SSSGY - Sartorius Aktiengesellschaft (SARTF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-04-18 14:12:02 ET
Sartorius Aktiengesellschaft (SARTF)
Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call
April 18, 2024 7:00 am ET
Corporate Participants
Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg - Chairman
René Fáber - Chief Executive Officer
Florian Funck - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Vineet Agrawal - Citi
Matthew Weston - UBS
Richard Vosser - JPMorgan
Odysseas Manesiotis - Berenberg
Oliver Reinberg - Kepler Cheuvreux
Hugo Solvet - BNP Paribas Exane
Ed Ridley-Day - Redburn Atlantic
Oliver Metzger - Oddo BHF
Sezgi Ozener - HSBC
Thibault Boutherin - Morgan Stanley
James Vane-Tempest - Jefferies International Limited
Charles Pitman - Barclays
Falko Friedrichs - Deutsche Bank
Dylan Van Haaften - Stifel
Charlie Haywood - Bank of America
Presentation
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sartorius and Sartorius Stedim Biotech Conference Call on the Q1 2024 Results. I'm Morris, your Chorus call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded.
The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.
At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg. Please go ahead.
Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg
Thank you, very much and good day, good morning, good afternoon also from my side here. Together with my colleagues Florian Funck, our new CFO and René Fáber, CEO of Sartorius Stedim Biotech, I will now walk you through our presentation for the Q1 results of Sartorius as well as Sartorius Stedim Biotech.
I think it's fair to say that the results of the first quarter of this year show a mixed picture. That is mostly because of the very different levels of order intake and sales revenue at the beginning of last year as a comparison because of the very strong dynamics and unsynchronized development of order intake and sales revenue during 2022 and 2023.
It's also because of quite some different regional trends and influencing factors and these have also different effects on the different product segments of Sartorius and you will see this in a minute also in more detail.
We would nevertheless say that the results largely are within the expectations. We expected a rather slow start into the year. We were rather expecting a moderate first half of the year. Order intake is up by almost 10% whereas sales revenue because of the much stronger prior year numbers is down by roughly 7.5%. Book-to-bill ratio is slightly above 1 as we have seen it again being the case at the end of last year in the fourth quarter. We have seen that first time since a while so we see a continuation of this positive dynamics.
As I already said, the dynamics vary quite significantly across regions and customers and as I also said across the different product segments. By regions, and again you will see this in more detail, you can say that order intake is the strongest for both divisions in the Americas and by far the weakest for China. If we take this as a separate market, this is really relevant to have a dedicated look on that, and for sales also, say China is showing the weakest numbers, pretty much as expected I would say. This also has some effect on the different developments on the product segment dimension.
What is very positive is that order intake is significantly up for the recurring business, so mostly consumables, and that is the case for both divisions. Whereas we are seeing a muted investment activity by customers pretty much across the board, again the strongest in China but also in other regions, and that has led to a relatively low order intake for our equipment and instruments....
Sartorius Aktiengesellschaft (SARTF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript