CHEMOMETEC A/S (CHEMM) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Okay, it is now 3 p.m., so let's get started. Thank you all for joining, and welcome to Chemometrics conference call. Today, CEO Martin Helbo and CFO Philip Matsey-Price will take you through this year's annual report, followed by a Q&A where you can type in questions, and then I will read them out loud. Okay, so let's get started. Over to you, Martin.

Yes, thank you, everyone, and welcome to this conference call. Today, I have with me our new CFO, Philip, who will give a short presentation here at first but also i want you to basically give us a little bit feedback on this new setup we have had a lot of feedback from investors on previous conference calls so today we're trying something new and hope you will provide us with some feedback afterwards so over to you philip thank you martin just a few words from my side as this is my first earnings call here at chemometric i joined the company in august as a cfo so i've now been here for a little more than a month now.

I can tell that it's been a busy start, but also a great opportunity to get into know the company and the organization. And I really look forward to the journey ahead. With that, let's turn to the financial performance for the fiscal year 2025-2026. All numbers I'll refer to will be in Danish crowns. Revenue for the year came in at 511 million, which is equivalent to 3% growth compared to last year, or 7% at constant exchange rates. EBITDA ended at 281 million, 9% growth compared to the year before, and our EBITDA margin increased from 52.1% to 55%, equivalent to 2.9 percentage point increase which is mainly explained by the increase in revenue, improved profitability and a reduction in staff cost. Looking across our product categories the main growth driver for the year was our instrument sales. Our instrument revenue went up with 13% compared to the year before which was mainly driven by our sales of XM products including NC203 that increased from 27.7 million last year to 68.1 million this year. Our service revenue increased by 4% and consumables declined by 4%. The decline in consumables is mainly explained by the US federal government shutdown in the fall of 2025, during which several of our largest customers saw a decline in number of patients treated. Looking at the geographical development, US and Canada, our largest market, decreased by 6% in reported terms, however increased slightly by 1% at constant exchange levels. Europe increased by 14% while we saw growth of 21% in the rest of the world. Looking at our two business areas, life science continued to grow with revenue increasing by 6% to approximately 485 million and is now representing 95% of group revenue. Our animal semen, beer and milk declined by 32% to approximately 26 million, reflecting our continued exit from this market. And looking specifically at life science, it's worth noting that the reported growth does not fully reflect the underlying development in our core business. During the year, we were impacted by lower activity among some of our largest U.S. customers, including the effects from the U.S. government shutdown, as well as some larger players leaving the market. This naturally had an impact on our consumable sales in short term. And finally, also reminding the negative FX impact, as mentioned earlier, The underlying growth is more around double digits for this area. We ended the year with a strong balance sheet, cash precision of around 290 million, equity of approximately 725 million. And during the year, we invested around 100 million in growth initiatives, including software, automation, product development, and our facilities here in Ellerud. And finally, our ongoing share buyback program, we have repurchased 105,000 shares at year-end, equivalent to approximately 39 million. As of today, we have repurchased around 206,600 shares, equivalent to 1.2% of the share capital.

