Evotec SE (NASDAQ:EVO) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call May 22, 2024 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Volker Braun - EVP Head of Global IR and ESG
Mario Polywka - Interim CEO
Laetitia Rouxel - CFO
Matthias Evers - Chief Business Officer
Craig Johnston - COO
Cord Dohrmann - Chief Scientific Officer

Conference Call Participants

Charles Weston - RBC Capital Markets
Thibault Boutherin - Morgan Stanley
Michael Ryskin - Bank of America
Peter Verdult - Citigroup Inc.
Ben Jackson - Jefferies
Falko Friedrichs - Deutsche Bank
Joseph Hedden - Rx Securities
Christian Ehmann - Warburg Research

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Evotec SE Quarterly Statement Q1 2024 Conference Call. I am Sandra, the chorus call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants have been listen-only mode and the conference has been recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]

The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Volker Braun. Please go ahead, sir.

Volker Braun

Thank you, Sandra, and good day, good morning to all of you in the call, the Q1 2024 results call. I trust you have seen the press release this morning, and we are happy to share more details with you today. Before we do that, it's my obligation to familiarize you with the cautionary language as outlined on page two. And with that, I would like to hand over to Mario Polywka, our Interim CEO. Please Mario, go ahead.

Mario Polywka

Thank you, Volker, and a very warm welcome to everyone on the call. The entire management team is present in this call with me and they will do the main update on the development of the first quarter and on the program we have initiated in resetting and right-sizing Evotec for future profitable growth.

So welcome, Laetitia, Matthias, Craig and Cord. I will spend a few moments on recapping the developments in Q1 before handing over to Laetitia and Matthias for the majority of the presentation. On Slide 6, we give a brief summary of our Q1 developments. Our business, like many of our peers, continues to operate in a challenging market environment. It is clear that the more differentiated our offering is, the better positioned we will be to grow our business in the future.

For clarity, you will see and Laetitia will discuss further later, we have moved our reporting to Shared R&D and just Evotec Biologics. So in Shared R&D, despite the poor market conditions, we have still closed a number of exciting deals, including the AI-powered strategic partnership with Owkin, precision medicine collaboration in cardiology with Bayer, and of course our strategic partnerships with BMS continue to make good progress. Despite our 23% revenue decline in Shared R&D in Q1 of 2024 versus Q1 of 2023, which you will all remember was the strongest in our history.