Thank you all for joining and welcome to ChemoMetec's conference call. Today, CEO Martin Helbo and CFO Philip Mathiesen Price will take you through this year's annual report, followed by Q&A where you can type in questions, and then I will read them out loud.

Let's get started. Over to you, Martin.

Yes, thank you, everyone, and welcome to this conference call. Today, I have with me our new CFO, Philip, who will give a short presentation here at first.

Also I want you to basically give us a little bit feedback on this new setup. We have had a lot of feedback from investors on previous conference calls, today we're trying something new and hope you will provide us with some feedback afterwards.

Over to you, Philip.

Thank you, Martin. Just a few words from my side, as this is my first earnings call here at ChemoMetec.

I joined the company in August as the CFO, I've now been here for a little more than a month now. I can tell that it's been a busy start, but also a great opportunity to get to know the company and the organization.

I really look forward to the journey ahead. With that, let's turn to the financial performance for the fiscal year 2025/2026.

All numbers I refer to will be in Danish krone. Revenue for the year came in at 511 million, which is equivalent to 3% growth compared to last year, or 7% at constant exchange rates.

EBITDA ended at 281 million, 9% growth compared to the year before, and our EBITDA margin increased from 52.1% to 55%, equivalent to 2.9 percentage point increase, which is mainly explained by the increase in revenue, improved profitability, and a reduction in staff cost. Looking across our product categories, the main growth driver for the year was our instrument sales.

Our instrument revenue went up with 13% compared to the year before, which was mainly driven by our sales of XM products, including NC-203, that increased from 27.7 million last year to 68.1 million this year. Our service revenue increased by 4%, and consumables declined by 4%.

The decline in consumables is mainly explained by the US federal government shutdown in the fall of 2025, during which several of our largest customers saw a decline in number of patients treated. Looking at the geographical development, US and Canada, our largest market, decreased by 6% in reported terms, however increased slightly by 1% at constant exchange levels.

Europe increased by 14%, while we saw growth of 21% in the rest of the world. Looking at our two business areas, Life Science continued to grow, with revenue increasing by 6% to approximately 485 million, and is now representing 95% of group revenue.

Our animal semen, beer, and milk declined by 32% to approximately 26 million, reflecting our continued exit from this market. Looking specifically at Life Science, it's worth noting that the reported growth does not fully reflect the underlying development in our core business.

During the year, we were impacted by lower activity among some of our largest US customers, including the effects from the US government shutdown, as well as some larger players leaving the market. This naturally had an impact on our consumable sales in short term.

Finally, also reminding the negative FX impact, as mentioned earlier, the underlying growth is more around double digits for this area. We ended the year with a strong balance sheet, cash position of around 290 million, equity of approximately 725 million, and during the year, we invested around 100 million in growth initiatives, including software, automation, product development, and our facilities here in Allerød.

Finally, our ongoing share buyback program, we've repurchased 105,000 shares at year-end, equivalent to approximately 39 million. As of today, we have repurchased around 206,600 shares, equivalent to 1.2% of the share capital.

Thank you, Philip. Once again, a record year, and as I'll walk you through here, hopefully also a record year next year.

First, I'll walk you through the market conditions, then our products and product launch, then at last product development, before Philip will take you through our guidance. Here at first, market conditions, still really exciting to see all these approved CAR-T cell therapies doing well.

Mainly, we still see growth, and you can though see here that some cell therapies are struggling a little bit, and the one of course doing best is is heavily our customer. Again, it has been a year with less-treated patients, and of course that is also affecting our consumables.

Overall, we do see some recovery in the field. If you look at this chart, you can see that it starts looking better.

Also when you're in the field talking to customers, actually seeing what's happening, it's easy to see that the flow is definitely getting better. Also, we reported at the year-end that it starts—we start to see more demand from our customers, and of course that has something to do with the market.

If you look in the startup environment, which is important to us, we start to see some recovery, and that is of course crucial because many of our customers are still in preclinical, Phase 1, and Phase 2. Of course, this is an area which is very important for us.

We keep investing, specifically at incubator sites where we are very well represented with our instruments. Incubators, for those who doesn't know that, is where usually you have shared labs, you'll have early startups, maybe professor and and an assistant who are doing some exciting work.

They will be then testing a lot, doing a lot of research, and then adding our instrumentation into their SOPs. We have been investing a lot, made sure that when this market is recovering, we have a lot of our products written in their SOPs.

