many prior point of care molecular platforms struggled to scale. And beyond speed, Nulexa's differentiation is its simplicity. The workflow requires less than one minute of hands-on time and eliminates many of the complexity barriers that have historically limited molecular adoption at the point of And we believe this combination of speed, simplicity, and economics is what makes the platform particularly compelling. And historically, point-of-care molecular diagnostics have required trade-offs between speed, workflow, simplicity, and cost. And we believe Nulexa changes that equation. It delivers PCR quality performance, industry-leading speed, a simple workflow, and attractive economics in a compact footprint. And as a result, we believe Nulexa represents one of the most differentiated value propositions currently available in point-of-care molecular diagnostics. Innovation is one of the areas where we've made meaningful progress over the last two years. we strengthened our R&D organization, improved portfolio prioritization, increased accountability, and created stronger alignment across R&D, commercial, operations, quality, and regulatory. The result is a more focused innovation portfolio aligned to the areas where we see the greatest opportunities for growth and customer value creation. And as you can see on this slide, we're investing across platforms automation software molecular diagnostics and menu expansion and these investments are designed to expand market access improve customer workflows increase utilization and drive additional recurring revenue across our installed base importantly we are already seeing the output of these efforts through launches such as vitros 450 vitros ecl high sensitivity troponin results manager and nulexa and combined this pipeline strengthens our competitive position and gives us confidence in our ability to accelerate growth over time looking ahead quite all ortho has multiple levers to drive long-term value creation we start from a position of strength with leading market positions in labs and immunohematology long-standing customer relationships and a highly recurring revenue model and building on that foundation we're focused on improving commercial execution expanding our menu and platform portfolio strengthening operational efficiency and continuing to invest in innovation that increases customer value and expands market access at the same time we are leveraging our global footprint pursuing targeted partnerships where they make sense and maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Taken together, these initiatives create a clear pathway toward growth above our historical mid-single-digit profile while supporting continued margin expansion and cash flow improvement. I'm very pleased with the leadership team that we've assembled over the last two years. We have strengthened key areas across R&D, quality, regulatory, operations, commercial, HR, finance, and strategy, bringing together a team with really deep diagnostics and operational expertise. And I'm also pleased with the progress that we're making in the CFO search and look forward to announcing Joe's successor in the near future. So let me spend a few minutes on our full year 2025 results and 2026 financial guidance. We delivered solid execution in 2025, achieving on our financial commitments with $2.73 billion in reported revenue, representing 5% growth, excluding COVID and donor screening revenue. We generated $597 million of adjusted EBITDA, delivering 22% margin and expanding margin by 240 basis points versus the prior year. An adjusted diluted EPS was $2.12 for the full year, representing a 15% year-over-year growth. Looking ahead, our guidance reflects continued expectations for revenue growth, margin expansion, and improving free cash flow generation, and I would like to note that although we did provide a new guidance range on our Q1 earnings call due to the soft Q1 respiratory season, we are still tethered to the low end of our previously provided range, which was purposefully wide to account for respiratory season variability. Our absolute highest financial priority is accelerating free cash flow generation and reducing leverage. With the costs associated with integration, systems conversion, and organizational restructuring largely behind us, our focus has shifted toward improving the fundamentals of cash generation. And we're working across the business to improve collections, reduce inventory, optimize capital spending and drive greater working capital efficiency and at the same time we're continuing to execute procurement and facility optimization initiatives that further improve profitability and cash flow and we believe these actions position us to materially improve cash conversion and achieve our targeted recurring free cash flow conversion levels by the second half of 2027. Improving cash flow is critical, but it's only one part of the value creation equation. So let me talk about how we're thinking about capital allocation and the priorities that will drive long-term shareholder value. Our focus on profitable growth includes commercial execution in profitable markets and additional cost savings initiatives that will expand adjusted EBITDA to to the mid to high 20% range by mid 2027. By the end of 2025, we have already achieved 140 million in cost savings, and we expect to generate an additional 30 to 40 million in savings this year. I've already discussed the importance of increasing cashflow. Let me just add that free cashflow generation remains a company-wide focus with management incentives tied directly aligned to achieving our cash flow objectives and we continue to evaluate every aspect of the portfolio and operating model to unlock additional value and accelerate deleveraging and finally our capital allocation priority remains deleveraging we are committed to reducing our net debt leverage to our targeted two and a half to three and a half times in the second half of 2027. So, I'll close by just bringing the story together here. Quidel Ortho today is a highly recurring revenue diagnostics company with leading positions in attractive and growing markets, a strengthened innovation pipeline, and a clear path to improving profitability, cash flow, and leverage. We benefit from a large global installed base, long-term customer relationships, and a business model that generates 96% recurring revenue. On the right, you can see how we're thinking about our market position and our long-term growth profile. Last year, we delivered 5% revenue growth, excluding COVID and donor screening revenue, and we expect to continue growing in the mid-single digits. Over the last two years, we've strengthened the portfolio, improved execution, innovation, enhanced our leadership team, and sharpened our focus on value creation. And while there's more work ahead, we believe the foundation is firmly in place to create significant long-term value for shareholders. So with that, I'll wrap up and thank you for your continued interest in Quidel Ortho. Thank you.