And once again, a record year. And as I'll walk you through here, hopefully also a record year next year. first I'll walk you through the market conditions then our products and product launch then at last product development before Philip will take you through our guidance you're at first market conditions still really exciting to see all these approved Cortese cell therapies doing well mainly we still see growth and you can though see here that some cell therapies or struggling a little bit and the one of course doing best is is happily our customer but again it has been a year with less treated patients and of course that is also affecting our consumables. Overall we do see some recovery in the field and if you look at this chart you can see that it starts looking better. Also when you're in the field talking to customers actually seeing what's happening it's easy to see that the flow is definitely getting better. Also we reported at the year-end that it starts we start to see more demand from our customers and of course that has something to do with the market if you look in the startup environment which is important to us we start to see some recovery and that is of course crucial because many of our customers are still in preclinical phase one and phase two so of course this is an area which is very important for us we keep investing specifically at incubator sites where we are very well represented with our instruments and incubators for those who doesn't know that is where usually you have shared labs so you will have early startups maybe professor and an assistant who are doing some exciting work they will be then testing a lot doing a lot of research and then adding our instrumentation into their SOPs so we have been investing a lot made sure that when this market is recovering we have a lot of our products written in their sops also something interesting is the layoff tracker i think when i traveled around a couple of years ago we spoke to customers and started to see a lot of empty spaces in cambridge for example we saw a lot of layoffs which also later meant that of course with fewer people they do less sampling also means less testing and in the end less sales from us for us so here i think this very positive also when we're in the field we start seeing customers hiring we start seeing less empty spaces if you move into the incubator space you actually have everything occupied by now so very very interesting and very good news for the whole industry as philip just said and we had some i will say it was pretty rocky back in november and you can also see here with the cutting of NIH funding we saw some clinical trials getting cancelled and since we have a decent share of the market of course we get hit as well majorly we also saw some of the largest companies out there Novo Nordisk Galapagos Takeda actually exiting the market and of course that is hurting kinematics revenue as well overall though we are seeing recovery a pretty decent recovery and again I think if we move on to the next slide you can basically see the growth of this company we only have 45 approvals and if you look at this charge yeah sky's the limit and of course as we're seeing more approvals in cell and gene therapy specifically of course we will grow with that but also of course we have the exciting opportunity for bioprocessing the future which I'll come back to you if move on to the products we are now talking a lot about Exit-O-Matic and NC203 and that's mainly because it is the future of this company. We have spent so much time in the field validating the 40, the 30 and the 203 and I will say I think many of you have by now read a lot of articles and interviews about our XM30 and XM40 and the feedback is amazing. The 203 is also very exciting for us since we have of course announced the discontinuation of the 200. So many customers who are used to the flow of the cassette based instrument will basically replace the 200 with the 203 but also many of them are looking now into automating some processes with the 30 so it actually will be a combination of the 203 and xm30 i believe in the future for cell therapy again it was a record year for excitomatic and i remember i think was just a year ago i had many investors asking can you even sell this product is it is it is it even good and i think these numbers testifying that it's not only chemo medic now saying this product is is sellable a lot of customers feedback interviews you have seen it all they love this product so hopefully of course in the future we'll start seeing chemo medic to expand even more in this area and as you know we're also reporting that basically we expect most of our instrument revenue coming from excited romantic in the future For the Q4, specifically, if you include NC203, we have a record quarter, again, 17.7 million. And, of course, most of that revenue, not of course, but most of that revenue actually happened in June. So what we started to see with the discontinuation, also with the market improvement and automation, we saw a lot of demand. And, again, we mainly had more than 50% of our instrument sales coming from this area. so we are very looking forward to the future again here some extra numbers of course the growth is explaining itself and we have of course big hope for the new year mainly the trend which happened in June and Q4 is something we expect to continue into next year current year and the key drivers are basically the replacement of the 200 we have sold thousands of nc200 so many customers they have to now basically start replacing which means first of all they need to make sure they can produce for the next three years with nc200 so we are seeing some last time buys as well as actually some departments already starting to basically validate our nc203 or xm30 xm40 automation again is very interesting i believe because when we start seeing replacements for the 200 we also have customers saying well it would be nice to automate some process flows now when we are actually looking into validation so we do see a lot of customers doing validations between the hamilton system and an xm30 and also basically a tecan system and xm30 it also helps that the marketing conditions are getting better we can see that and we can also feel that when we're negotiating i remember a couple of years ago getting budget for a customer for an xm40 specifically was almost impossible where today we do see it is easier for them basically to purchase our instrumentation not only that we do also have been working on some strategic partnerships and the strategic partnerships is something you only have to do once specifically here i mean the validation into their systems we've been working very hard in this area to ensure the best possible agreement for chemo medic also for the future and mainly many of these partnership has happened through customer demand because when we have been presenting our xm30 xm40 and 203 in the field we've had customers saying why don't you actually start integrating into other other systems so instead of buying specifically from chemo medic we can buy a combined solution a system so we started talking to teak and hamilton and roche to basically integrate our product into a larger solution and i think we'll see a lot from this in the future and then over to product development where we also have some exciting projects for the future i think what we're trying to show is mainly that in the future chemo medic won't only be a cell counter company because one thing is doing an on-site cell count but many customers actually also are looking into how can we treat more patients how can we scale this business so mainly we're trying to with the sample management system for example to automate some procedures to help them scale to actually help them do way more testing than they're doing today and i've met with many many operators and also head of operations who says in the future we don't want too many operators in the lab in the manufacturing they actually want hands free so it's basically the car manufacturing all over again specifically here you see our sample management system but also with an integrated xm50 and we are hoping that customers can save a lot of money by basically buying our automated system scale their samples scale their production and actually produce cheaper cell therapies and talking about automation hardware alone is not enough you also need a software to ensure you can cut some cost i can tell you when we are on site we usually meet service managers who are overseeing 7 000 instruments where they need to make sure their service they work they're up and running they get tested every day and the whole idea about XM Octopus came to life because of that because what they would love is a fleet management where you can oversee all your instruments make sure everything is serviced you can even see is it working as supposed to is anything wrong and if anything is wrong you can just contact a chemo medic service engineer so here by moving into the software area it's basically customer it's a customer demand but also it just makes so much more sense because you can imagine overseeing 7 000 instruments which is not only chemometic instruments it's just a lot of work so imagine if they can oversee it just from a system and basically look into that and service and everything you will cut so much cost also with xm octopus instead of going into a lab to extract data you can actually send the data by API into a remote server and by that you can do QC approval you can even do audits from FDA in there so you will have so many opportunities with this new software and of course we have big expectations for that as well. The next slide here is our financial outlook so I'll give it over to Philip.