Also something interesting is the layoff tracker. I think when I traveled around a couple of years ago, we spoke to customers and started to see a lot of empty spaces in Cambridge, for example.

We saw a lot of layoffs, which also later meant that, of course, with fewer people, they do less sampling, also means less testing, and and in the end less sales from us—for us. Here, I think this is very positive.

Also, when we're in the field, we start seeing customers hiring. We start seeing less empty spaces.

If you move into the incubator space, you actually have everything occupied by now, very, very interesting and very good news for the whole industry. As Philip just said, we had some, I will say, it was pretty rocky back in November, and you can also see here with the cutting of NIH funding, we saw some clinical trials getting canceled, and since we have a decent share of the market, of course we get hit as well.

Majorly, we also saw some of the largest companies out there, Novo Nordisk, Galapagos, Takeda, actually exiting the market, and of course that is hurting ChemoMetec's revenue as well. Overall, though, we are seeing a recovery, a pretty decent recovery.

Again, I think if we move on to the next slide, you can basically see the growth of this company. We only have 45 approvals, and if you look at this charge—chart, yeah, the sky is the limit, and of course as we're seeing more approvals in cell and gene therapy, specifically, of course we will grow with that, but also of course we have the exciting opportunity for bioprocessing in the future, which I'll come back to.

If we move on to the products, we are now talking a lot about XcytoMatic and NC-203, and that's mainly because it is the future of this company. We have spent so much time in the field validating the 40, the 30, and the 203, and I will say I think many of you have by now read a lot of articles and interviews about our XM30 and XM40, and the feedback is amazing.

The 203 is also very exciting for us since we have, of course, announced the discontinuation of the 200, so many customers who were used to the flow of the cassette-based instrument will basically place the 200 with the 203, but also many of them are looking now into automating some processes with the 30, it actually will be a combination of the 203 and XM30, I believe, in the future for cell therapy. Again, it was a record year for XcytoMatic, and I remember I think it was just a year ago, I had many investors asking, "Can you even sell this product?

Is it is it is it even good?" I think these numbers testifying that it's not only ChemoMetec now saying this product is is sellable, a lot of customers, feedback, interviews, you've seen it all, they love this product.

Hopefully, of course, in the future, we'll start seeing ChemoMetec to expand even more in this area. As we're also reporting that's basically we expect most of our instrument revenue coming from XcytoMatic in the future.

For the Q4 specifically, if you include NC-203, we have a record quarter again, 17.7 million, and of course most of that revenue—not of course, but most of that revenue actually happened in June. What we started to see with the discontinuation, also with the market improvement and automation, we saw a lot of demand, and again, we mainly had more than 50% of our instrument sales coming from this area, we are very looking forward to the future.

Again here, some extra numbers. Of course, the growth explains itself, and we have, of course, big hope for the new year.

Mainly the trend which happened in June and Q4 is something we expect to continue into next year, current year, and the key drivers are basically the replacement of the 200. We have sold thousands of NC-200, so many customers, they have to now basically start replacing, which means, first of all, they need to make sure they can produce for the next three years with NC-200, we are seeing some last-time buys, as well as actually some departments already starting to basically validate our NC-203 or XM30, XM40.

Automation again is very interesting, I believe, because when we start seeing replacements for the 200, we also have customers saying, "Well, it would be nice to automate some process flows now when we are actually looking into validation." We do see a lot of customers doing validations between the Hamilton system and an XM30, and also basically a Tecan system and XM30.

It also helps that the market conditions are getting better. We can see that and we can also feel that when we're in negotiating.

I remember a couple of years ago getting budget for a customer for an XM40 specifically was almost impossible, where today we do see it is easier for them basically to purchase our instrumentation. Not only that, we do also have been working on some strategic partnerships, and the strategic partnerships is something you only have to do once, specifically here I mean the validation into their systems.

We've been working very hard in this area to ensure the best possible agreement for ChemoMetec, also for the future, and mainly many of these partnership has happened through customer demand, because when we have been presenting our XM30, XM40, and 203 in the field, we've had customers saying, "Why don't you actually start integrating into other other systems, instead of buying specifically from ChemoMetec, we can buy a combined solution, a system?" We started talking to Tecan, Hamilton, and now Roche, to basically integrate our product into a larger solution, and I think we will see a lot from this in the future.

