Prahlad Singh
Analyst · Citi
Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. I have several important developments to discuss today. First, I'm really excited to report that Revvity delivered strong first quarter results with 3% total company organic growth, demonstrating the resilience and strength of our business. Our adjusted operating margins came in at 23.6%, which was above our 23% outlook. These results are a good start to the year and position us well to achieve our full year expectations, which Max will update you on in a bit. The better-than-anticipated revenue and margin performance in the quarter led to our adjusted earnings per share in the quarter being $1.06, which was solidly above the $1.02 to the $1.04 outlook that was implied in our guidance. I next want to highlight a transformative strategic decision we have made that will accelerate our growth trajectory, improve our financial profile and allow for even more focused investments. Following an extensive review, we have decided to divest our immunodiagnostics business in China, which represented approximately 6% of total company revenue last year. This decision reflects our commitment to focusing resources where we can generate the highest returns for shareholders going forward. The health care market in China, particularly diagnostics, has faced persistent policy-induced headwinds that have dramatically impacted both customer demand and pricing dynamics. Unfortunately, we see these challenges continuing over the medium term. To maintain our position in this space, it would require us to make substantial investments, including fully localizing manufacturing, supply chains and regulatory capabilities. This would require meaningful capital allocation, resulting in a deprioritization of other higher potential return initiatives available to us. Rather than deploying material dollars and management attention to address the structural challenges in the China immunodiagnostics market, we are choosing to concentrate our efforts on business areas where we have clear competitive advantages and see healthy growth trajectories. This is an intentional strategic allocation of our resources towards higher value opportunities that will drive and further improve our future performance. In fact, this selective approach is being validated by our performance in other parts of our China business. For example, our Life Sciences business in the region, which was larger in absolute revenue dollars last year than the immunodiagnostics business we will be divesting continued to perform well with reagents growing solidly above our overall reagents performance last year. We anticipate a continuation, if not acceleration, of our strong Life Sciences performance in China as we move through 2026, demonstrating our ability to succeed and grow meaningfully in China with the right products, market positioning and appropriate policy backdrop. We have signed a letter of intent with a local management-led buyer group for the purchase of this business and expect to reach a definitive agreement within the next 2 months, which would include our retaining a minority interest in the new company. The transaction is anticipated to close by the end of next year, allowing time for the buyer to establish local manufacturing capabilities and obtain necessary regulatory approvals. Until closing, we will continue to report the financial impact of these operations, but will exclude them on a pro forma basis to provide clear visibility into our ongoing business performance. The financial benefits of this planned divestiture are meaningful. On a pro forma basis, China will now only represent approximately 8% to 9% of our total revenue with approximately 7% being Life Sciences. If you were to exclude this business, our pro forma organic growth in the first quarter would have been 6%, while our pro forma adjusted operating margins would have been an even better 24% overall. We expect this change to improve our 2026 total company organic growth by approximately 100 basis points and enhance our operating margins by approximately 30 basis points. This move reflects the removal of a lower growth, lower margin business that has been a significant drag on our cash flow conversion over the last several years and was also consuming disproportionate management focus and capital resources. More importantly, this move further supports our long-range plan, which calls for 6% to 8% organic growth and double-digit EPS growth. As it pertains to our updated pro forma guidance for 2026, which now excludes the immunodiagnostics business in China, we are now looking for organic growth of 3% to 4%, adjusted operating margins of 28.4%, and adjusted earnings per share of $5.20 to $5.30, which includes a 20% reduction related to the planned divestiture, offset by $0.05 of benefit from improved operational execution throughout the year. This move will result in a more focused business with cleaner financial metrics that better reflects our core growth drivers. Turning to our end markets. We saw a modestly improved pharma and biotech spending environment in the first quarter, which led to positive low single-digit year-over-year organic growth from these customers. This was the strongest year-over-year growth we've had for reagents and instrument sales to this customer group since the first half of 2023. While customer behavior continues to remain somewhat measured as customers work through budget cycles, we are seeing early indicators that we believe should lead to future improvement. On the academic and government side, there have been some promising developments from a budget and policy perspective, which also bodes well as we look ahead. I'm encouraged by the positive mid-single-digit growth overall in the first quarter from our academic customers. And in the U.S., we also saw positive growth from these customers for the first time since the second quarter of 2023. So while we are pleased by the first quarter trends in this end market and recent policy developments, we remain mindful of the world we live in today and how quickly policies and regulations can change. Consequently, until we see a bit more consistent performance from both our pharma and academic customer bases, we plan to remain prudent with our forward-looking assumptions across each of these end markets. As it pertains to Diagnostics, we had a fantastic quarter within reproductive health as it grew in the low double digits organically overall. This was driven by a combination of continued success in our newborn screening business despite continued challenging global birth rate trends and a better-than-expected contribution from our Genomics England contract. Within immunodiagnostics, we saw challenging conditions in China as anticipated, while the business outside of China performed in line with our expectations. During the first quarter, we also continued to demonstrate strength in our ability to drive innovation, a