Eurofins Scientific SE

PAR:ERF

Earnings Call Transcript 2019-Q1

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the Eurofins Scientific Q1 2019 Management Update Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded.And at this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Gilles Martin, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Good day, everybody, and thanks for joining our quarterly conference call. Once again, Eurofins have had -- had very strong growth in Q1. A large part of it, of course, due to the many acquisitions, the exceptional level of acquisitions we did in 2018. We're also in the 27% total growth of about 2% FX benefit, which is linked to our investments in the -- mainly, to our investments over the last few years in North America. So we invested a lot since 2011 in the United States, where the -- at times, where the dollar was less strong against the euro than it is today. So we're benefiting from that today.Otherwise, if we accept the effect of calendar days, which is low in Q1 and will normalize back by the end of Q3, the total [ year of ] 251 days of -- in our -- in the mix of our businesses and countries.In 2018, like 2017, that effect were in line with our objective of about 5% organic growth. The company is mainly continuing to build its infrastructure. We are making good progress to finalizing our -- the almost doubling in size of our large campuses in Hamburg and in Lancaster. Those -- in Pennsylvania. Those of you who will join our Investor's event this year and can see the development of our pretty impressive campuses. And I think they will be very well received by our clients and they should enable us to have even more economies of scale in our activities. Overall, we are growing fast in some regions of the world, like Asia, is growing even faster. We are too small in Asia, but this is beyond 2020, one of the areas where we intend to grow more significantly. It took us about 7, 8 years to almost rebalance Western Europe with North America. As you can see, Western Europe is still 48% and that's mainly because in Western Europe, we have some routine clinical testing, in France mainly, which is not necessarily the focus of our growth in clinical testing because we are focused mainly on esoteric testing and genomic -- genetic testing. We had that for market entry in France. But if we accept that, we are slowly going to be on a par in terms of size between Europe and North America. Of course, rest of the world at 15% is lagging far behind. Long term, we could target about 1/3 in each of those main regions. There's lots of growth potential in Asia. The markets for what we do, which is very advanced testing of food, environments, household products mainly, are less developed in Asia and the emerging markets than in the Western world, but the size of the -- of those markets in total are growing very fast and, therefore, we see they are very big opportunities. But we are committed by 2022 to continue building the house, and we should be there by then, not only many large campuses, moving or less efficient, more diversified labs into either local labs that carry out only the time-critical assays or to specialize their production centers or moving the esoteric assay to our competent centers. This is something we should complete by the end of 2020. We are also starting to make good progress in the deployment of our IT solutions, especially in biopharma. We have started the deployment. Of course, it's creating a lot of bottlenecks at the beginning because we have to enter thousands of tests and the breakdown of thousands of tests and plant-specific tests in our systems. It's costing us resources in this implementation phase and timing from staff, but in the long run, we see very nice efficiency increases due to that.So overall, not so much to report. Yesterday, we had our Annual General Assembly, and we decided to change auditors. The reason was that we had some critics last year that our previous auditors had been there for very long. We were very happy working Pricewaterhouse and they were happy with us, but nonetheless, we listened to what the market participants tell us, so we decided to make a chance -- a change. I hope it will make everybody happy. Although, we had really no complaints with Pricewaterhouse. Otherwise, we're also focusing on innovation. And we're starting to release some new testing in clinical diagnostics like the Y chromosome test, preparatory test that we launched in New York State this last quarter, which now we're going to push for the commercialization.So no, nothing really exceptional or strange, except Boston Heart, which was, of course, a disappointment of the all the acquisitions that we did. This is a specialized company focused on developing a specific offering to help doctors detect the risks of cardiovascular disease earlier than like the routine test. Unfortunately, in the current reimbursement environment in the U.S., there is very strong limitation of reimbursement for genetic test or for esoteric test generally, which has been hurting this company significantly. It was down 30% sequentially and 50% year-on-year in Q1. And we feel this will continue during the rest of 2019, which, of course, makes this company very small and almost negligible now, below 1% for the whole group. In that sense, it won't hurt us forever. It is unfortunate. Other of our investments have done much better in this clinical space, like our company Viracor, focused on transplant of patients. So that's maybe the main thing to report. Otherwise, we are continuing to carry out our plan, build out our lab network, building the efficiencies, and we are confident that this will lead to significantly increased cash flows and profits beyond 2020.That's it for my introduction. And now I will turn the microphone over to you for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question here.