Then over to product development, where we also have some exciting projects for the future. I think what we're trying to show is mainly that in the future, ChemoMetec won't only be a cell counter company, because one thing is doing an on-site cell count, but many customers actually also are looking into how can we treat more patients, how can we scale this business?

Mainly we're trying to, with the sample management system, for example, to automate some procedures to help them scale, to actually help them do way more testing than they're doing today. I've met with many, many operators and also head of operations who says in the future, we don't want too many operators in the lab, in the manufacturing, they actually want hands-free, it's basically the car manufacturing all over again.

Specifically here, you see our sample management system, but also with an integrated XM50, and we are hoping that customers can save a lot of money by basically buying our automated system, scale their samples, scale their production, and actually produce cheaper cell therapies. Talking about automation, hardware alone is not enough.

You also need a software to ensure you can cut some cost. I can tell you when we are on-site, we usually meet service managers who are overseeing 7,000 instruments where they need to make sure they're serviced, they work, they're up and running, they get tested every day, and the whole idea about XM Octopus came to life because of that.

Because what they would love is a fleet management where you can oversee all your instruments, make sure everything is serviced, you can even see is it working as supposed to, is anything wrong, and if anything is wrong, you can just contact a ChemoMetec service engineer. Here, by moving into the software area, it's basically customer—it's a customer demand, but also it just makes so much more sense because you can imagine overseeing 7,000 instruments, which is not only ChemoMetec instruments, it's just a lot of work.

Imagine if they can oversee it just from a system and basically look into that and service and everything, you will cut so much cost. Also, with XM Octopus, instead of going into a lab to extract data, you can actually send the data by an API into a remote server, and by that you can do QC approval, you can even do audits from FDA in there, you will have so many opportunities with this new software, and of course we have big expectations for that as well.

The next slide here is our financial outlook, I'll give it over to Philip.

Thank you, Martin. To wrap everything up, our expectations for the fiscal year 2026/2027, we expect revenue of between 545 million to 575 million, equivalent to growth of around 7% to 13%, and EBITDA of between 300 million and 313 million.

Also, we expect capex to be around 120 million. While we expect growth in both revenue and EBITDA, our margin and also capex will be reflecting our continued growth initiatives.

With that, over to Q&A.

Let's start with the first questions. Jesper from DNB: Could you help us understand the assumptions behind 2026/2027 guidance?

Do you expect instrument sales, both XM and NC, to be the main growth driver, while consumables and service continue to decline? What would need to happen for you to end up at the upper versus lower end of the guidance range?

I'll take that one. Basically the assumptions behind guidance is, of course, we have learned from last year.

I think many, many investors, they reach out of course after our downgrade, and this is not something we were very proud of, we have learned from that. This year, we of course have seen some market improvements, we have a lot of exciting replacements to do, and mainly we have looked into what is the worst-case scenario here because we don't want to disappoint.

What we expect is mainly the instrument sales to grow first, because to have consumable and service growth, you need instruments to grow it first. We haven't basically had any expectations for Roche, Tecan, Hamilton, those collaborations, because we don't have any numbers.

Mainly that's of course upside if that happens. Overall, we are looking at the guidance to say the running business itself, how is that working out with the market and everything.

Again, remember the market improvement is basically only a couple of months old before it really started to take off, we still have to see the trend, but we are cautiously optimistic about the future.

The next question is also from Jesper: How do you view Novartis's pausing some of its CGT programs, including YTB323 in DLBCL and PHE885 in multiple myeloma, as well as BMS pausing some of its cell therapy programs, in terms of what this signals for the broader CGT market and platforms such as T-Charge? More specifically, have you seen any impact on ChemoMetec activity or demand from Novartis, BMS, or related programs?

Of course we have been reading about those programs as well. I think if we're going back to the presentations, we saw more than 3,000 ongoing trials, of course when you have Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials, you have to expect some of them facing some issues.

This is in vivo, and in vivo is very different from ex vivo since the expansion happens inside the body. I know they had some issues, but it's not something which causes too much stress.

From our point of view, this is what happens. We hear it all the time, and of course when you move into a whole new way of producing a drug, which is in vivo, you have to expect some issues throughout the clinical trials.