Thank you Martin. So to wrap everything up our expectations for the fiscal year 2026-27 We expect revenue of between $545 million to $575 million, equivalent to growth of around 7% to 13%, and EBITDA of between $300 million and $313 million. Also, we expect CAPEX to be around $120 million. So while we expect growth in both revenue and EBITDA, our margin and also CAPEX will be reflecting our continued growth initiatives. With that, over to Q&A.

Okay, so let's start with the first questions. Jesper from DNB, could you help us understand the assumptions behind 2627 guidance? Do you expect instrument sales, both XM and NC, to be the main growth driver while consumables and service continue to decline? And what would need to happen for you to end up at the upper versus lower end of the guidance range?

Yeah, I'll take that one. And basically the assumptions behind guidance is, of course, we have learned from last year. I think many, many investors, they reach out, of course, after our downgrade. And this is not something we were very proud of. So we have learned from that. So this year we, of course, have seen some market improvements. We have a lot of exciting replacements to do. And mainly we have looked into what is the worst case scenario here because we don't want to disappoint. What we expect is mainly the instrument sales to grow first because to have consumable and service growth, you need instruments to grow at first. We haven't basically had any expectations for Roche, Cheek, and Hamilton, those collaborations, because we don't have any numbers. So mainly, that's, of course, an upside if that happens. So overall, we are looking at the guidance to, say, the running business itself, how is that working out with the market and everything? But again, remember, the market improvement is basically only a couple of months old before it really started to take off. So we still have to see the trend, but we are cautiously optimistic about the future.

Okay, and the next question is also from Jesper. How do you view Novartis pausing some of its CGT programs, including YTB323, in DLBCL, and PHE885 in multiple myeloma, as well as BMS pausing some of its cell therapy programs, in terms of what this signals for the broader CGT market and platforms such as T-Charge? And more specifically, have you seen any impact on chemometrics activity or demand from Novartis, BMS, or related programs?

Yeah, and of course, we have been reading about those programs as well. And I think if we're going back to the presentations, we saw more than 3,000 ongoing trials. So, of course, when you have phase one and phase two trials, you have to expect some of them facing some issues. This is in vivo, and in vivo is very different from ex vivo since the expansion happens inside the body. And I know they had some issues, but it's not something which causes too much stress. or you can say we're from our point of view this is what happens so we hear it all the time and of course when you move into a whole new way of producing a drug which is in vivo you have to expect some issues throughout the clinical trials so no we are not too nervous about that and I think they're gonna solve the issues and we will see some exciting drugs in the future and also it is important to say that those platforms t-charge for example and next from bms they have many drugs on this platform and so far it has only been a couple of drugs facing issues so the platform

itself from novartis and from bms is to my understanding not facing any major issues okay the next one is also from jasper you recently announced the discontinuation of the nc200 platform with sales ending in April 27 and service ending in April 29. We hear that some labs have started making last-time buys ahead of the April 27 deadline. Should we expect this to drive any meaningful uplift in instrument sales over the coming quarters?

