Charles River Laboratories International Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

It's certainly difficult for us to call the timing. This is a pretty unexpected and rapid deterioration of the large pharma companies business. The good news is we have a disproportionately large share of big pharmaceutical companies' work, particularly in the safety assessment business. So that's great on the one hand. On the other hand, of course, as they begin to ratchet down their cost structures, that causes them to reduce their overall demand. The pharma companies have -- go through multiple processes every few years to try to lean out their infrastructures. They do sometimes an adequate job, sometimes they don't. I think the IRA legislation, coupled with the impending patent cliff has made it essential, maybe with the exception of the 2 prominent companies that have GLP-1 drug.

So rapid deceleration and cutbacks, disproportionate impact on us, reprioritization of pipelines, some of the companies seem to be through it. Some are probably in the midst of it, may take longer for others. It's tough to get a very good line of sight. We have very high-level contacts in all of the drug companies. We're dealing sometimes with the head of R&D and sort of minimally with the number two or three person in R&D. And it's clear that so many of these decisions have been made and are still being made sort of at the C-suite level or the board level and there are profound cuts at big pharma, which some of the people that we're working with don't necessarily have a line of sight or certainly not an early line of sight, so they could warn us and work with us.

So we're their partners. We respect and appreciate the opportunity to be so. It doesn't mean that we have early indications of what these folks would do. So it's a little bit impossible to call. But what we said in our prepared remarks, and I'll just repeat is we've seen a slower recovery in biotech, although it's been recovering, and we've seen this very soft demand and cutbacks in pharma. It feels like that's likely to persist into 2025. There's sort of no logical reason to believe that, that somehow gets curtailed subject to my comments that it's very, very, very difficult for us to call pharma in the aggregate. But it's clear that their emphasis is on the clinic, to get drugs into the clinic, to do -- to pay for their clinical trials and obviously to get drugs into the market. And it would seem, I don't know, seem logical that they would continue that for some period of time.

Yes. We think that -- we're obviously biased, but we think we have a fabulous portfolio that's quite unique. We have a much larger geographic footprint, particularly in Safety and Discovery. We have exquisite and deep science. And we have had to, in appropriate cases, be aggressive with our prices. I think we'll -- through the back half of this year, we'll have to do more -- we'll have to do more of that. So we certainly don't think that we're losing share. As we continue to refine our sales organization and structure, its use of IT, its use of Apollo, which is one of our early digitization platforms to allow the clients to get data faster and easier, some pricing and some aggressive time lines and also utilizing the whole portfolio, which I do think we've talked about a lot, which -- and can do better. In other words, our greatest competitive advantage is that we can work with the clients across this very large nonclinical portfolio, which virtually none of our competitors can.

So we think this is a market shift very. It's sudden with pharma, kind of gradual with biotech, although getting better. And we certainly don't want to do anything to impair the quality of our science. But as we said earlier, we're going to work hard to lean out our infrastructure, both in terms of staff and facilities and certainly G&A so that we can respond to whatever the market demand is going forward in an effort to do the best job we can to have the most positive operating margins possible in the midst of a slowdown in demand.

It's Flavia, I'll take that one. It was approximately $20 million in the second quarter or about $0.30. And the second quarter was a true-up for the first half of the year.

You can expect also additional favorability that would come through the second half as we updated guidance for the full year. So we will probably have additional favorability following through.

You're correct. It's mostly DSA and at the corporate level. The other 2 segments, as you pointed out, are performing well and in line with the plan. So the majority of the impact is at corporate and DSA.

Yes. I we're not going to get to that level of specificity. I think, as I said, there will be additional favorability in the second half just because the true-up that we did so far was only for the first half.

We feel like we're holding our own, certainly, from a competitive point of view, I would say, across the entire portfolio. Certainly in RMS, both from a product and services point of view. And like for a relatively long time, we've had modest volume declines with meaningful pricing declines across the world. So that will persist. China is quite strong, notwithstanding some of the political issues there. Europe is quite strong. And services have been strong now for -- I don't know how long, Eric, maybe a decade. The GEMS business is a little softer than we would like just because of the slowdown in both client bases, pharma and biotech. But we think that's a critical element in doing basic research. And our CRADL initiative is definitely in times of economic stress, which I think a lot of our clients are in, that's a really good solution for them.