[Unknown Analyst]

Can you hear me?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Yes.

[Unknown Analyst]

Just a few from me, please. You mentioned that France Clinical Diagnostics continued to decline in 1Q. Would you be able to quantify the impact of that, please?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

No. The impact is not significant. We mentioned that the -- of course, compared to our group growth target of 5%, it is significantly below. France Clinical Diagnostics is in a range the last couple of years of minus 1.5% to plus 1.5%. That was the range we have for that business.

[Unknown Analyst]

Understood. And last year, I think we know clinical in France declined quite sharply in Q4. But in Q1 to Q3 was it in the range that you have specified, minus 1.5% to plus 1.5%?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Yes, yes. There is in France each year a cut -- a normal cut of reimbursement in the beginning of April. So once a year and then it...

[Unknown Analyst]

I see. If you can...

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

That cut drags on for the full year and is normally compensated by volume increase as the year goes by.

[Unknown Analyst]

Got it. And given this drag on clinic -- from clinicals, can you talk about potential margin drag as well? And how that's going to reflect -- go ahead.

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Actually, this business is quite profitable. So it doesn't create a margin drag. I think actually -- it has a higher margin than the rest of our group margin. And we can improve it -- we continue to improve it. And expect for Boston Heart, of course, which is a serious problem, which is hitting both our top line significantly and our bottom line.

[Operator]

And we'll take our next question.

[Edward Stanley, Equity Analyst]

It's Ed at Morgan Stanley. I got 3 quick ones, please. On Boston Heart, last time you -- we had a conference call you said that it wasn't necessary to take an impairment because it was all bundled into goodwill, and you -- the clinical goodwill is all bundled together anyway. I'm just wondering if it's not a sign that an impairment was pretty seriously considered for that businesses that's going down 50% year-on-year.

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

You want to ask your 3 questions together or...

[Edward Stanley, Equity Analyst]

Yes. I can. So on the working day effect as well. As I understand it, you're vastly and predominantly B2B businesses, but the scale of the working day impact suggests that you might have quite a lot of B2C elements because when I understand from the other testing businesses, it's really the B2C kind of spot testing that really gets disrupted by working days. So I'm a bit confused about that. And secondly -- or thirdly, the -- I just wanted to understand the chain of events on the auditor. You say, on the AGM resolutions, on your website, on the 25th of March, that the Board of Directors was happy with PwC and sticking with them and then 2 weeks later, on the 10th of April, that got replaced and edited to say Deloitte in that 2-week period. It was the shareholders pushing back? Or what changed? Because it originally sounded like the Board of Directors was very happy, and then something changed behind the scenes in that 2-week period.

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Thank you very much. To your first question on Boston Heart, there's no change. It's still part of our overall clinical business. We have no reason to make a specific impairment at this date. And on the working days effect, it's very simple. Our labs work and they only work during public days. And when there is a public day, we can produce, and we can build and when the people are at home for some reason, we don't produce. While we pay people on a monthly basis or bimonthly in the U.S., twice a month, independently of the number of working days, it is averaged out. So basically that's why we have this working days effect. Of course, the working days -- numbers of working days are different in each country. In the first quarter in Germany, we had exactly the same number of working days than last year. In the U.S., it was different and, et cetera. So depending on each company, depending on the mix of where the revenues are, it might be a slightly different average. And as to the auditor, we started a call for offer with different auditors, and it just took a little bit too long to finalize it. So it wasn't finished the call for offer when we sent the invitation for the Annual Meeting. We're quite happy with PwC. There's no -- we had no complaints. The only reason we changed is that apparently some market participants thought that we have been too long with PwC. I don't think so. But frankly, if that's what it takes to make people happy, we change. That's no problem.