No, we are not too nervous about that, and I think they're going to solve the issues, and we will see some exciting drugs in the future. Also it is important to say that those platforms, T-Charge, for example, and NEX-T from BMS, they have many drugs on this platform, and so far has only been a couple of drugs facing issues.

The platform itself from Novartis and from BMS is to my understanding not facing any major issues.

The next one is also from Jesper: You recently announced the discontinuation of the NC-200 platform, with sales ending in April 2027 and service ending in April 2029. We hear that some labs have started making last-time buys ahead of the April 2027 deadline.

Should we expect this to drive any meaningful uplift in instrument sales over the coming quarters?

That's actually a very good question, Jesper, thank you for that. Mainly our visibility might be 45 days, from our point of view, of course when we do a last-time buy, we have some expectations for some last-time buy.

If you're producing with NC-200 and you know the last-time buy is in April 2027, you need to buy some instruments at some point to basically cover up for the lack over the next couple of years. Yes, we expect some last-time buy related to the 200, and we also expect some NC-203 sales for validation.

The difficult, you can say, thing for us is basically to estimate it, because last year we tried to estimate it. We heard a lot of numbers, and we believed it, and this year we're more cautious because we don't want to disappoint again.

The next question is from Simon Laursen from Danske Bank: What about the pushed XM orders triggering the PW last year? The old FY 2025/2026 guidance set at DKK 565 to 580 millions.

We ended up at 511 million, and now we have a new guidance pointing towards 560 million at midpoint for FY 2026/2027. Can you talk about what happened to those XM orders that you thought would end up in H2 last year?

Seems like you're not counting on them materializing this year.

Mainly it's because we haven't received the orders yet. From our point of view, we will wait until we see the PO this year before we start reporting to any investors.

Mainly still expect them at some point. It's very difficult for us to say when because these validations, and we had a pretty great example last year in our annual report, I believe, those validations, they take time.

We have had validations running for a couple of years with many customers. Some of the sales you see right now is mainly from those validations running over a couple of years.

We also know at some point these customers, they will buy more instruments. It's just very difficult for us to estimate.

Right now, they're mainly not a part of the guidance since we are not familiar with the exact numbers and estimates, even if they will arrive this year, next year, or in two years. That's the main case here.

The next question is from Ludvig from Arctic, and there's two questions. The first one: When it comes to the change in IFRS accounting, you highlighted a 15 million effect on instrument sales in fiscal Q3.

What was the effect in fiscal Q4? If excluding the accounting effects in 2025/2026 and 2026/2027, what is the implied sales growth range assumed in your guidance?

The 50 million effect was a one—15 million effect was a one-off, we don't have any effect this quarter. If we're looking at the expectation of our product development and investments, mainly we are looking into investing more in our XM Octopus.

We believe software is the future in this area. Also, we are looking into automation, sample management system, autosampler.

We have some XM50 coming pretty soon. We're looking to keep investing.

I think what's important for ChemoMetec is the next 5, 10 years, still a lot of cell counters. At some point, we have to look at what is the next growth leg from our point of view.

We're investing a lot in automation and in software because we believe the future is systems, and to sell a system, you need hardware, software, mainly automated. Also, of course, a big piece of this is for XM Octopus.

The second question is: When it comes to the expected 120 million product development expense in 2026/2027, does this entail only capitalized investments?

Mainly it's going to be capex, but of course there will be some P&L as well, but mainly it's going to be capex.

The next question is from Peter from [Prosteen Invest?] : Roche, how far along are you with the collaboration, and when do you expect commercialization to begin?

Is the validation process different or easier compared with standard customer validation process?

Our expectations from Roche and for the Roche deal, I get the question a lot. The difficult part from our point of view is, first of all, we're not allowed to talk too much about it.

Second of all, we do not have any numbers. We do expect to start selling next year, 2027.

The validation process itself is difficult because when you are replacing a trypan blue-based instrument, there will be differences between our method and trypan blue. Positive part here is we have spent some of our R&D expenses this year to basically develop protocols, we are able to help the customer to basically do an easier tech transfer.

It will be some work for the customer, it will take time, but mainly if you move straight to integrating it, that itself is not a problem. It's basically to replace an existing method that can be more difficult.

Again, since the product will leave the market, they basically have no option. They'll have to do a validation no matter what.

The next question is from Mads from Berenberg. He has two questions.