So we have a little bit of facility overlap, maybe a little bit too much capacity in some locales, opportunities to have more capacity in other locales. So that business should hold up well. Manufacturing business definitely should hold up well. Definitely, principal amount of pressure is in DSA. But if you just look at the SA portion of that, a lot of drugs were parked or have been parked or will be parked by our clients before INDs were filed. So they have a drug that they like, they have a certain amount of cash to spend and they prioritize, they will get back to those next. And so we're seeing a lot of emphasis on post-IND work that will shift to classic IND work. And then at some point, when they feel that the coffers are stable, will get back to more significant spending in core discovery. But of course, as we all know, there is no future. There is no preclinical. There is no clinical without discovery, so that business should improve as well. Time frame, obviously, is a little bit difficult to call. And we think that will be the last thing. that recovers.

I think I call on that is that the biotech companies continue to improve slowly, more slowly than we had anticipated or that we liked. But just in terms of proposal volume and bookings, definitely better. We spent a fair amount of time over the last few months really studying the trend because I just want to remind everybody on this call that do several things. Number one, as I just said earlier, we have the preponderance of work, particularly safety work for big pharma. Number two, big pharma was fabulously strong for us last year, unusually strong because so much of our growth has been driven by biotech. We saw a very strong pharma growth last year and solid pharma growth for the first half of this year. And then we see this sort of rapid decline. And so it's taken us a while to study. It's tied to clients to really understand what was behind it. We're certainly seeing it persist into July. As I said a few moments ago, while this is absolutely -- if you look at the big pharma companies, an industry phenomenon of cutting back funds and infrastructure and, of course, a pipeline, they are in different phases of it, although it does seem that most of them are doing it in the same time.

At some point, they'll find C level there and they'll put the spending into those drugs, which are post-IND and in the clinic. And we hope that future progresses that they will find more of our IND work. The IND work is obviously extremely important. And as a percentage of the cost of developing a drug, quite trivial. So we do think that they'll have the money to do that at some point, and that's important for the future. Following that with any specificity at the moment is just a bit murky, given the suddenness and the unexpected nature and the meaningful nature of this pullback.

I would consider that to be separate at this point, Elizabeth. As I said in the prepared remarks, we'll be looking to start executing on it in Q3, but the impact is going to be de minimis in this year still.

So it's not in the numbers.

Correct.

Let me take a shot at that and then Flavia can jump in as well. As you said, biotech funding has been strong. It was particularly strong in the first quarter. Second quarter was okay. July wasn't great. So I don't think any of us know, Dave, but you may be right that it's cooling off a bit. Having said that, we've had a proliferation of proposals and some improvement in bookings as well. So much of it is psychology, though. So I think our client base is nervous about the consistency of the availability of cash. Obviously, they're going to continue to be conservative. And I think pharma has a lot of work to do in terms of trying to get their infrastructure where they want it to be, given the impending patent cliff.

So look, all we can say -- and even though it's a long time, this isn't always, always for us and I think we do this well. We have to get our capacity. And by that, I mean, human capacity and physical capacity, in line with our expectations for growth and demand. We always have to call it, I don't know, 12 to 24 months in advance. So our capex investments in growth in a bunch of areas, obviously, will slow down dramatically, has slowed down dramatically and will continue to. Half of our costs -- at least half of our cost is staff. So we've already made some cutbacks and we'll look to do more starting at the end of this year through next year. And we've had some small facility consolidations, and we'll look at perhaps larger ones to see whether those are appropriate.

We've done a really good job over the last decade of having capacity really well utilized across all of our businesses. And indeed, as you know, been able to add space without impairing our operating margins. So we, I think, are in the midst of and will continue to scale back both of them commensurate with what the demand is. '25, a little bit tough to call, but as I said a few moments ago, it's hard to believe that the pharma pullbacks won't continue and persist to some portion of next year. If you are right that we're beginning to see a cooling off of biotech, which we try to be careful with calling trends, Dave, because it was actually a pretty good first half of the year. So I don't know what the election will do. I don't know what the wars will do. I don't know what any of those things will do. But assuming that it's stable and doesn't get worse, I do think that biotech work and volume could continue to improve for us just because there's still hundreds of new companies minted every year that don't have any internal capacity and we work with a lot of the VCs and a lot of those portfolio companies.

So we need to watch it very carefully. Obviously, we need to call it today. We've called a lot of the savings, $150 million, $100 million of which will hit in this year. We've already called that and have implemented a bunch of it and we'll continue to. And then we will, for sure, do more next year.

And Jim, I don't have anything else to add. I think you covered it comprehensively.

Yes. I'll take especially the latter part of the question. So Dave, the pricing -- the dynamics of pricing that we've experienced so far through the first half as well as what we anticipate the trends to be in the second half, and as I said, exiting the year with slight price decline in DSA have been considered in the margin. I'll add some comments on the pricing dynamics and welcome additional color by Jim. But as we said it in the first earnings call, we are being selective. And where it makes sense, we are providing some discounts depending on the nature of work, depending on the start of the work. There's pockets of the work that we do where not a lot of competitors have those capabilities. And in those spaces, we don't feel like we need to provide additional price incentives.