[Edward Stanley, Equity Analyst]

Okay. And very quickly following on from that. The -- when you said at the full year results in your presentation that certain geographies like Luxembourg would be taken over by PwC, that is still happening as a subsidiary level? This is just Deloitte taking over at a parent level?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Well, you have to differentiate the closing of 2018. So 2018, we had 2 things -- or each year, we have 2 things. We have the audit of the parent company accounts, which includes the audit or review of the local [ auditors ] work for the local company. And then in addition to that, which all companies do is, at Eurofins, we ask -- in addition something that we don't have to do is the full legal audit, statutory audit of all our companies or substantially all our companies. And that is done by sometime different auditors, sometimes the same auditors. But Laurent Lebras can give you more detail if you want.

[Laurent Lebras, Group Administration & Finance Director]

Yes. I mean, concerning the change we announced on the luxury companies, which audited for the 2018 accounts by PwC, in 2019, this will be taken over by Deloitte.

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

And the statutory audits are completed weeks later. Some of them are completed in April or something like that.

[Operator]

We can move to the next question.

[William Kirkness, Equity Analyst]

It's Will Kirkness from Jefferies. I've got 2 questions, please. Firstly, just wondering if you could give us the -- you talked about the great things in North America and how food environmental is doing, including the recent acquisitions of Covance and TestAmerica. But I just wondered if you could explicitly let us know how Covance and TestAmerica are growing. And the second one just on acquisitions. I think from the sort of stage when you reported your prelims, that had about EUR 20 million or so of acquired revenues. Just wondered if there is anything else that's happened and how that's trending. Obviously, we knew that you'd be converting less, but still targeting, I think, EUR 200 million, so if you could just perhaps talk about the outlook for M&A and where you are year-to-date?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

On the M&A, so as we mentioned, we had quite a good growth in the United States in food testing, including Covance and the -- and Eurofins. We are of course starting to integrate the businesses. So the borders and the frontiers are becoming more difficult to redefine or to doing equivalence of different businesses, some food testing, some food innovation and design, which is happening. Companies design new food product. This is an activity that is smaller, and that we might not even expand as the previous management of Covance wanted. So it's several different companies. Overall, the integration is going well. We are building a new laboratory in Madison to move Covance. There will be some disruption at Covance because we are in the process of extracting that lab from the LabCorp and Covance IT solutions. It's very, very heavy work to move a real-time business to a new set of servers new set of actual solutions. This will go on by -- until the end of June, beginning of July. So we have some disruption there. And then we have to move out of the site that used to belong to the corporate Covance, so that do belong to corporate Covance. And that will be essentially completed by the end of this year in the U.K. and Singapore and will be completed in the beginning of 2021 for all of the U.S. sites, with some U.S. sites having moved before that. But that's also causing a bit of effort and disruption. For TestAmerica, the company is doing well. I don't have details. It's more isolated now because it was a separate company, fairly large. So we haven't done so much integration yet. This will start probably in the later part of this year for some time. Here what we are going to do is bring together some of Eurofins existing sites together with some of TestAmerica existing site, but we haven't changed anything in terms of IT solutions, IT systems because we -- in both the companies with data centers and servers, so the integration on the IT side is -- will be -- will take place later. So there is no specific disruption on this one. And on the acquisitions, I think not very much maybe since the ones we mentioned in January or February or with our accounts. We added a few smaller companies that are all below the level, like EUR 2 million, EUR 6 million, below the level that we'd normally report. We might -- our companies locally might have done some local press release. But we're on track for the -- I think about EUR 200 million of revenues throughout -- by the end of this year. That's what we are aiming for. Although, it's hard to plan. Of course, it depends on what we find, how the locations end up. We're very selective. We have thoughts on a couple of acquisitions that we think -- who were either too expensive or where we could build the lab ourselves and incur less cost. So we are -- of course, as we planned, we're a bit more conservative on that.

