Blau Farmaceutica SA

BOVESPA:BLAU3

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q2

[Bruna Gamboa, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Blau's Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. Today, we are live with Marcelo Hahn the Founder and CEO; Douglas Rodrigues, our CFO; and with myself, Bruna Gamboa from Investor Relations. At the end of the presentation, we'll have our question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Our call is being held in Portuguese with simultaneous translation into English. And the webcast is recorded and will be available on the company's Investor Relations website.

Now I would like to pass the floor to Marcelo so we can begin our presentation.

[Marcelo Hahn, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our earnings call on the results of the second quarter of 2023. Before we begin the presentation, I'd like to let you know that from this release onwards will adopt a new format to communicate our results with the main objective of protecting the interest of the company and of our shareholders, respecting the legal standards.

Moving on to Slide 2. I would like to highlight that since we began Blau, we have maintained in our essence the DNA of entrepreneurship and innovation, achieving our objectives through continuous investments in R&D, productive capacity in human capital. And we've always sought to consolidate ourselves as the largest pharmaceutical industry in the institutional segment, the hospital segment. Another quarter, we are in the first place in the ranking of pharmaceutical industries in the nonretail market in Brazil, according to the IQVIA data. And we're even stronger after the acquisition of Bergamo, which we completed on June 30th. Together, Blau and Bergamo will become one of the most complete portfolios in the onco/hemato segment. It was one of the largest production capacities in Brazil and a very robust pipeline of new products.

I'm very happy with this merger between both companies, which consolidates our leadership position of the companies in high complex medication. In this quarter, we also had another important milestone, which was signing an important contract with about hemo derivatives that could go over $165 million in up to 5 years. Our partner -- GCC has been a partner for over 20 years, and this contract began on the 1st of June, strengthening our commitment to supply the market with quality hemo derivatives following the national Brazilian standards and greater safety and efficacy standards.

Another milestone of the quarter was the start of sales of our drugs produced in the specialty span P210 with 2 production lines of injectables with high speed and large capacity, which has already contributed to the unit's results in this quarter.

In our R&D investments, we reached over BRL 43 million, and these were also important to highlight in the quarter, driven by the partnership with Similis Bio to produce our 4 next-generation monoclonal antibodies that are currently under patent protection and the addressable market has been growing nonstop. In this period, we launched 3 new products with an addressable market of BRL 163 million in Brazil. I also want to highlight that I'm super happy with our plasma collection operation in the United States, which began from scratch. And after 18 months, we were able to reach breakeven after we got the licenses from the FDA in the second quarter providing sequence to our strategy in the company of the IFAs and increasing our revenue in strong currency.

On Slide 3, we're going to present more details about the acquisition of the Bergamo Lab. I'm really excited about this partnership, which consolidates our leading position of these companies with highly complex medication and one of the most complete portfolios in the Oncology and Hematology segments as with one of the largest production capacities in Brazil. Bergamo was started in 1946, and there's a state-of-the-art plant located in [indiscernible] Sao Paulo, which has received recurring investments in recent years. Bergamo also has 2 production lines. And in addition to the Oncology portfolio, we have important products that together will have to boost our results.

Currently, Bergamo has the portfolio with 25 products sold in 39 different presentations and at an addressable market of approximately BLR 2.8 billion and a market share of 18%. So with the completion of this acquisition, where Blau performed a very good purchase, we will have an opportunity for gains in tax operation on productive areas with the expansion of product offers, greater productive capacity, portfolio increases and operational excellence. We also have the opportunity to export products that are produced by Bergamo to our LatAm affiliates and transfer some patients and registrations to Blau and LatAm.

And between the signing and closing Blau Bergamo completed a new quality control center in new R&D lab with some important authorizations for 2 more registrations with Anvisa that are going to be launched in the second semester with an addressable market of about BRL 110 million.

On Slide 4 of this presentation, I'm going to highlight that Blau continues to advance in capacity expansion projects and our operational excellency in all of it's production plants intending to meet the growing demand for our products and geographic expansion. On the 5th of April, we had the authorization for Anvisa to start marketing the drugs produced in our new production plant in Caucaia, P210, addressing our supply bottlenecks in the specialties unit.

