Bourse & Valeurs #112, avec Guillaume Bouhours (bioMérieux)

Jean-Pierre, hello everyone, and Executive VP Finance of bioMérieux. 2021 was an exceptional year from all points of view for bioMérieux, with a jump of more than 10% in organic growth of our revenue, revenue that exceeds three billion three hundred seventy million exactly. You may recall that bioMérieux is a specialist in in vitro diagnostics with two target markets: first, 80% of revenue from the clinical market for infectious disease diagnosis for hospitals and public or private analysis laboratories, and a second market of agri-food and pharmaceutical clients, i.e., the industrial market for product and production environment diagnostics. Indeed, 2021 was exceptional in itself, remarkable, driven by the health crisis, COVID-19, still, so our respiratory parameters had very strong growth, but also a recovery of all the rest of our business that had suffered for other ranges in 2020 with the lockdowns and recovered very well. So all our ranges performed very well to deliver this 10% organic growth, which was above our expectations in 2021.

Absolutely, 13,000 people in 44 countries, and indeed very international. Our first market is the United States with 45% of revenue, the second is China, Europe represents 30% of revenue, and France actually 7-8%. So we talked about activity; if we look at the results, they progress even more strongly: +49% to over 600 million euros exactly, 600 million euros in net profit, 800 million euros in operating profit, an operating margin of 24%, which is a record for bioMérieux. It is important to keep in mind that the company's costs were particularly low in 2021. Why? Because with COVID, we traveled less, we had fewer client events, and also clinical studies were a bit slowed down, so a cost level that is exceptionally low. We have indeed seen that and we think we will not repeat this level of operating margin, but we must still rejoice for the year 2021.

Absolutely, almost more than 10% of revenue, 190 million euros. We are investing heavily in the United States for our molecular biology site in Salt Lake City, and large investments in China as well. We are currently building two factories in Suzhou, one for immunoassays and one for culture media. So a very high level of investment, which reflects our growth prospects for the future.

First of all, a thought for the people suffering from this conflict. In our teams, we have a direct team of 80 people in Russia, but no equipment in Ukraine. In fact, we operate through a distributor in Ukraine. So I would say the direct impact for bioMérieux in terms of business is quite low, less than 1% of our revenue. However, we obviously have the indirect impact, particularly inflation of materials etc., which is quite significant.

Exactly, that is the guidance we gave, -3 to -7%. To understand it well, first of all, the environment is very uncertain, very volatile. We assume that COVID will become endemic and therefore a slowdown – hopefully for our personal lives – but a slowdown in COVID tests, in the demand for respiratory tests, of around 30% – that is our assumption. Faced with that, we expect to have solid growth in our microbiology activities, industrial microbiology, strong growth in non-respiratory molecular biology. All these elements lead to a decline in revenue between -3% and -7%, which gives us hope for an operating profit between 530 and 610 million euros. Exactly, and then 530 to 610 million is about 17 to 18% operating margin in 2022, which we are aiming for. That is much less than in 2021 when we had 24% margin, so from 24 to 17-18, but as I explained before, we had a very low cost level. But it is much higher than before the pandemic. In 2019, bioMérieux had a margin of 14 to 15%. We have clearly progressed through the three years of COVID, we were very strongly boosted, and we maintain a higher margin level.

bioMérieux is very strongly positioned, particularly on the fight against antibiotic resistance, which is a major public health issue, perhaps talked about much less than COVID which takes all the space. The fight against antibiotic resistance: according to a recent study by The Lancet, 1.3 million deaths in 2019 from multi-resistant bacteria. This is a subject that will continue to grow. About 80% of our product portfolio helps address this issue. We want to continue to invest and innovate on this subject, and we think we are very well positioned for the future. That's not our only theme, but it's very important.