[Operator]

And we will take our next question.

[Aymeric Poulain, Head of Support Services Research]

It's Aymeric Poulain from Kepler. I've got a follow-up question on the M&A contribution to organic growth in this quarter. You -- 3.6% organic growth. What would it have been without the contribution of the entire acquisition? I mean, you mentioned double-digit growth in food testing, including Covance, so it can be quite material. So just to get a sense of the contribution of M&A versus the historic core of Eurofins. And also given the integration what you mentioned and the timetable, do you have a quantification of the negative drag to organic growth that this integration could create in the coming quarter? And finally, given the importance of Clinical Diagnostic in the portfolio and the drag it creates on the organic growth, I was wondering if you had a view on when the pipeline of more innovative tests would start contributing more materially to the gross profile of that unit. And if you -- when you think you'll be able to produce a kind of pipeline to get a sense of the innovative tests that could move the needles in the foreseeable future?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Right. So this is permanent question on impacts of M&A on organic growth. We spent days to write a long answer, when was that? Last year. And we did 5 calculations or 3 calculations of organic growth in all kind of ways to response to, I think, Morgan Stanley note. And when we do that -- we're not going to do that every quarter. We did it for the full year. We can do it this year again for the full year if you want. But the general thing is the acquisitions that we've done in the last 12 to 24 months are generally a drag to organic growth because -- yes, we do work to integrate them. We have disruption, we have site moves, we have things like that. And after a while then when things get integrated, they grow basically like the rest of our group. So that's what we have always said about our acquisitions. So acquisitions, not only do they cause some time reorganization costs, one-off costs, et cetera, but also they have a negative impact -- a small negative impact from our overall organic growth. As to Clinical Diagnostics, I think we communicated that we will -- we should start to see some benefit in France from the reimbursement of noninvasive prenatal testing, which should happen this year and next year in Germany. And the test we announced in the U.S. and we're working on, we think we launched them, the first one. And this is something, of course, we have to sell it to introduce it to the market, et cetera. So we think 2020, 2021, we should see some benefits of that and other things we have in our pipeline. Actually we have a few nice things in our pipeline, which could be very nice surprises if they work out.

[Operator]

And we will take our next question.

[Thomas Edward Burlton]

It's Tom Burlton here from Berenberg. Thanks for taking my questions. A few of them have already been answered, so it's more a point of clarification, see. Working day movement is slightly confusing, but it sounds like Q2, there'll still be a slight drag; Q3, there'll be probably a little bit of a benefit. And by then, if net neutral, say, does that mean that the 3.6% you reported today we should expect by H2 that would be back above the 5% heading into the year-end? And then just again, a clarification around Boston Heart, you sounded like, if I remember from the full year results, most of that issue or headwind manifested in the second half. So why are we anticipating that, that headwind will probably ease or annualize heading into second half? But it sounds here like you've mentioned that you expect that 50% year-on-year decline experience in Q1 to continue through the year. So how do you see that business ending up by year-end if we ended FY '18 at EUR 50 million of revenues? Where might that get to by the end of '19, please?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Sure. Yes, so working days, I can give you the exact number if you're interested, but it's -- we got a drag of about 1.2% in Q1, a drag of 0.2% in Q2, a plus of about 1.2% in Q3, and a flat same number of days in Q4, meaning that for the year, it should even out and it should start even evening out this impact by the end of Q3. Of course, the working days, they apply -- there is a small seasonality effect too because Q4 is the strongest quarter, but it just happens that Q4 has the same number of days this year, so we shouldn't have a compounding of seasonality and working days in Q4. So that's for the working days, then for Boston Heart, yes, we -- I mean, we were mostly hit in a bigger way in Q4 of last year at Boston Heart because of change in regulations, also about how we can sell those tests and approach the markets that combine with an insurance's decision about coverage. So the first 3 quarters will -- of this year will continue to have that effect. We still have a small sequential drop from Q4 of last year to Q1 of this year. Now we're talking of much smaller numbers and so the impact on the whole group will be -- of that sequential drag if it continues, will not be all that big.