There are other pockets that we are being selective and are ensuring that, as appropriate, we do not lose certain volume and certain business. So it's -- I think from a macro trend with the last couple of years, particularly in 2021 and 2022, pricing was extremely positive, higher than historical levels and it started to modulate last year coming into this year, as we said, it was still slightly up in Q2. But we are seeing a shift in trend and plan to exit the year with slight price decline in DSA. Jim, I don't know if you want to add anything else?

There's no question, Dave, that our competitors principally use price as the lever. And so we don't like to chase it. We try not to. As we said sort of in the first half of the year, we reduced price pretty sparingly to certainly preserve share and to gain share. I just think it feels like it's going to be more pronounced in the back half of the year given the sort of pretty sudden pullback by big pharma and maybe some concern by our biotech clients about access to capital. So price, which for years became less of an issue and maybe for the last year or so, it's become more of an issue. As Flavia said, should become more pronounced in the back half of the year. We're anticipating that, that's embedded in our guidance.

Again, we're going to continue to have this tale of 2 cities. We definitely dialed into biotech and they have no internal capacity. So if they're in a preclinical phase or moving into it, we have a very high probability to get meaningful amount of that work. And as we've said to you for some period of time, they historically have been a little less price sensitive than big pharma. I know that's a surprising comment, but it's true. So I think we're very much in touch with that marketplace. As I said earlier, it's very much about the psychology of access to capital. So we just have to see how the capital markets unfold. I mean, a little bit rocky right now. The summer is also a very difficult time to call it.

There's maybe a dozen pharma companies left. We're very close to all of them. We have a very high-level relationships. I'd say the majority of them don't do the work internally. So they're also quite dependent on us. They adjust, and with a lot of them, we have long-term pricing arrangements. So that's -- while there will be some pressure on price, it's just going to be more about volume as they cut back and try to preserve their cost structure. So as we said, we're going to see that persist. I would imagine biotech becomes more positive, faster than big pharma who I think has some major restructure -- major structural improvements to make it because there's no way they can make them overnight. They're going to look to us to help them make them. So CRADL will be important. I do think Safety will continue to be important. And definitely, all of our Manufacturing segment will be increasingly more important to them.

So for us, it's again, we have a very strong portfolio. We think it's scientifically superior to all of the competitors, both individually and in the aggregate. We just have to lean out the infrastructure dramatically, so that we're a little bit not as tied to the time frame, assuming that it's softer for longer than we think. But we just don't see any reason why this would change for us for 2025, given that we're not [Indecipherable].

So it's definitely broad-based. We're seeing it with every client, and as I said before, we have very large market shares and huge for us, very -- increasingly large dollar volumes. across all of big pharma. And with the exception of the two companies that are making GLP-1s, virtually all of them are going through substantial cutbacks of staff, facilities and portfolio at the same time. Having said that, there's no question that it disproportionately adversely impacts, I don't know, some of the tools companies probably, definitely folks that are playing in discovery and safety to the benefit of clinical work. So it's all a big portion.

By the way, that's where most of the money is spent anyway, but it's all a push to get drugs into the clinic and to try to get as many drugs into the market. It's possible that so far for new drugs that have been approved is meaningfully behind the prior year. So I think that's also another problem with them. So they see a patent cliff. They're sort of working really hard to get more drugs into the clinic and into the market. That's not easy to do. They've got the IRA legislation to make that a bit more complex, a lot of competition around similar targets, similar types of molecules and they definitely just have too much to fight off right now. So again, it's difficult to know, I won't say even predict, to know how long there will be a disproportionate focus on the clinic. But we know it can't be forever or there is no pharmaceutical industry. We know that they have to use, hopefully, drugs that successfully get to market to fund more work on the IND phase, and then ultimately, more discovery to start.

So we've seen this before. I typically personally don't think there are cycles in this business. But in times of economic stress, sort of -- I don't think the situation is as bad, but we saw in 2009, '10, '11, '12, we had a similar period where our client base pretty much on a broad gauge basis is watching and spending carefully and all we can do -- look, we're merely reflections. We are merely a reflection of the aggregate amount of work of big pharma and biotech data. Obviously, that's what we do, right? We don't have any of our own molecules. And while we have an increasing amount of services in and around the clinic, so that's good. Our manufacturing business should continue to do well as we said in our guidance because that's in and around the clinic. The preponderance of our work is in discovery and preclinical, which is less emphasized right now, certainly by the big drug companies.

