Harvard Bioscience, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBIO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Unidentified Analyst: Hi. This is Asim for Chris. Jim, I was wondering with the restructuring done and operating margins improving, you have committed to reducing the debt. But I was wondering in terms of new product development, would you look at business development like acquisitions also, or you’re going to — you’re thinking mostly de novo pipeline?

Jim Green: Yes. No, good — great question. We’re — what I really wanted to do was to first make sure that we made these changes that we could show, a stable growth business with far improved operating leverage. As I get through the next couple of quarters, a couple of things will happen. One is we’ll be in a much better position to first of all know where those real growth opportunities and improvement opportunities are. We are really figuring this out now. And then secondly, figure out what’s the right way to fund it. How do we want to do that? Do we want to do it mostly through organic? Do we want to use maybe do some M&A or some teaming and licensing all those opportunities we’ll be developing here this year. In my mind, there’s no question we need to grow the business continue — of course the best growth is always organic, but we really want to be able to augment and get into some of these newer spaces.

Then we’ll look at what’s the best way to accomplish those growth factors.

Unidentified Analyst: Perfect. And I know inflation and currency have adversely affected your current results. In terms of guidance, how you have kind of factored those two things in if you can give some color?

Jim Green: Yes. Well, I mean, first of all, we started dialing in new pricing, which we see that starting already to come into our revenue streams. So pricing is going to help us offset €“ they will help us offset any inflation. The currency in general we kind of think it’s starting to stabilize and ease. But to me the best way for me to do this is to continue to just keep driving my overall cost structure down, see where I can expand both pricing and volume and really get through this the right way. And as we pay the debt down and I’ll be paying that down quite a bit this year, we’re not going to see such an impact from interest rates. And then again as things kind of stabilize on the currencies that will help us on a currency translation basis.

So again that should to — we should start to see an ease of currency impacts inflation. Again we’ll improve that against that with pricing and as we grow and get more leverage in the business. The drop down leverage is much better now with this new growth and not to mention with the new product portfolio the mix of products is dramatically improving.

Unidentified Analyst: Perfect. Thank you.

Jim Green: Thanks, Christopher.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to hand the call back over to Jim Green for closing remarks.

Jim Green: Thank you, and thanks for joining us everybody. This ends today’s presentation. Certainly I hope that you’ll join us in May for our first quarter results for our fiscal 2023 and we look forward to this being such a great business that we’d envisioned it to be. And again thanks again for your patience and sticking with us as investors. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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