I'm really glad that we've been addressing part of this demand in the market and also reducing our bad quarters. Now in the third quarter, we're going to begin our third shift to the factory and we'll continue in this ramp-up process until the fourth quarter. Even with the beginning of our operation in the P210, we still have important production bottlenecks in other plants that have already been addressed and will be completely solved with the construction of the Pernambuco industrial complex, which will provide more details about in the next slide.

Moving on to Slide 5. I would like to highlight that I'm really excited about the beginning of the construction of this new industrial complex in Pernambuco, which will increase Blau's possibilities to enter new markets and geographies expanding access to medication and generating significant value for our shareholders. This new project will combine low operating costs with higher production capacity in addition to benefiting from tax reduction programs in a place with competitive infrastructure proximity to the foreign airport which will also leverage our strategy to export medication worldwide, reducing dependence on medication and taking advantage of market opportunities.

On this slide, we're also going to be presenting the average about paid of taxes and the average rates for '22, so that you can project and forecast the benefits for the next year. For model purposes, we believe that the first production line will be active in 2026, and the last line, we'll be operating after 36 months. About some updates on the project in the quarter, we completed the development of the master plan which is a conceptual project for the plant deployment and will be the basis for the development of our executive project. In this period, we also completed some important conversations with [indiscernible] and also and [indiscernible] to readjust the road access to start the earthwork and begin all of this in the fourth quarter.

I want to thank you all. I'll pass the floor back to Bruna. Thank you very much.

[Bruna Gamboa, executive]

Thank you, Marcelo. Moving on to Slide 6. We highlight our product pipeline which is, of course, revisited and updated quarterly. So it's important to emphasize that we have preliminary information presented here and that the dates that we present our estimates that we have in the company. Since the registration process for the drugs really depends on the authorities and there may be changes that accelerate or delay certain product launches. Every quarter, we have greater share of our new products and our results, and we're really happy to announce that by the end of June, we have already obtained the registration for 8 of the 10 drugs that will be launched this year in addition to the registration of a drug that will be launched early in 2024 which demonstrates our precise strategy from our regulatory and R&D departments.

We continue to advance in a large number of projects that we submitted to the specific authorities in Brazil and Latin America by 2024. And in this quarter, we also launched 3 new drugs in Brazil with a total addressable market of BRL 163 million. On the bottom part of the slide, we can present the performance of the products launched by Blau. And altogether, we have this mature portfolio that represents 22% of the company's total market share based on the IQVIA MAT data from June.

Two years after the beginning of the sales of the products launched in 2021, the company has already managed to achieve an average market share of 22% for these products. We're also happy with the drugs we launched by Blau in 2022, which by the end of June 23, had already reached an average market share of 7%. And I want to remind you all that the products at the highest addressable market were launched in the fourth quarter of '22.

On Slide 7, we're going to mention the main highlights of the plasma collection operation in the United States. What we call the Amyris operation. As mentioned by Marcelo, the first center reached a breakeven and had an all-time revenue representing BRL 6 million in this quarter. The second center scheduled to be opened in September, and on the next weeks, we're also going to be starting to set up the equipment and also train the employees and team that have been trained at our first center in [indiscernible].

Our third center already has a construction company starting to work on it now in the third quarter. And we also completed the acquisition of 25% share in the fourth present -- in the fourth center in Jacksonville, Florida. This fourth center has the FDA approval for the collection of fresh plasma and also for the [indiscernible] plasmas and a higher concentration of antibodies for diseases like hepatitis and tetanus. And the idea is that we'll be able to expand the service as well to the other ventures in the company.

We also started prospecting the fifth and sixth centers for plasma collection with an expectation to open both of these next year. We are continuing this journey towards building capacity to reach 500,000 liters of plasma per year, and our ideas that will reach this amount per year, really in line with our strategic plans, and with our long-term vision in the company.