[Operator]

And we'll take our next question on the call...

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

So next year, though...

[Operator]

Go ahead.

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Sorry. And I was again, and then the company will become very small and it's going to be a sub-40 million company, between the EUR 30 million and EUR 40 million. So of course, we think that the tests we're working on which are very preventative and the way we'll market them maybe more to self-pay patients or people who really want to do something good for their health before they get sick. It's, of course, somewhat a refocusing of the company, which in that -- at some point will lead to some positive impact. But even if it doesn't happen, if we end up with a EUR 30 million or EUR 40 million company, it's not going to be very impactful on the overall -- and whatever happens won't be very impactful on the whole company.

[Operator]

And we'll take our next question.

[Unknown Analyst]

Hello, hello?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Yes, we can hear you.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes, so -- yes. I have 1 question regarding North America. You say in the press release that food is close to double-digit growth, environment over 5% [indiscernible] trailing in Q4, but all in all, the growth of North America is below the average, which was not the case in Q4. So my question is regarding Pharma. Of course, it been impacted by bottom-ups, but in the same way that in Q4. So does it mean that you -- all the segments of the Pharma division in U.S. are impacted by price pressure?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

No, no. Yes, the main impact is for 1 quarter that's very significant in part of Boston Heart, which is about minus -- almost minus [ 50 ]% compared to Q1 of last year. Pharma is slightly affected by the introduction of our IT innovative solutions, which create a bit of a bottleneck and maybe some slight contract shifting. And sometimes, we have big contracts and sometimes they end and they have to be replaced. There might be a bit of that impact in Pharma in the U.S., but not in other parts of the world, actually.

[Unknown Analyst]

If you look at North America, what is the split between those 3 division? Do you have an idea?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Sorry?

[Unknown Analyst]

Is there a sales split in North America between food, Pharma and environment?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

The revenue split, you mean?

[Unknown Analyst]

Sales -- the split of sales around what is the weight of pharma, food and environment in the sales in U.S.?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Well, we'd have to look, but Pharma is by far the biggest because we have several business lines in Pharma. We have the biopharma product testing, we have CVMO, we have central lab, we have discovery, we also have genomics in the U.S. That's a lot of Pharma businesses, I would say that's probably -- of our U.S. business, more than the overall group representation, maybe more than 40%. I would have to look at the number. Then we have environment up [ $200 ] million; food also, with less than that maybe. So yes, I'd say Pharma is the biggest, followed by Environment, then Food and then Clinical.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay, so it means that Boston is something like 6% of the Pharma business, so it has such an impact at the level of the Pharma business to put the organic growth in North America below 5% when food and environment are above 5%?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

I guess so. It's a math that works. But I don't know exactly what the numbers are. It's an impact of EUR 5 million throughout that company. I will pick up the numbers. Yes, it's an impact of EUR 8 million just in 1 quarter for that company, more than EUR 8 million. And so of course, you're looking at 1 quarter, so EUR 8 million in 1 quarter is significant.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes, but year-on-year, you can expect it the same amount for the next quarter than Q4?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Not exactly the same amount, maybe percentage-wise because the company has been slightly declining, but it will be an impact, a significant impact for the -- basically, more or less the same impact for the year. So if we had a drag of 0.7% or 0.8% from Boston Heart in Q1, you can assume that's going to be the impact for the year, and that is the best guess for what will happen.

[Operator]

And we'll take our next question.