I mean this is unusual activity for our pharma clients who obviously we've been servicing forever, and that was our principal source of revenue and there's obviously a meaningful source of revenue right now. I think your comments on IRA are accurate except we're surprised that we're hearing more about it lately. So I don't know what sort of restarted that. But almost all the clients have mentioned that. They're mentioning the patent lifts even more.

So the notion that they would double down on our R&D to try to offset that, which actually at least on the -- or an early depart makes a lot of sense. Strategically and structurally and organizationally, we just don't see them doing it right now. It's just, as you know, it takes longer to get drugs into the clinic. It takes longer for them to get to market and it costs a lot more. So they just have to work on a smaller number of drugs to offset the impending impact from so many of them, some many of the patents coming off.

So feels like unusual activity. It also feels unusually profound and sudden. And as we said, we used the word unexpected because we're really close to these folks and we deal with them every day and we're their service provider, and in many ways, an extension of their own internal facilities. And yet it's not like they said to watch a year ago. I just want to tell you we're going to be -- we're going to emphasize clinical work to the detriment of preclinical so you need to prepare for that, we'll be doing less work with you. So we didn't get that sort of warning or dialogue. I think we're increasingly closer to our clients. We feel that we're sitting on the same side of the table with them. I think a lot of these decisions have been taken relatively recently and probably more to come and haven't been taken yet.

I think it's hard to believe that the BIOSECURE ACT won't have a positive benefit to the demand curve for us across lots of what we do, right, biologics, CDMO for sure, some safety, some discovery. I mean it's pretty profound, and there's a lot of Chinese competitors in that space who compete with us principally on price, but have very good scale and our clients have been quite happy with them. And while it's quite clear to us that, that should have a positive benefit, as we said, I think, on our last call or some of the interim conversations we've had at the investor conferences, there's been a very small amount of both conversation and interest and a tiny amount of work that has come with us. So we don't -- we want to be careful not to overstate the potential, although we think there is a potential over time.

So we just have to watch and see how it rolls out, see what the ultimate language is, see what the severity is and see whether clients follow. We did say, I think it was on our last call, that we had meetings with a couple of very big venture capital firms with whom we work who said they had, "Instructed their portfolio of companies not to do work in China." And we thought that was an unusually strong inter -- sort of interference with what these portfolio companies do. They didn't say we would prefer you don't use China. They said, we don't want you to. So that gave us an indication that, that might be something that expands. These are VCs that are creating new companies from scratch and the fact that they don't even want to start with China, quite interesting.

So it feels like it should have a greater head of steam, doesn't seem to have much right now. A lot of talk about it. So obviously, it's not built into anything that we're saying for this year, and we'll see whether there's any changes post-election on this. And I'll let Flavia take the interest expense question.

Sure. And Tejas, given that the -- any change in interest rates by the Fed will likely be at the end -- the tail end of the year, the timing of these reductions will not really have any meaningful impact on our outlook. Not to mention also 80% of our debt is fixed until November when we have the swap on the $500 million expire. I know you talked also about could that put pressure on your interest income. But we try to keep very little cash, obviously, given that our objective is to pay down debt. So that would be de minimis as well. And in terms of outlook for next year, anything that the Fed does in terms of bringing interest rates down will obviously be positive for us because we will have a little bit less that fix given the swap will expire. And so the amount of floating of our debt will increase. And if interest rates come down, that would actually be positive for us.

I can take that one, Casey. So -- and I'll separate it a little bit because I'm assuming that your question is more focused on NHP pricing in the DSA business, but I'll also provide some commentary on NHP pricing when we sell it to third parties, which is reflected in the RMS business. So for DSA, NHP pricing was still slightly positive in the second quarter as we, I think, indicated. And it's off from the peak levels of last year, but still positive. It will probably follow the same pattern as overall pricing for the DSA business, so probably modulate to slightly decline in the tail end of this year.

Shifting now to the NHP pricing within RMS. Obviously, we have 2 parts of that business, I think, as we have commented since we acquired Noveprim. We have the NHP sales in China for China. And then we have now NHP sales through the Noveprim acquisition. So in China, prices have come down and they have been reflected in our results so far this year, and we'll continue to expect them to be at the levels that we're experiencing them today.

And then in the case of Noveprim, prices are stable. They -- these agreements are long-term relationships and we haven't experienced price pressure there this year and do not expect it to happen in the second half of the year.

