Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. It's a great pleasure to be here.

My name is Erik Gatenholm, and I am here today in my power as Chairman of the Board. We will spend the first minutes of this earnings call to comment on the press release published yesterday evening regarding the leadership transition.

We will then proceed with the BICO Group Q2 earnings call. Today, I have the pleasure of having Maria Forss, CEO; Ewa Linsäter, CFO; and Anders Fogelberg, current CCO and incoming CEO, in the call.

The purpose of my remarks is to provide the Board of Directors' perspective on yesterday's announced leadership transition. After constructive discussions together with Maria Forss, the Board of Directors concluded that this is the right time for a leadership change as BICO enters its next phase of development with amplified focus on commercialization, customer engagement, and profitable growth.

The Board is pleased to appoint Anders Fogelberg as President and CEO, effective September 1st. As Chief Commercial Officer and a member of the executive management team since 2024, he has already played an important role in driving global commercial execution and advancing key market positions.

I would also like to sincerely thank Maria Forss for her contributions and dedication to BICO. Maria, you have, together with the team, played an important role in strengthening the financial position, strengthening of the balance sheet from net debt of -877 million Swedish crowns to net cash of 207 million Swedish crowns, and improved net working capital from 27% to 10%, improving operational discipline, and integrating acquired companies into a more streamlined organization.

Thanks to Maria, the company now stands on firmer ground and is better positioned for the next phase of development. On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to wish you all the success in the future, and at the same time, give Anders Fogelberg a very warm welcome to this new role.

I now hand over the word to you, Maria Forss.

Thank you, Erik. It's been a privilege to lead BICO during an important period of transformation, and I have worked closely with Anders during the past years, and I'm confident in his ability to lead the company moving forward.

Anders knows the organization. He knows our customers, our strategy, and opportunities well.

I look forward to supporting a seamless handover over the coming months, and I wish him and the entire team every success.

Thank you, Erik. Thank you, Maria.

I'm honored to be appointed President and CEO of BICO. Having served as Chief Commercial Officer and a member of the executive management team, I have had the opportunity to work closely with our colleagues, customers, and partners around the world.

I have a strong passion for this industry and the important impact that our people and our customers perform every day. I have been prioritizing deep customer engagement, operational excellence, and profitable growth since joining the company, and I will continue to do so also in my new role.

BICO has an attractive position at the intersection of automation, intelligence, and life science workflows, serving leading pharma and biotech customers globally. The opportunity ahead is substantial.

My immediate priority is execution: supporting our customers, driving commercial performance, improving operational efficiency, and delivering sustainable, profitable growth. I really look forward to engaging with all of you over the coming months.

Thank you, Maria and Anders. I now hand over the words to Maria and Eva to present the BICO Group Q2 earnings report.

Thank you, Erik, and thank you, Anders. I will continue today's session by summarizing quarter two 2026, and also describe how BICO serves the world's leading pharma and biotech companies with solutions that transform how labs operate, innovate, and solve our customer challenges.

Following that, Eva will then present the group's financial performance. I will also comment on our R&D pipeline with our ongoing product development efforts.

Additionally, I will highlight some recent product launches. The session will then conclude before we open up for Q&As about the financial results.

In the quarter, we saw a continued good sales momentum, navigating in a dynamic market, still affected by geopolitical uncertainty, but we are gaining confidence in a gradual market recovery, although the academic end markets remain soft due to reduced funding. Sales amounted to 336 million SEK, an organic growth in local currencies of 7%, mainly derived from continued strong benchtop instrument and consumable sales, while still experiencing challenges in the project-based business.

Due to continued currency headwinds, total growth was 4% in quarter two. We also see an improved profitability in the quarter as commercial and operational excellence activities are paying off, decreasing our overall costs, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA of 20 million SEK, or an adjusted EBITDA margin of 6%.

Cash flow from operating activities totaled -53 million, which is mainly stemming from changes in working capital. After the period ended, Cellenion, one of our business units, successfully signed long-term supply and license agreements as a prolongation of its ongoing business with one of its current customers.

The agreements have a combined contracted value of approximately €50 million over a 10-year term. All numbers presented are in million SEK unless otherwise stated.

Before Eva provides more details on our financial performance, I will present how BICO serves the world's leading pharma and biotech companies with solutions that transform how labs operate and innovate, which is what our vision is about. BICO supports customers to advance science so that therapies can reach patients faster.

Our solutions, with predominantly benchtop instruments, enable smarter, faster, and more efficient labs, in which we see an underlying strong demand. Pharma and biotech companies all face the same fundamental challenge: long and costly development cycles for new therapies.