[Nicolas Tabor, Analyst]

Nicolas Tabor from MainFirst. I had 3 questions. First on the non-invasive prenatal testing, I wanted to know what is the weight currently in Western Europe of this activity in your Clinical Diagnostics? And what is the weight you expect and then with this to reach in Germany and in France once the reimbursement starts to kick in, in 2019 and 2020? In addition to these in Clinical Diagnostics, you said that some of the business, as they are not niche, they do not correspond exactly to the strategy. Would you consider divesting some of them? Even the same for Boston Heart Diagnostics, is that not a growing business anymore and then as attractive? Third question, can we also expect the lean deployment to have a drag on the next quarter? As you said, if I remember correctly, that you had 50% of the lea deployed last year and that we should expect the remaining to be done this year?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

All right. So NIPT, it's hard to say. I think we might have EUR 50 million -- between EUR 40 million and EUR 50 million in Europe in that segment. It's very hard to guess how fast and how big this will grow. We also have some proprietary tests that could be very powerful and that are much less expensive than what is being done right now. This will also depend on adoption and the registration of those tests. So the current normal NIPT price, let's say, is around EUR 300. We assess that we can sell below EUR 100. That covers, at the moment, 1 [indiscernible], and we are trying to expend to 3 [indiscernible]. And of course they have to -- depending on the country, there is different level or different processes for getting them approved and reimbursed. It's a little bit hard to predict. We prefer not to predict too much, especially when it's due to things that are not under our control, like regulatory approval. We haven't decided to divest anything, but as we mentioned before, we're not -- we don't have a taboo against anything like that. We'll evaluate things every year, every quarter depending on what we think makes sense. In Clinical Diagnostics, we want to have a distribution. We want to have market access in as many markets as possible. So we can sell there our esoteric test, which is doing, actually, quite well in some markets, for NIPT, for example, not yet for other things, unfortunately. And so, yes, we could consider divesting things if they don't -- they are not necessary for that objective, but we have not considered -- decided to do that, and we might never do it. Because those things are quite profitable, generate good cash flow with low CapEx, they are not a bad thing to own. Now okay, another owner might put a lot of money on it, which we think if somebody else thinks they are worth much, much more than we think, okay, that's always another reason to maybe look at it. In terms of lean deployment, this will go on for, like, for the next -- at least the next 2 years. And this had been going on before in different places where we do it. But when we say our objective is 5% organic growth, we take that into account.

[Operator]

And we'll take our next question.

[Allen David Wells, Research Analyst]

It's Allen Wells from Exane. And just a couple from me. And maybe just a general comment. [indiscernible] that the narrative on the regions and you provided some, obviously, some good color around food environment in the regions. And maybe just [indiscernible] together, try to get a thorough -- is it not just the [indiscernible] so the funding environment probably has slightly stronger start to the year than one might have expected, whereas maybe Pharma was maybe on the line to be slightly below or maybe slightly more impacted by the reorganization and maybe Clinical Diagnostics [ is weaker ]. Is that sort of the reflection of the 3 or 4 divisions starting in Q1? And then the second question, just on the working [indiscernible] just maybe just some clarity. The margin impact from that [indiscernible] won't recover until the third quarter. Should we [indiscernible] perhaps to remain on sort of level of margin impacting in the first half, so we don't get sort of called out by that when you report at the half year level?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

Thank you very much. Yes, I couldn't hear. There was some noise on the line, I couldn't hear everything you said. But I think, yes, it's probably right. I think we had a strong start in food and environment overall. Diagnostic is a drag and it didn't do very well with, I think close to the euro or around that range. I mentioned minus 1.5, plus 1.5, probably between 0 and 1, I guess. And at Pharma, it was a little bit softer because of what we mentioned in Q1 than last year. That can change during the year, it's not a trend or anything. And yes, the working day impact translates one-to-one to the bottom line because all costs are a little bit proportional to working days, so the variable cost. The fixed costs are fixed, now independent on the number of working days. And in the meantime, the answer for the previous question, so North America in Q1 was EUR 384.6 million revenues. And so the drop of Boston Heart has an impact of more than 2% on the growth of that barometer, which is substantial.