On Slide 8 of this presentation, we're going to talk about ESG. We continue to have an important focus on ESG and innovation respecting life, and trying to preserve the planet. This quarter was also the case, and we sponsored 2 really important projects. The construction of the Mundoteca library in Cotia, which carries out cultural activities, and it has over 400 books, providing access to reading opportunities for children and adolescents with disabilities. And we also sponsored the Blitz Alegria project in Anapolis where we helped train 30 professionals that take joy to the hospital Santa Casa de Misericordia.

In the environmental field, we also participated in a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And with the use of our fleet of electric vehicles, we were able to prevent 3.6 tons of CO2 was released in the atmosphere in the first half of '23. We also promoted the rational use of water at Blau with about 80% of our operation being supplied through wells that are appropriately licensed.

Finally, and for the first -- for the second consecutive year following the best governance practices, the company disclosed the main indicators and environmental initiatives in 2022. The report follows the international standards and it also reinforces our commitment to transparency ethics. And so the report is available in the CVM website and also on the company's website.

And moving on to Slide 9, we present the revenue in the period. And from this quarter onwards, we're going to be including also in our materials, the gross revenue vision. So we can have more visibility on the average tax rate of the -- and upon revenue. And in this quarter, they represent 7% of our gross revenue. So it's important to highlight also that from 2024 onwards, we will start to capture benefits of ICMS taxes related to the AP1000 plant. So the net revenue reached BRL 374 million with over 40% above the first quarter '23, driven mainly by the beginning of the commercialization of the drugs that were produced in this new plant, P210, and the performance of the launches that we -- of our products in the last few months.

So moving on to Slide 10. We also talk about the evolution of our gross profit and our EBITDA in this period. Our gross profit reached BRL 152 million with a margin of 42% during this period. And in the quarterly comparison, despite the evolution of our net revenue, the competitive pressure in the mature portfolio impacted the gross margin in the quarter. And in the annual comparison, in addition to the challenging competitive scenario, we had the allocation of [indiscernible] as well that were previously going through the company's expenses line. So that also impacted our expenses and margins when you have an annual comparison.

Our EBITDA added up to BRL 94 million in the quarter, 7 points higher than the first quarter, especially due to a dilution in the expenses during this period. When you have the annual comparison, we have a reduction of 7 percentage points reflecting the increase in expenses, which will be presented in more detail by Douglas on the next slide.

Now I'll pass the floor to our CFO, and he will continue with the presentation.

[Douglas Rodrigues, executive]

Thank you, Bruna. Good morning, everyone. So moving on to Slide 11. Here, we're going to mention our operational expenses. In this quarter, we had a level of BRL 65 million. And with our revenue getting back to BRL 364 million, this represented 18% of our operational expenses. It's important to mention when we look at the expenses that on the graph on the left side of the slide, we see this normalization. The company has mentioned during 2022, that during these quarters, we had reallocations, adjustments of provisions, and even as Bruna mentioned, the reclassification of [indiscernible]. So when you normalize this expense quarter-over-quarter, it's really clear to see how there's a change in this level of expenses compared to the revenue, which is basically associated with the new investments the company has been working on to promote new revenue generation sources, which is related to our collection centers abroad. Our international operations, our new headquarters here that gave us more room to expand the development of products in our headquarters in Cotia before our structures in the company, investments in technology. So this is the moment we're in. We're investing now. And this, of course, has some weight on our short-term expenses to promote our long-term results and bringing in these new sorts of revenue.

On the right side, you have the breakdown between commercial selling and R&D expenses. So R&D represented 12% in this quarter. Marcelo has already mentioned this. This is very much related to the Similis Bio investments and the monoclonal antibodies. What was considered in the results represented 3% of the sales. And what we should expect quarter-over-quarter from 2% to 3% of the revenue. And it can be a bit more, a bit less, depending on the product, depending on the stage of development of this product but this is what we should see impacting our results from 2 to 3 points to promote the development of these products. When it comes to commercial expenses for marketing, we did have an increase basically due to the variable expense issues and also related to these movements in our new affiliates.