The development of a new therapy often takes more than 10 years and costs between $2 billion and $4 billion, with the probability of approval after Phase 1 at just 10%. To overcome this, our pharma and biotech customers are investing heavily in automation and AI to increase efficiency, speed, and quality, to bring innovations to market faster and at a lower cost.

AI accelerates discovery, and then the wet labs become the new bottleneck. Generative models and predictive biology dramatically speed up hypothesis generation, yet wet lab automation and validation remains the hard constraint.

In fact, more AI-driven candidates mean more experiments, not fewer, intensifying pressure on lab throughput, system uptime, and data reproducibility. This means that wet labs become more critical, not obsolete.

AI breakthroughs have made wet labs even more central to R&D, and the lab is now a biological compute cluster, validating AI predictions, high-throughput automation and trusted data become mission critical. Customers using BICO lab automation solutions consistently report measurable gains in productivity and reliability, including reduced hands-on time, faster turnaround time, and higher instrument utilization.

To summarize, BICO leads the way in solving the challenges in life science with speed, accuracy, and efficiency. All in all, our customers can run their processes faster, improve the quality of the data, and ultimately make better decisions.

Now I hand over to Eva to present the results for the second quarter.

Thank you, Maria. I will now give some more details to the numbers presented by Maria.

Navigating these dynamic market conditions, sales in Q2 amounted to 336 million, representing an organic growth of 7% compared to a weak comparison quarter. Due to the continued currency headwinds, our total growth was 4%.

As Maria mentioned, the commercial and operational excellence activities are paying off, decreasing our overall costs, leading to an improvement in adjusted EBITDA of 21 percentage points, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 6%. While the market will experience geopolitical uncertainty, we are gaining confidence in gradual market recovery, although the US academic end markets remain soft due to reduced funding.

Sales amounted to 336 million, an organic growth in local currencies of 7%, a continued good momentum with growth in our benchtop instruments business, while still experiencing challenges in the project-based business. Also, consumables had a nice development during the quarter and grew by 10%.

Last year's sales were negatively impacted by a reestimation of remaining project hours of approximately 40 million due to the project delays in our integrated lab automation project business. Excluding this adjustment, organic growth was -4%.

We see growth year-on-year in Europe and Asia, while North America is declining, as expected. The decline in North America is due to continued soft academic funding, as well as timing of customer projects within our European-based diagnostic business.

While the underlying demand remains within the diagnostic business, the industry continues to experience longer lead times for larger automation investments, extending the uncertainty around sales cycles. The emerging market for integrated lab automation solutions is in a transformation phase where pace of development and the competitive landscape have changed substantially.

As described in Q1, we see execution challenges in part of our US-based integrated lab automation solution business. In combination with lower demand as the legacy projects are nearing completion, the US business has been right-sized to align with current staffing requirements.

We are now reassessing our position in the market to regain trust and grow the business for integrated lab automation solutions in a sustainable way. We saw substantially improved gross profit margin this quarter from 44% in Q2 last year to 59% this year.

Part of the improvement is due to the negative adjustment from updated cost estimation in ongoing project within the integrated lab automation project business last year, but the improvement in gross margin this year is due to continued favorable product mix and higher share of direct sales. EBITDA amounted to 16 million, with adjusted EBITDA being 20 million.

The difference relates to a restructuring provision of 4.5 million in relation to our US-based project business. Adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 21 percentage points, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 6%.

Excluding last year's 40 million SEK adjustment, EBITDA margin improved from -2.6% last year to 6% this year. The improvement was mainly driven by our commercial and our operational excellence initiatives, supported by favorable product mix.

Operating expenses decreased with 7% year-over-year. During the quarter, we launched a group-wide program to identify opportunities to improve how we work and further streamline core processes across the group.

The program focused on areas with clear potential for standardization, automation, and efficiency gains across the full value chain, primarily related to our ERP system. The restructuring project launched in Q1, aimed at improving cost efficiency and R&D pipeline execution by consolidating the activities in the site in Lyon to Berlin.

The project progresses successfully, and the completion of the project is expected this fall. The anticipated annualized savings from the project of 30 million, communicated in Q1, remain fully achievable.

The effects will start to materialize in the second half of the year. Cash flow from operating activities amounted to -53 million, impacted by negative net working capital change of 54 million, mainly derived from lower accounts payables and increased accounts receivable, as well as inventory of raw materials.

Cash reserves by end of the period were 628 million, of which 57 million were restricted. As mentioned on the previous slide, the effect of changes in working capital amounted to a negative 54 million compared to the previous quarter.