Yeah, and that's actually a very good question, Jesper. So thank you for that. So mainly our visibility might be 45 days. So from our point of view, of course, when we do a last-time buy, we have some expectations for some last-time buy. if you're producing with nc200 and you know the last time by is in april 27 you need to buy some instruments at some point to basically cover up for the lack over the next couple of years so yes we expect some last time by on related to the 200 and we also expect some nc203 sales for validation the difficult you can say thing for us is basically to estimate it because last year we tried to estimated we heard a lot of numbers and we believed it and this year we're more cautious because we don't want to disappoint again.

And the next question is from Simon Larsen from Danske Bank. What about the pushed XM orders triggering the PW last year? The old Fi 2526 guidance set at DKK 565 to 580 millions. We ended up at 511 million and now we have a new guidance pointing towards 560 million at midpoint for FY2627. Can you talk about what happened to those XM orders that you thought would end up in H2 last year? Seems like you're not counting on them materializing this year.

Yeah and mainly it's because we haven't received the orders yet so from our point of view we will wait until we see the PO this year before we start reporting to any investors so mainly still expect them at some point. It's very difficult for us to say when because these validations, we had a pretty great example last year in our report, I believe, those validations, they take time. We have had validations running for a couple of years with many customers. Some of the sales you see right now is mainly from those validations running over a couple of years. So we also know at some point these customers, they will buy more instruments it's just very difficult for us to estimate so right now they're mainly not a part of the guidance since we are not familiar with the exact numbers and estimates even if they will arrive this year next year or in two years so that's the main case here the next question is from Lulvi from Arctic and there's two questions the first one when it comes to the change in IFRS accounting you highlighted a 50 million effect on instrument sales and fiscal Q3.

What was the effect in fiscal Q4? If excluding the accounting effects in 25-26 and 26-27, what is the implied sales growth range assumed in your guidance?

First of all, the 15 million effect was a one-off, so we don't have any effect this quarter. So if we're looking at the expectation of our product development and investments, mainly we are looking into investing more in our xm octopus we believe software is the future in this area also we are looking into automation sample management system auto sampler we have some 50 coming pretty soon so so we're looking to keep investing and i think what's important for chemo medic is the next five ten years sell a lot of cell counters but at some point we have to look at what is the next growth leg for from our point of view so we're investing a lot in automation and in software because we believe the future is systems and to sell a

system you need hardware software mainly automated also of course a big piece of this is for xm octopus and the second question is when it comes to the expected 120 million product development expense in 2627 does this entail only capitalized investments mainly it's going to be capex but of course there will be some pnl as well but mainly it's going to be capex and the next question is from peter from proosting invest rush how far along are you with the collaboration and when do you expect commercialization to begin is the validation process different or easier compared with standard customer validation process yeah and our expectations from roche and for the roche

deal i i get the question a lot and the difficult part from our point of view is first of all we're not allowed to talk too much about it second of all we do not have any numbers but we do expect the commons we do expect to start selling next year 2027 and the validation process itself is difficult because when you are replacing a Trifon Blue based instrument there will be differences between our method and Trifon Blue. Positive part here is we've spent some of our our R&D expenses this year to basically develop protocols so we are able to help the customer to basically do it an easier tech transfer so it will be some work for the customer it will take time and but mainly if you move straight to integrating it that itself is not a problem it's basically to replace an existing method that can be more difficult but again since the product will leave the market they basically have no option so they will have to do a validation no matter what and the next question is from mess from bernbach he has two questions um number one please help me understand what the underlying consumable growth was excluding legacy for example animal reproduction and government shutdown and excluding large customers leaving the market yeah and it's a good question because if you look at the the life science lake alone the growth was pretty decent and semen and our milk and beer has been struggling a little bit because it's not a focus area for us also if you're taking those shutdowns into account, of course, it would be looking very differently. So we would probably be a little above the 10% you see. I would say probably around 15% for life science alone. Consumable-wise, we did take a hit from those closures. So that would also have been a little higher.