But to date, it's already reached a level of 6% and what the company searches for for us always to have commercial expenses that are close to 5%. In regards to our administrative expenses, 9% of our revenue and we always try to be close to 8%, but the administrative expenses today also carry on investments. And a clear example that we can mention also now that we completed the closing at Bergamo is that ever since the prospecting and the closing of an M&A operation, the company incurs expenses to support these projects, and this is going to be allocated as expenses. And now from the second semester onwards, we start collecting the results of this integration with Bergamo. But during the other periods, this was considered to be part of our results.

When we move on to the next slide, Slide 12, when we talk about the net income. Our net income in the quarter was at the same level as the first quarter. And we had operational results that were better, which demonstrates that the company is getting back to our level of revenue, and we see a normal dilution, and we can, of course, lever the company's net revenue. So our net revenue was at the same level, mainly due to our financial results that were also smaller this quarter due to smaller interest revenue and currency variations. So it's important to highlight once again the efficiency of the tax planning processes. So the weight of the tax load is less than 20%, which, of course, promotes a very attractive net margin for the company.

Moving on to the next slide. We are going to talk about some of the company's balance sheet. So basically, we're talking about our working capital and CapEx. Our working capital is at the same level as the previous quarter, 60% of our revenue but has a lot more liquidity, we're able to reduce our stock levels in this quarter. Now we have 278 days. And it's important to mention that today, 10% of our stock is related to R&D products to support our new revenue generation sources in the company. And of course, with a greater level of sales, we also had a greater term for receivables in our portfolio at a higher level. We were able to once again advance in our average term per payment to suppliers. This is something that we've been working on constantly. We've been positioning ourselves with our suppliers, trying to have best negotiations, reducing costs or having better payment terms and the results are going to be seen, of course, in our next quarter.

CapEx basically, whatever is intangible is related to Similis Bio investments and our CapEx or fixed assets has, of course, the completion of our P210 and more investments as well to invest our capacity in plants and investments in our new in Uruguay and other projects related. So it's important to highlight, and you'll see this on our release and also in our statement that there is a reclassification for 20 million effect which is basically the tax credit that's in our fixed assets. And once the fixed assets are underway, we will just reclassify this for the tax group. But as soon as you reactivate this, you'll see that this starts being structured, and this becomes a positive credit for the company. So of course, this is important to mention as you see this in the release and also in our statement.

So moving on to the next slide, you can see our cash position and debt. Once again, the company is closing with a net cash position. So it's important to mention and highlight that the variation between the net cash in this quarter versus the previous quarter is basically related to the closing of Bergamo. And it's important to highlight that we invested $5 million in this acquisition which is basically going to appear in the second semester because we bought a position for net cash and we're disclosing at Bergamo.

But in the second quarter, what we did was that we had the payment of our debentures, the first debentures of the last 3 installments, and we started amortizing the second debentures, which are 5 annual installments. We paid the first one in the second quarter. Our net -- our gross debt is basically the 4 installments of our debenture, about BLR 50 million per year, a total of BLR 200 million. And our net cash of about is basically related to the closing of Bergamo and advances and partnerships with Similis Bio. So once again, we have a net cash position, and that's going to be reinforced with the Bergamo cash position that you'll see during the second semester onwards when we start consolidating Bergamo onto operations. This is a very robust cash position to handle our development program in the company. But of course, the company intends to reestablish cash and could maybe think about new alternatives that are feasible to reestablish cash position.

But for the presentation, we're going to stop here. And then we'll start with the Q&A session. And after Marcelo will come back to this final remarks. Thank you very much.

[Bruna Gamboa, executive]

Guys, starting off with our Q&A session here. I already have the first question from [ Felipe Manabe ]. [Operator Instructions].

[Unknown Analyst]

Hey, guys, good morning, everyone. Actually, we have 2 questions and they're both related to costs. So when you talk about costs, you mentioned pressure in our portfolio of the company that pressured the gross margin. Could you guys talk about what were the main segments where you see this pressure? And what are the main reasons behind it? And also for costs, you talk about how the company has been working on renegotiating with suppliers and this should have a positive effect in margins in the next quarters. Could you guys maybe talk about how this renegotiation has been taking place? And if besides the impacts in gross margins, how we should see this reflected in the working capital also? Thank you, guys.