Number one: Please help me understand what the underlying consumable growth was excluding legacy, for example animal reproduction, and government shutdown, and excluding large customers leaving the market.

It's a good question, because if you look at the Life Science leg alone, the growth was pretty decent. Semen and our milk and beer has been struggling a little bit because it's not a focus area for us.

Also, if you're taking those shutdowns into account, of course it would be looking very differently. We would probably be a little above the 10% you see.

I would say probably around 15% for Life Science alone. Consumable-wise, we did take a hit from those closures, so that would also have been a little higher, yeah.

The second question from Mads: He wants an understanding of how many customers you're speaking to on the XM platform, and how that compares to the beginning of the year, and in addition, how many potential instruments does that equate to?

We're talking to so many by now that I do not have the exact number, but it's in the hundreds, it's a lot. I think the difference from our point of view to last year is that now we do not have to showcase the product before people show interest.

We have a lot of customers and potential customers reaching out saying they've heard about integration opportunities, they definitely just want to see, "Can we just integrate XM30 into Hamilton? We have seen the webinar," or etc.

The difference is definitely way more demand, way more, you can say, validations, and it's so many that I don't have the exact number, but way above 100.

The next question is from Yiwei Zhou from SEB: You mentioned that you're seeing improved demands towards the year-end. Can you elaborate if the demand improved for both NC and XM instruments?

Mainly it's for XM, and that is due to the discontinuation, the market improvements, and many of those validations we have done prior to this year. It's mainly XM, and we definitely expect XM to be the leading instrument in the future, and it will also probably exceed NC next year.

The next one is from Jesper from DNB: You're guiding for around 120 million of capex in 2026/2027, up from around 100 million in 2025/2026, and equivalent to more than 20% of revenue. How much of this relates to software development, how long should we expect capex to remain at more than 20% of revenue, and what would you consider a more normalized level once the current investment are completed?

I will say it always depends if our revenue goes through the sky, we'll probably invest even more. You'll have limits because you cannot keep investing unlimited.

This year, we believe we need 120, and mainly the split is probably quite even between the different areas. Something our investors might not know is we're also spending a lot of R&D expenses for biology, creating protocols, easier tech transfers for our customers.

We have a lot of different areas. The software itself might be 20% to 25% of our R&D expenses in the future.

Will we increase? It depends on the revenue and also actually the demand from customers, because we expect to launch XM Octopus at some point.

If they want something different, we'll build it. I think this is an ongoing thing, and of course I think you know us, we have decent margins, we're pretty good with math, if it makes sense, we'll keep investing.

If it doesn't, we won't do it. That's going to be the answer to that.

Then we have a question from Simon from Danske Bank: You state in the report that before making their financial decision, customers expect documentation that the XM30, the XM40, and the NC-203 all produce comparable results for different cell types, as well as country sites. You say it's a new development for customers to express these wishes.

Does this mean that you are in discussions with customers looking to also replace competing products with ChemoMetec cell counters, and using ChemoMetec cell counters as a platform solution?

That's exactly what we're working on. That's also why the validation takes a little longer, because usually you might hear from a department they want to buy 10 instruments, and then they say, "Oh, actually, we now are moving into global alignment because we actually want to replace everything with this new platform."

What usually happens is that we're talking to one department, then other departments have other different instrumentation, and suddenly this moves into a bigger project. Down the line, yes, we are expecting to replace a lot of competitor instruments and basically be the one cell counter in the field.

I would say cell counter platform, actually.

Then we just have one question left. The question is from Jesper from DNB: On the Roche collaboration, given the significantly higher throughput of XcytoMatic compared with the legacy Cedex HiRes, how should we think about the replacement ratio?

Is there any reason to expect something close to a one-for-one replacement, perhaps because customers typically operate the cell counter alongside a Cedex Bio Analyzer, or should we assume materially fewer XcytoMatic units will be needed?

That's a good question again, Jesper. Mainly, if you want to integrate into the Cedex Bio Analyzer, it's going to be a one-to-one replacement.

We have seen when we're replacing competitor instruments in the field that they can actually replace two to one, which is also a big USP for the customer because our instruments are so fast. It depends on the setup, but if it's a standalone, usually they will replace two old instruments, competitor instruments, with one instrument from ChemoMetec, unless we're talking integration, because then it is a one-to-one specifically.

That was the last question for today. Thank you all for joining.

See you in the next conference call.