[Operator]

And we'll take our next question.

[Christophe-Raphael Ganet]

Christophe Ganet from ODDO. Maybe 2 questions, if I may. First, by region, would you see any reason to see some improvement in the next quarter in specific regions for, I don't know, new tenders, new contracts or anything regarding prices? That's the first question. Second relates to your opening of lab program by '19 and '20. Can you update us on what is still to be done in terms of openings for the rest of 2019 and 2020? And last question regarding Covance and TestAmerica. So when should we think or when should we -- where should we locate the pitch of cost of restructuring for Covance on one side and for TestAmerica on the other side, so we know the change? When should we see the highest levels of nonrecurring items for reorganization for Covance and TestAmerica?

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

A lot of things will happen in the next few quarters. Yes, we are winning big contracted there or we have -- we're raising our prices every year but I can't pinpoint 1 specific thing that many things could happen but want to -- we've become bigger now. It's almost the first time we had a EUR 1 billion quarter. From EUR 1 billion of revenues, it has to be on a quarterly basis, it has to be a pretty big thing to move the needle. So opening of labs, well, we have slowed down significantly. I mean, we have some labs that were just started to be opened last year, which, of course, will be -- will get their first accreditation maybe in 2020. New projects will be very few. I think we had 12 last year. This year and 2020, we'll have maybe a handful of new projects in each year. That's where we're focusing basically for the next 3 years, to make what we have work, to make acquisitions where they really make eminent strategic sense, not because they are nice to have, but because they make one of our countries or divisions much stronger. We will actually -- and what we did in the first quarter, yes, they were mainly strengthening our existing businesses in countries where we are already. And to the other question regarding Covance and TestAmerica. In Covance, we have quite a lot of cost at the beginning because we have what is called a TSA. It's basically a support agreement with the seller. Until Covance is moving on Eurofins systems and also in Eurofins facilities, we're paying fairly high transition fees to Covance for the use of their facilities and system. So we believe we will be out of the systems cost by the end of July, but we still bear the cost of the facilities, which are quite high until the end of, basically -- for some facilities end of this year, for other facilities, until mid-2021. Reorganizations, we'll have a little bit this year. We had a bit last year. They won't be so massive cost and anything with on those facilities things, the bulk of it will be done this year. On TestAmerica, we haven't done much yet because we bought the company at the back end of last year. So there's not -- we didn't have time to do so much. And that will be spread probably over the next 5 years or as we -- as the leases end on some of the sites of TestAmerica, et cetera, we might [ do good ] things. So it will be not huge, but spread over a longer time.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And at this time, it appears that we do not have any more phone questions.

[Gilles G. Martin, Chairman of the Board & CEO]

All right. Well, thank you very much, everybody, for joining our quarterly call. We'll be happy to follow up with you at various investor conferences in May in London mainly, and to see some of you at our Investor Days in the fall at Lancaster in Pennsylvania and in Hamburg. As I said, the company is plodding along, continuing to do what it's planning to do for the next 2 years, finalizing the expansion of our large campuses and the deployment of our local satellites where we do the time-critical assays. And we've entered in new countries in the last few years. We're seeing good growth, very good growth, from our startup program in India and China, for example. It's still small compared to the overall size of the group, but it's very encouraging. Actually, Brazil has started to pick up. It's a really -- we hit the bottom probably sometime last year or backend of '17. There's a lot of good things on the horizon, but still a lot of work. So thanks a lot to all of you who are supporting us and spending time trying to understand what we do. It's a bit boring. It's takes a long time to execute that, but we believe we are building formidable competitive advantages in our markets, and we see it in more and more markets, that our market position is very much appreciated by clients. And when we compare like for like with competitors in the same country, we are doing much better. So that's it for now and thank you very much, and have a nice evening or nice day.

[Laurent Lebras, Group Administration & Finance Director]

Goodbye.

[Operator]

And this concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.