Haemonetics Corporation (NYSE:HAE) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Thank you so much. And your next question comes from the line of Larry Solow of CJS Securities. Your line is now open.

Lee Jagoda: Lee Jagoda for Larry this morning. And I’ll try not to ask any Novartis questions. Just two quick ones related to your margins. I guess it sounds like you did a pretty good job going through the reason for the margin decline in the second half versus the first half as implied in your guidance. If I look out to the long-term goals of getting to the high 20s margins, can you help us bridge that gap through a combination of just the end-of-life stuff that you talked about and then the addition of the acquisitions and some of the leverage you’re seeing there?

James D’Arecca: Yes, sure. Hi. It’s James. Yes. So overall, you’re right, the longer-term play for us really is leverage, I would say. And that is just a simple our revenues – our operating income has to grow more quickly than our revenue. And it’s driven really, I would say, by three things. One is favorable mix towards the more profitable hospital products. And certainly, OpSens is a part of that moving forward in the future. The second part is continued focus on our cost of goods and improving whether it’s through volumes or through our operational excellence program the margins – the gross margins that we have. We have a target there, too, of high 50s, low 60s. So that will €“ that will certainly help drive it as we move forward.

And the third one really is the volumes being pushed through. Those three things combined is what gets you to the higher 20s. And yes, we’re – I’m glad you brought up OpSens. We’re excited about that one. And certainly, that will help contribute as we move forward.

Lee Jagoda: And then just looking at your new free cash flow guide, obviously, a nice increase there. It sounds like there was a little bit of conservatism on your part as it related to working capital. But can you kind of go through the revised CapEx guidance? And how much of that is just lower expenses versus timing and push out to next year?

James D’Arecca: Yes. Sure. So overall cash flow, very strong for the quarter. We had $51 million in cash, $90 million – almost $90 million in free cash flow for the first half of the year. Our initial guidance was, I would say, understated by the combined effect of having too much CapEx, so an overestimate on CapEx and then an underestimate on some working capital sources of cash and benefits. And so we took the opportunity to correct that and update that here in our – with our disclosures. I think that was more – I wouldn’t say there’s anything really changing for us in terms of the underlying capital plan. Longer term, our CapEx should remain fairly consistent. And I feel like the cash flow generation of the business is a real strength for us that we’ll utilize going forward.

Lee Jagoda: Sounds great. I will hop back in the queue.

Operator: Thank you so much. Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Cooper of Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Andrew Cooper: Thanks for the questions. Maybe first, just hoping you could give a little more context on sort of the supply disruption on plasma and maybe from a dollar basis, what that meant? Because like you mentioned optically, it does look like the revenue growth was a little bit slower than the typical seasonality, but you’re calling out end markets that were a little bit better. So just if you could help us bridge the gap on a numbers basis, that would be wonderful.

Chris Simon: Yes, Andrew, what I would say about that is we had advanced notice on part of this and some of it was just in the moment, our response what we were able to do is ramp up production from other suppliers, which is what gives us confidence. This is very situational and very temporal. We don’t expect this to be a problem in our second half or beyond. So you see that in our guidance and why we had confidence to raise guidance for plasma revenue specifically. In terms of where we were, we were required to take our inventory levels down. We typically hold something north of 30 days inventory for that product. We are below that now. In the field, our customers don’t have real storage capacity across the 1,200 collection sites that we serve.