SRTOY - Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. (SDMHF) H1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-07-19 19:15:20 ET
Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. (SDMHF)
H1 2024 Earnings Conference Call
July 18, 2024, 13:45 AM ET
Company Participants
Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg - IR
Rene Faber - Head of Bioprocess Solutions Division & Member
Dr. Florian Funck - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Richard Vosser - JPMorgan
Odysseas Manesiotis - Berenberg
Charlie Heywood - Bank of America
Charles Pitman - Barclays
Vineet Agrawal - Citi
Thibault Boutherin - Morgan Stanley
Falko Friedrichs - Deutsche Bank
Jo Walton - UBS
Oliver Metzger - Oddo BHF
Sezgi Ozener - HSBC
James Vane-Tempest - Jefferies.
Presentation
Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg
Welcome everyone, and thank you for dialing in at this little bit unusual time for our call on quarterly results. Obviously, this is because we pulled the publication forward in the context of our decision to de-risk our guidance and therefore Ad hoc these news in the format of an Ad hoc announcement just a little bit earlier today.
I would like to walk you through the highlights and the most important points for H1 of the Sartorius group, that largely also are relevant for Sartorius Stedim Biotech. I will then hand over to Florian, our CFO, who will walk you through the numbers in more detail.
Thereafter, I will talk a little bit more in detail about the revised guidance for full year 2024. Then we will hand over to Rene who will talk about Sartorius Stedim Biotech for H1 as well as outlook. So, as we also said for Q1, one can clearly say that we still see a very mixed picture regarding market conditions and how this reflects then in our numbers.
First of all, we have to say we did achieve the H1 results as we communicated them at the Capital Markets Day roughly eight, nine weeks ago. This is for both top-line as well as margin, but we clearly also have to say that the overall demand situation didn't really gain substantial momentum yet. Maybe in more detail before we talk about the outlook again for bioprocess solutions, we have sales for H1 now, on previous year's level.
We still have been in negative territory for Q1, so Q2 has shown quite better picture here. Recurring business was contributing to that. However, it's still affected in some areas by destocking effects, and we clearly see muted investment appetite by customers regarding equipment.
We do see at the same time very encouraging and significant growth in the area of advanced therapies. For our lab products and services division, sales is still below previous year, which reflects the overall soft-end markets. And clearly China, which plays a more significant role for LPS than for BPS, does play a particular role here, but it also holds true for other geographies as well.
The profitability, I think one can say is on a robust level, given the fact that we are not achieving our initial top-line targets. We see increasing positive effects from our efficiency program. We were talking about that during the capital markets day as well. They're shooting now for a bit more than €100 million on a full year basis.
However, we do see and expect that also going forward, some dilution by lower volumes and that is why we are mentioning that explicitly as well, even a bit lower capacity utilization than sales were because we are running down our inventory levels by ourselves as well....
Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. (SDMHF) H1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript