Harvard Bioscience, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBIO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

James Green: Well, I think with SFN, that’s our biggest show society for neurology. Perfect timing for us with a number of our very key core business products. Our telemetry products, we’re expanding the offerings there. We’re pretty certain that organoids is going to get a lot of press. It’s been something that’s been kind of brewing in academic research for a while. We’ve been investing pretty heavily over the last few years to turn this into something more than just an academic research product but a real industrial level use product. So I think we’re going to learn a lot there. And then with the introduction of the new VivaMARS product, that’s already getting a lot of interest worldwide, both in North America, Europe and Asia.

Every place that does the formal in vivo testing for — with the behavioral requirements that are required for any product you need to get to this kind of level of product and you need to have high volume, high capacity and it needs to be in a GLP environment. So we’re really excited about VivaMARS. We see that developing very quickly. We’ve already sold the first one. We’ll be in shipping the very first unit here next month. And that, as we said publicly, is about $850,000 system. That’s just for 1 to 1 customer — and we see this as really lining up a lot of growth opportunity for us as we move into next year. And that will also include China.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Could you also talk a little bit about the quarter the percentage of revenues that were related to recurring revenues and also new product offerings and going into 2024, there is a potential for increases in those areas, a larger percentage of recurring revenues as the total. And also, your thoughts on new products going forward, if you’re going to see that increase as a percentage of your total offerings and your efforts in that space?

James Green: Yes, that’s a great question. I think you’re right on. We had first started identifying where we were on recurring revenues and I think it was a — it wasn’t known very well because it wasn’t publicized much or even measured very well here. But we had found that we’re over 35% on the recurring revenue side. And clearly, that’s an area where you see the new products coming out and the new service offerings that are coming out, they are designed to not just sell new product and capital purchases but they tend to come with consumables, services, recurring revenues. So I see an opportunity here for us to move that number from 35%, well higher into the mid-40s or maybe better. That would be my longer-term longer term target.

But with each of these new products coming out, there is a service and a consumable and a recurring component to it. NPI, NPI is the lifeblood of a company like this and technology is critical for us. So that’s why you see in spite of the issues that we’ve all had to go through, we’ve been working hard to keep our costs down so that we can continue to put the investment where it really is needed for a company, a technology company that’s expecting to really grow and that’s a new product development. You’ll see that right there in front of you at SFN this year with Society of Neurology. We have to keep investing in these areas. And I suspect — I certainly expect a fairly substantial percentage of our new business to be driven by these new products.

Unidentified Analyst: I guess just 1 other question. There’s been a lot of weakness in the space overall, not just using some weakness in China but some of the bigger players. Kind of in light of that weakness, are there opportunities you’re starting to see out there, maybe smaller opportunities, whether it’s product lines or maybe a smaller private company that might make sense for you going forward as far as, if not an acquisition opportunity, maybe a partnering opportunity or just buying a product line. Is that something you’re starting to see in the space?