[Marcelo Hahn, executive]

Well, thank you for the question. Yes. So I think that basically, today, the company has -- well, the company had a stock level that had a higher cost. Basically, we had the influence of the dollar and our foreign currency and the import and that was also an older cost. The company will now start renegotiating with suppliers. This stock will, of course, have a turn. And as it's reestablished at an average cost, we expect to have margin gains in the next quarters, and this is a constant exercise in the company.

So we're going to continue to work towards this to reflect possible pressure that we suffer at moments where we have more competition. The company has a very robust portfolio, and we can also, with Bergamo, increase and expand our competitive advantages and our negotiation power and purchase power in the market. That's normal, unexpected now when it comes to pressure. It's pretty normal. We always highlighted that we have our portfolio that's mature. And that's only where we have more competition, but the company also has been increasing quarter-over-quarter. It's a participation in these new products. So this brings in an increment capacity to lever it's margins.

[Bruna Gamboa, executive]

Our next question is from [ Gabriel Francia ] .

[Unknown Analyst]

I had 2 points here. Could you guys give us some light on this immunoglobulin market? I know you guys didn't disclose this, but could you talk about it a bit? And about the stock, what's the period, the validity period of these products?

[Marcelo Hahn, executive]

While the market is still pressured because of price, we still have a residual amount of products that don't have registrations in the market, and they have value that's below the market levels of those that are regulated from the health authorities. And we don't have a stock that's committed -- that's compromised by our validity period or we feel very comfortable watching the situation and our demands with our suppliers were updated. And daily, we've been lowering our stock. So this is our idea at the company level. And we expect that we'll get back to sales of immunoglobulin in the future, but the company has been reinventing itself launching new products.

And in this quarter, we've also showed that -- we have a level of revenue that's basically at the same level as last year. And we haven't increased our revenue for immunoglobulin, and we've increased our revenue with other products only. So these are the results.

[Douglas Rodrigues, executive]

And to add on to Marcelo's answer, when it comes to some public bids that people were discussing at the beginning of the year, we also don't have anything new to share. So today, it's a lot more about waiting to see what's coming up ahead.

[Bruna Gamboa, executive]

Our next question is from Ms. Estela Strano from JPMorgan.

[Estela Strano, analyst]

I have a question here on my side. You guys mentioned on the release that the new launches had about 9% or 10% of the revenue represented. And considering that this maturity curve of these product launches in the last 2 years, in addition to the new launches that are going to be accelerated in the next few years. How can we expect these new launches to represent the total amount of the revenue until the end of the year and next year?

[Marcelo Hahn, executive]

Well, we have a track record of having an average of 30% market share of the products we commercialize or trade. We have been disclosing a bit of the addressable market in products that are being launched, and we've been talking about the ramp-up. So we have been making it very transparent the possibility for growth in this segment. But, quarter-over-quarter, we also have been disclosing market share of the products that are launched with more and less time. So I think that with this, you can base yourself and have an idea what the future market is and the growth of the company as well.

When it comes to forecast Estela, what we always mention is that in the first 12 months after the launch of the product, they should reach about 7% and 10%. And it's been gaining 5% or 7% next year. So for modeling perspective, we also disclosed the best way would be to consider that you launch all of the products in the middle of the year because you have products that you launch in January, others that you launch in December. But with this information, you can have a pretty good proxy and any other questions also will be available to clarify within these calculations.

[Bruna Gamboa, executive]

Guys, next question comes from [ Wagner ] at [ Quantitas ].

[Unknown Analyst]

Has 2 questions here. If you guys could give us some updates on the alpha situation? And if you guys have any new points to share? And secondly, if you could understand a bit of your vision on specialties market and the situation with the distributors. In the beginning of the year, we remember that there were some interactions with you guys are a little more challenging. You had a lot of distributors that add financial distress. And in your vision when you look at the second semester, do you think this improved, worsened considering the price competition among customers? Just to give you an update on that.