Operating receivables increased by 15 million, mainly in relation to accounts receivable. Inventories increased by 6 million, mainly in relation to raw material.

Operating liabilities decreased by 33 million, mainly in relation to accounts payable. In percentage of the last 12 months' sales, net working capital in the quarter corresponded to 10%.

Over time, we expect working capital in relation to sales to be in line with industry standard of closer to 20% of sales. I will now hand over to Maria to present the R&D portfolio and some recent product launches.

Thank you, Eva. One focus area for growth is continuous product innovation, and we have a solid R&D pipeline and roadmap in place, which is based on the portfolio strategy being part of BICO 2.0.

Multiple product launches are planned for this year, and these include both software, instrument, and consumables. The fast development of AI is an opportunity for BICO, as AI accelerates discovery and shifts the bottleneck to the wet lab, as I described earlier in this call, and this is where our automation solutions are at the core.

We had two key launches during the quarter: C-Pure, which automates DNA purification, and yet another AI solution, this time for cell culture workflows. Our company, [ECHO's?]

new Confluence AI turns one of cell culture's most subjective steps into a quantitative, reproducible metric, which we deliver as a licensed software feature to our Rebel and Revolve systems already in the field. Confluence AI is built directly into our microscopes through our software to detect and calculate the number of cells more reliably.

This removes subjectivity and improves decision-making, timing, as well as reproducibility. The other launch this quarter is the C-Pure Gen 2, which automates DNA purification, delivering rapid, reproducible, plastic, tip-free sample cleanup for seamless NGS library prep workflows.

This saves the use of 300,000 pipette tips per year for a mid-sized laboratory. It's also 10 times faster, which significantly increases the throughput.

Saving 18 minutes per plate means roughly 4 working weeks of technician time per instrument per year. These are just two examples of technology and solutions delivering customer value, which are the results of our efforts within R&D.

This will be my last quarterly report for BICO Group, and I'm proud of what we have accomplished together during my tenure. We have focused on commercializing, consolidating, and professionalizing the group to position the company for long-term success.

I now hand over the leadership to Anders Fogelberg, in whom I have great confidence, and I wish every success in the next chapter and look forward to following BICO's continued development as the group enters an exciting new phase. Thank you to our employees, our customers, partners, shareholders, and the Board for your support and commitment throughout this journey.

This was the final slide before the Q&A. I will hand over to the earnings call host for further instructions.

Yes, hi, guys, and thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to start off a bit on the license and supply agreement, which I argue deserves a bit more spotlight given the significant effect it should have on the P&L here in Q3.

Starting off on the license part of it of almost €11 million, which will be recorded as revenue in Q3, if I understand correctly. I just assume this relates to another company licensing your microdispensing technology in Cellenion.

Maybe if you can just give some flavor on what type of IP they're licensing and what type of product that this goes into and the end market for that. If you can, yeah, just give some more flavor on that, would be nice.

This is with our diagnostic business, it is a technology license that we have with the customer.

Thanks. Just on the margin for this license agreement, I suppose this is a bit higher than what you have for the instruments typically.

We don't comment on margins for specific products or licenses. I'm sorry for that.

Fair enough. This is somewhat of a follow-up license agreement that you have now, and you've had it before, but I guess this spans over many years.

Have we seen this type of negotiation before in BICO numbers? The last time this was negotiated was before it was even acquired by BICO?

Also, I always look a bit on the cash flow profile of this. I assume you won't get the full cash flow here in Q3 for the revenue, but, yeah, just how this spans over the next few years would be nice.

Some more flavor on that.

Thank you, Ludvig, for the question. I will start and answer in terms of what this has been before, and then I'll hand over to Eva to answer about the financial implications accounting-wise.

This type of agreements—there are two, one license agreement and one supply agreement—is a prolongation of earlier business that we have done with this customer. Given the tenure of these type of contracts, The original contract was something that was signed with the customer and Cellenion prior to BICO acquiring Cellenion.

We have not communicated to the market about these contracts before. It's been a long negotiation with the customer for this prolongation.

Given the nature of supply agreement as well as license agreement over a tenure of 10 years, that has some accounting and cash flow implications. Please, Eva, if you can give some more flavor on that, that would be helpful.

As you can see in the report, for the license, we will take €10.6 million at a point in time in the Q3. That is the revenue recognition of the license part that is non-cancelable.

According to IFRS, we need to do it at point of time. That means that it will deviate from the cash flow.