consistent priority of ours. In our Signals software business, we introduced Xynthetica in December, our AI models as a service platform that serves as a secure marketplace, collecting computational capabilities to wet lab research. Last month, we introduced BioDesign, our cloud-native molecular design platform for biologics development. Upon its official launch at a major industry trade show next week, BioDesign will be the only cloud-based offering of its type, addressing a critical need for molecular biology teams developing the next generation of antibody cell and gene therapies. Then towards the end of this year, we'll introduce LabGistics, a novel AI-first drug discovery to drug development workflow offering, rounding out an impressive year of software innovation that demonstrates our ability to rapidly bring new capabilities to market. In our instruments business, we have been highlighting to you for several quarters that we have been seeing stronger demand for our high content screening portfolio, driven by increases in GLP-1 related research, new approach methodologies, including organ on chip development work and data generation for AI model creation and training, amongst other validation related work. Our launch earlier this year of our new flagship Opera Phenix OptIQ system will only further build on this momentum. The OptIQ's enhanced confocal imaging capabilities, advanced 3D cell analysis and automated phenotypic profiling aligned perfectly with current market trends focused on complex disease modeling and precision medicine research. This is another great example of one of our key product lines, which we believe will meaningfully benefit from increasing AI adoption by our customers in their preclinical R&D work. I think it is important to clearly address the transformational impact of artificial intelligence and life sciences research. AI is dramatically accelerating scientific discovery, enabling researchers to identify and design exponentially more therapeutic compounds and biological targets than ever before. This acceleration means more discoveries to validate and more insights to unlock through physical experimentation than ever before. To understand the opportunity, let me provide you an example to consider in where we believe we are in the AI adoption cycle. Today, we are in what would be called the infrastructure build-out phase, similar to the early days of the Internet, when companies were laying fiber optic cables and building foundational systems that would support the digital transformation. After that Internet infrastructure was established, we witnessed an explosion of value creation. Companies like Google, Amazon and Meta built entirely new business models that created fundamentally new ways of organizing information and commerce. AI in Life Sciences is following a similar trajectory. We expect our consumables, instruments and software to see significant increases in demand in the future. as they are utilized by our customers to create new insights at an accelerating rate in order to capitalize on the new capabilities that AI provides. Our offerings are used by our customers to actually uncover and translate the new data that the AI models and the infrastructure can then learn from. This value creation phase is only just beginning, and this is where the real opportunity lies for Revvity. Every AI-generated discovery will still require physical validation through wet lab experimentation. One cannot approve a drug based solely on computational predictions. It must be synthesized, tested, screened and validated through rigorous and laboratory work given that only a small fraction of human biology is well understood. We believe that as more compounds are designed and combined with new ways to develop and refine them, a continuous loop of innovation and improvement will be created. That is likely to result in a demand bottleneck in validation related work for our customers. As AI generates more promising therapeutic hypothesis at an unprecedented rate, the downstream demand for laboratory tools, reagents, and instruments to validate these discoveries will grow substantially. This inflection point sits squarely within Revvity's core strengths, providing the critical technologies that translate AI-driven insights into real-world biological validation. Looking ahead, I anticipate a third phase emerging after value creation, which is value capture. This is where our customers will begin realizing substantial returns on their AI investments through faster development time lines and higher success rates. These gains will incentivize even greater investments in research capabilities, creating a virtuous cycle that expands the entire market for scientific research tools. Beyond our external AI strategy, we are dramatically transforming our internal operations through AI adoption that I believe is quite differentiated and includes appropriately repositioning our employees and their roles. The well-known research from Gartner recently published a research paper highlighting our internal AI deployment, which stands out across the industries that they've researched. They noted how our structured approach has accelerated software delivery and enable impactful initiatives that previously would not have been feasible. With our unique rollout of multiple leading LLMs to the entirety of our global employee base, we are seeing employee adoption rates of AI well above corporate averages, and we are doing so at a fraction of the cost of traditional AI corporate implementations. We also continued to execute on our operational efficiency initiatives that we discussed on our fourth quarter call. Implementation is well underway and remains on pace to be fully completed around midyear, which will result in a greater impact on our financials starting in the second half of this year. These initiatives are a meaningful driver of the operating margin expansion we have communicated. Since the contributions from these actions will not anniversary until midyear next year, it positions us well for robust margin expansion in the first half of 2027 as well. Before turning the call over to Max, I want to make you aware and invite you to our Investor Day in New York City on Friday, November 13. This will be an excellent opportunity for us to showcase the progress we've made across our business and share our vision for where Revvity is heading in the future. Software will be a central theme of that discussion, and we are excited to provide much deeper insights into how our offerings in this space will enable long-term growth. I've never been more excited about the future potential of Revvity than I am right now. We are exceptionally well positioned in both the near and long term to lead the transformation of how preclinical research is performed, while delivering an outstanding opportunity for our shareholders as end market demand trends normalize. With that, I will now turn the call over to Max.