No problem. I'll take that one as well, Jim. And you're correct, Casey, the cancellations for sort of biotech, small and mid-tier companies, actually was a slight sequential improvement from Q1. So less cancellations. And global has actually picked up between Q1 and Q2. So sequentially, it was a deterioration, more cancellations for global in Q2 and an improvement for mid-tiers as you had guessed.

We have to hire even direct labor probably a quarter ahead, that's a good time frame. It's kind of 3 to 4 months to train people that have no background in this work. So not a long period of time, but the people really can't start to contribute the next day. So we try and I think have been successful in staying ahead of that curve. Can't take on new work with without sufficient staff. So think it should be relatively straightforward to get those -- to hire those people or hire them back or hire people. Obviously, senior scientific people and [Indecipherable] directors and things like that, it's much more complicated we were going to hold on to those people as we continue to refine our infrastructure.

It's a good question. I mean pharma is 50% to 70% of the drugs are externally accessed. So you're going to see pharma continue to do a lot of M&A of small, medium and large biotech companies. So I don't think there's going to be much M&A between pharma companies. So that's positive for them. Much of the work that they're doing, particularly in the areas that we work, are currently being outsourced. As they buy the startup or growth biotech companies, they are obviously going to continue to work, but they would buy those companies. So we should benefit from that as well, particularly if that biotech company is a client of ours or the pharma company buys as well.

We haven't seen this level of pullback this severe in a long time, but we saw it years ago when there was another patent cliff. So that's just the fact that they can't deny, and they have to fill that hole as quickly as possible. Hence, the emphasis on the clinic. As we said a few times today, it's a bit of an imponderable to try to figure out when they'll reinvigorate pure discovery spending or IND spending. But the IND spending would come sooner than discovery. And it's all essential in terms of continuing to fuel the strength of their pipeline.

So at some level, they have to do it all. They have to look at their own infrastructure from facilities, they have to look at it on G&A. They had to look at -- some of them are cutting back therapeutic areas. They have to really refine their infrastructure, which is not something, I think, the pharmaceutical industry has historically done on that well, but they're at the point now where it's really a necessity. So that should -- when the smoke clears, whenever that is, be a significant benefit to us since we do so much of this work -- can do so much this work for them with deeper science, with closer proximity, lower cost, et cetera, et cetera, like we have been for years. So we have to hang in there, get lean, watch our cost structure and try to be as responsive as possible from a sales point of view so that we minimally hold on to share and maximally take share of new work.

I think we're probably already seeing a little bit of a bleed-through, just to use your language, in North America, which has been a bit slower, and of course, that's where all most of biotech resides. Conversely, Europe, which has less biotech and ironically lots of pharma, has been solid. China is still growing really nicely. That's a function of capital going into life sciences. Just the scale of the country and the scale of our operation because we built some new facilities.

So we feel pretty good -- we feel pretty good about our guidance there. We've always gotten price in RMS forever. None of our clients produce their own animals and the competition is relatively small. And while the service parts of RMS are a bit slow at the moment, it's still quite substantial. They've got good operating margins. And they are part of the solution for the clients watching the cost structure. So we would imagine that, that work will stabilize as well. So I think as we said, RMS will continue to do its thing. Our guidance is only 0 to low single digits. So we certainly feel quite confident about our ability to deliver that for the 3 or 4 reasons I just gave you.

Our win rate in Safety has been quite high and pretty consistent over a long period of time. So when we go head-to-head given our overall portfolio, given the geography, given the depth of our science, we'll almost always win until there's a serious conversation about price with a client that's just worried about running out of cash. And then they are more open, I think, to compromise on the quality. I don't think that's a big issue when -- and often we don't even bid on that work. There's some very small competitors who really compete entirely on price.

So our market share is still quite substantial. It has been growing our win rates have been good. The proposal volume has been quite significant. And the bookings have begun to improve, as we said in our prepared remarks, just not at the rate that we would need them to improve to really invigorate the back half of the year. So we think that's going to be less positive than we thought and exacerbated by pharma pulling back at the same time. But I think we continue to hold our own, do really well from a market share point of view with the entire client base, but certainly particularly biotech.

And Max, if I can just add, I think you alluded to one of our competitors that reported last week, if I saw it correctly, and it's a smaller piece of their business, but the piece that we compete more directly, I think their performance in the quarter was worse than ours. And so I think to Jim's point, we believe this is more of a market dynamic as opposed to a competitive dynamic driving the more negative outlook that we are forecasting.

I was going to just say, I apologize if we didn't get to some of the questions. It was running long. I will follow up, and thank you, everyone, for joining the conference call this morning. We look forward to seeing you at some of the investor conferences in September, and this concludes the call. Thank you.