The cash flow will be invoiced on a yearly basis going forward, but the revenue we need to take at a point of time in Q3.

Thank you.

Very,

very clear. Then just a final one from my side on this matter.

Just on the supply part of it, you take some revenue as well from previous deliveries, if I understand correctly, for the themselves. Do you expect this prolongation or new deal to drive any incremental extra sales for the hardware, or is it just run as a test run for basically?

The contract is primarily the license and consumable business. However, what sometimes happen when you enter this kind of partnerships, that there are additional opportunities, but there's nothing that we can comment on.

Of course, that's in our commercial interest to pursue.

It is a stable business that we have had in past years, Ludvig.

Great. Thanks.

I'll jump back into the queue.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ludvig.

hello there. Thanks for taking my question.

I'm going to start with the same topic that you guys started with, with the CEO transition. Promoting from the firm is practically as low drama as it can get.

Rather than asking actually what's the drama, since there is no drama, I'll skip it. Maria, what's the one thing that you would actually expect Anders to change when he takes over the reins?

Maybe for Anders also, can you give us a little bit more color on your immediate priorities once you take the lead on September 1st?

Yep. No, as you say, Maria, there is no drama in this.

I was recruited by the Board of Directors 3 years ago with the task of focus on commercialization, consolidation, and professionalizing the company. As we have presented in the report today, we have come quite far in that transformation.

I recruited Anders Fogelberg as our Chief Commercial Officer 6 months into my tenure, and we have worked closely the past 2 years together with the rest of the executive team. Together with the Board, we have agreed that this is a good time for a shift in leadership, now when we're entering into a new phase with an additional increased focus on executing the commercialization, continue our engagement with the customers, and also ensuring profitable, sustainable growth.

Anders, in terms of your focus and the comments from you, please.

Absolutely. Thank you for the question.

Of course, I've been with BICO for these 2 years and with Maria, in some ways, I continue what I've done, which is support the global customer base, building a commercial engine, and strengthening the market presence. Of course, over the next few months, I and my executive management team and the Board will look at the business, and we might come back with additional perspectives or insights.

For now, when I start the 1st of September, it's all about the commercial engine, operational efficiency, and to drive profitable growth.

I will remain as a senior advisor for a quarter to ensure that we have a smooth transition and handover process to Anders. Of course, Anders knows the customers and knows the market, there's no drama or big deal in this, and I'm really, really in hope that we'll have good success moving forward as well, and I'm sure that will be the case.

All right. Thank you so much for the comments there.

Now a little bit on the numbers. The instrument picture is a bit mixed.

We've seen some organic growth now, but instruments in total declined. However, you do mention that the desktop instruments are going well and they're staying strong.

Could you maybe quantify a little bit on the split between these benchtop instruments and maybe larger ones that you have, and maybe describe some trends that support your comment that you're gaining confidence in the market recovery?

I think overall, Maria, if we look at our peers who are operating in the same market as us, we see the same type of trends in the quarter as everyone else is doing, and I'll come to the instrument shortly. Both consumable, which is increasing by 10%, we also see a slight increase in service.

That's also seen by our peers. When it comes to instrument sales, despite the softness in academia, our benchtop instruments are going really, really well in several of our business units, which is really pleasing to see.

When it comes to the instrument decline in the quarter, that's due to the project-based business. That's the reason for the decline.

That has nothing to do with the benchtop industry part of our results. That's expected given how lumpiness that you see when you start new projects, then there will always be big instrument sales, and then you get a peak in those quarter where big new projects start.

That's the reason. Anders, do you want to comment anything further?

We see, as you said, Maria, we see what our peers are seeing, and there is some improvement in the demand. Everyone sees that.

The specialized instruments are being sought after. Instruments that are more commodities might not have the same demand because of the funding situation, primarily in the US.

We see that dynamics play out in our industry in our market as well.

Yeah. All right.

Thank you for the comments there as well. To finish off my short part here, a short comment maybe on capital allocation.

You've mentioned this in Q1, if I'm not mistaken. Is there any short follow-up you can give us on those dialogues, for instance, bolt-on acquisitions or something that you referenced in Q1?

Thank you, Maria, for that question. Of course, we are quite happy that we now have a balance sheet in order, and we brought in new capital in quarter one, which is a good foundation for continued both organic and potential inorganic growth.

As we have communicated in the market before, smaller bolt-on acquisitions could be opportunities, but also we are increasing our collaborations, such as the one we have with Sartorius and looking for different collaboration partners. It's a mix of ensuring that we can continue to invest with R&D, continue to explore strategic and commercial collaborations, as well as looking at potential strategic fit smaller bolt-on acquisitions.