[Marcelo Hahn, executive]

Well, thanks for the question. And when we look at the beginning of the year, as you mentioned, it was a first quarter, that was really complicated for the company and the market as a whole. We've seen more pressure in the market on the hospital segment, the detriment of the pharma market with retail. The first quarter was very complicated because all of the companies had -- were pretty much stocked up. And so we start off the year with a recession in the market and the distributors want to exchange the product by liquidity and cash, and so we see the prices drop and the difficulties in sales.

So we also see the medical insurance players having a challenge to approve the surgeries and have the reimbursements as well as renegotiating with hospitals. So we go through the second quarter with a recovery in normality, and we can launch many products, we can search for keeping the revenue, the idea the company had was to deliver more, but we still have this lever. If we had the possibility to meet all of our demand, we would basically reach an all-time high in revenue and -- but this is something that we have been growing geographically. We've been investing a lot in the development of new products. We've been expanding our productive capacity but, unfortunately, has not been in line with all of our needs. So we have challenges with our production plan. We also -- we added this first shift. These are very modern, automated equipment and finding people that are trained and prepared to work with this equipment and have the best performance.

It's not always easy -- and we're searching for this growth and this ramp-up that's sustainable. And if we think out of the next quarters, we'll have better results, and we're searching for this. Although, of course, we go back to saying that we have more demand than we can actually offer. And yes, we have to be reinvented. The market is very competitive, but with the product launches -- the new product launches, we have some that are like market niche products that don't have so much competition, very few production plants that can produce locally. And then, of course, this helps us have better margins.

So specifically talking about specialties, when you look at the second quarter now with a new production plant, the P210, we were already able to unleash some important bottlenecks in this unit. So although we haven't disclosed the revenue per unit, you can have some good ideas of how this is a unit that has been recovering and P210 was, well P210 and the new launches gained more strength in this ramp-up process, and they've been helping us to get back to levels that are higher in our business units.

[Unknown Analyst]

So what about Alpha?

[Marcelo Hahn, executive]

Well, we have a contract with the Ministry of Health, and we've been working on the deliveries that have been planned and we're following the schedule provided by the Ministry. We have planned deliveries till the end of the year and the beginning of 2024. And normally, we have the bid notice that's published for the new public bids more towards September. So we currently don't have any signs that are so clear about this, but it could be that we'll have news in the next weeks or months.

[Bruna Gamboa, executive]

Since we do not have any more questions in the queue, I'll pass the floor back to Marcelo for our final remarks.

[Marcelo Hahn, executive]

Hey guys, before we finish, I just want to thank you all for participating in our earnings call and that are really trusting our growth trajectory in the last slide. I really want to highlight our daily focus on executing our long-term strategic plan. Since we started Blau, we have been keeping innovation at our DNA, driving our transformation and growth over these more than 35 years of history. All of our initiatives are really aimed towards providing more health and quality of life for a greater number of people.

After our IPO, we performed a strategic plan with our directors and defined a new purpose for the company's new vision and guidelines. Since then, we started some important steps in line with our strategic pillars of growth. Part of these initiatives also began to generate results in the short term such as the expansion of productive capacity from the new P210 plant and productivity gains in other plants, incrementing our portfolios and these growing launches, the first plasma collection center reaching a breakeven. And all of this represented 6% of our revenue in the company. And from July onwards, we started the integration with Bergamo.

We're really happy with these achievements, and we're confident that we're on the right path. We know that there's still a lot to do, however. So we have these important projects, transformation and execution that will generate results in the long term and that will position Blau at a whole another level as a company such as the Pernambuco complex, which beginning expected for 2016 with a partnership with Similis Bio. We will be focused on the execution of our strategic plan without distractions and building this new future with the certainty that we're just starting. Thank you very much, everyone.

[Bruna Gamboa, executive]

Now we officially end our earnings call. If you have any additional questions, our IR team will be available. Thank you, everyone, and have a great day.

[Marcelo Hahn, executive]

Bye, goodbye. Thank you.