And the second question from Mes.

He wants an understanding of how many customers you're speaking to on the xm platform and how that compares to the beginning of the year and in addition how many potential instruments does that equate to yeah as we're talking to so many by now that i do not have the exact number but it's in the hundreds so it's it's a lot and i think the difference from our point of view to last year is that now we do not have to showcase the product before people show interest we have a lot of customers and potential customers reaching out saying they've heard about integration opportunities so they definitely just want to see can we just integrate xm30 into hamilton we have seen the webinar or etc so the difference is definitely way more demand way more you can say validations and it's so many that i don't have the exact number but way above 100 the next question is from yishu from seb you mentioned that you're seeing improved demands towards the year end can you elaborate if the demand improve for both nc and xm instruments yeah and mainly it's for xm and that is due to the discontinuation the market improvements and many of those validations we've done prior to to this year so it's it's mainly xm and and we definitely expect xm to be the leading instrument in the future and it will also probably exceed and see next year and the next one is from jesper from dnb you're guiding for

around 120 million of capex in 26 27 up from around 100 million in 25 26 and equivalent to more than 20 of revenue how much of this relates to software development how long should we expect capex to remain at more than 20 of revenue and what would you consider a more normalized level once the current investments are completed yeah and i'll say it always depends you know if our revenue goes through the sky we will probably invest even more we will have limited you will have limits because you cannot keep investing unlimited you this year we we believe we need 120 and mainly the split is probably quite even between the different areas but something our

investors might not know is we're also spending a lot of R&D expenses for biology, creating protocols, easier tech transfers for our customers. So we have a lot of different areas. So the software itself might be 20-25% of our R&D expenses in the future. Will we increase? It depends on the revenue and also actually the demand from customers because we expect to launch Oxum Octopus at some point if they want something different we'll build it so so i think this is an ongoing thing and of course i think you know us we have decent margins we're pretty good with math so if it makes sense we'll keep investing if it doesn't we won't do it so that's going to be the answer to that and then we have a question from simon from denske bank you state in the report that before making their financial decision customers expect documentation that the xm30 the xm40 and the The NC203 all produce comparable results for different cell types as well as countries' sites.

You say it's a new development for customers to express these wishes. Does this mean that you are in discussions with customers looking to also replace competing products with chemo-medic cell counters and using chemo-medic cell counters as a platform solution?

Yeah, and that's exactly what we're working on. That's also why the validation takes a little longer because usually you might hear from a department they want to buy 10 instruments and then they say, oh actually we now are moving into global alignment because we actually want to replace everything with this new platform so so that what usually happens is that we're talking to one department then other departments have other different instrumentation and suddenly this moves into a bigger project and down the line yes we are expecting to replace a lot of competitor instruments and basically be the one cell counter in the field. I will say sell counter platform actually.

And then we just have one question left and the question is from Jesper from DNB. On the rush collaboration, given the significantly higher throughput of Cytomatic compared with the legacy Zetix hires, how should we think about the replacement ratio? Is there any reason to expect something close to a one-for-one replacement? Perhaps because customers typically operate the cell counter alongside a CEDEX bioanalyzer or should we assume materially pure excitomatic units will be needed?

Yeah and that's a good question again Jesper so mainly if you want to integrate into the CEDEX bioanalyzer it's going to be a one-to-one replacement but we have seen when we're replacing competitor instruments in the field that they can actually replace two to one which is also a big USP for the customer because our instruments are so fast so it depends on the setup but if it's a standalone usually they will replace two old instruments compare instruments with one instrument from chemo medic unless you're talking integration because then it is a one-to-one specifically and that was the last question for today thank you all for joining see you in the next conference