Thanks. That will be all from me.

I'll get back into the line. Thanks.

Thank you, Maria.

Hi, everybody. My question is actually on the sort of Biosero side to start off.

I know we have discussed previously of the legacy projects that we've in Biosero. My question is maybe if you could provide just some guidance of sort of the duration expected of these legacy projects and what the reasonable expectation would be for how long it can continue to provide headwind.

Thank you.

Thank you. The legacy projects is something we focus on quite a lot, and if you look at the lab automation space and what we are achieving here, it's huge projects, often custom-made hardware, custom-made software solutions in an industry that do not really have standards yet in place.

It's quite groundbreaking. We're working with scientists at Big Pharma to set this up in a good way, and it's an entrepreneurial work.

As we have communicated many times, some of these bigger projects take longer than anticipated, and that's something we face. That's something many of our competitors face as well.

Our main priority is to make the customer satisfied with the solution. That is priority number one.

We are working very hard and close with these customers to make that happen. At the same time, we are, as we said in the quarterly report, we are reassessing this space.

What does this mean for us? How can we scale this in a good way, and how should we be positioned in lab automation to have a sustainable, profitable growth?

This is something we're looking at. At the same time, we do our utmost to make our customers happy with what we deliver.

Then a short follow-up to that, if I may.

If I may add there, I think it's important just to distinguish, we talk about lab automation overall, and we do lab automation in most of our companies. What Anders described now with Biosero is our lab automation solutions business, which is project-based.

We have a lot of lab automated solutions also with our benchtop instruments. We don't just say that lab automation is Biosero, because that's not the case.

Okay. A short follow-up then for me would be maybe if you could help us, are there any of these legacy projects that you maybe think will be completed, let's say, during 2026?

Will this be sort of a fading headwind or anything on that?

Yes. We have completed several of these projects in 2025.

We had dozens of them completed, in fact, in quarter four 2025. If you look at 2026, yes, we have completed some.

We will complete few more of them. When you look at this business, you have the building phase when you build it at the factory, you have this site build at the pharma sites, and then when it gets operational, there is, of course, a service component and an aftermarket component when you work with the scientists day to day.

In a way, the projects, yes, they get built, they get completed, but in a way, they will continue for years afterward as partners to these customers.

That's clear. Thanks.

I have one more. Would you say that the Q2's product mix and sort of share of direct sales to be a fair proxy to extrapolate for the second half of the year?

We cannot guide you on the forward-looking numbers. For Q1 and Q2, we saw the desktop instruments, the growing.

You wouldn't say that Sorry.

No, please, Filip. Go on.

No, what I'm out for is more in terms of would you say that Q2 is sort of an outlier quarter or is this something we can extrapolate? In those

As Eva said, we're not guiding for the future, but as we have reported all the years, our business is quite seasonal, where usually the first half of the year is slower than the second half due to how budgets are put into our customers' pockets.

Thank you.

Yes, hi. Just a few follow-ups from my side.

First, just on the academic end market, which you say is still a bit slow. However, I've heard from some peers at least that it seems to a turnaround now as budgets are not down that much or not at all actually on the NIH side.

Just some comments on that would be nice.

If you look at the NIH funding, which is very important for the academic projects in the US, the way that they fund and the way they pay this funding is a bit different. They pay for longer time periods, they incentivize longer projects, and there are fewer project starts.

If you look at their project lists, we had some delays when in Washington, D.C., that they had a standstill, there were delays of payments. Then there are fewer starts, which means that those that sell commodities to the academic segment, they will struggle more than those that sell niche products, because commodities, that's what you normally buy when you start up a lab and you start something, whereas the niche products you buy later on in the projects.

If you look at our portfolio, we, as everyone else, we are facing challenges when it comes to commodity products.

Thanks. Very clear.

Then just the final one, a bit of follow-up to the license and supply agreement question before. Just are there any similar type of licensing deals that you have in Cellenion that could be renegotiated this way, or was this a bit of a one-off when it comes to yeah, size and so on?

Of course, we cannot give guidance on future opportunities, but it's not a very common setup for us to go after this kind of license agreements. In this case, we have worked with them for several years before, and we've renegotiated our contracts for several reasons, and we are happy to have this continued trust from this customer.

It's not a core offering. It's not the core strategy to go after these kind of contracts.

Understood. Thanks a lot.

That was all my questions.

Thank you for all the questions received, and thank you for your continued interest and support in BICO Group. Together with Eva, Anders, and Erik, I wish you a great Wednesday.