ImmunoPrecise Antibodies Ltd. (NASDAQ:IPA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Brad McConn: Yes, sure. This is Brad. I’ll take that one. Thanks for the question, Will. We do analyze this metric kind of our CRO cash flows each quarter. And we have to do so by removing certain global costs that get allocated to their P&L and certain balance sheet transactions between the entities. But when we focus on those CRO subsidiaries, and I’m obviously talking specifically about Victoria, Osan, Utrecht in this case. Those entities consistently achieve EBITDA margins of around 30% of revenue. And they generate cash flow somewhere in the range of 25% of revenue pretty consistently. And so we discussed this in the past kind of this portion of the business that does have — they provide some flexibility as we determine capital allocation to other projects, and it is that stable cash flow that allows us that capital flexibility as we do make those decisions.

Will McHale: Got it. Thanks a lot. That’s helpful. And it seems in seeing the cash OpEx come down quite a bit quarter-on-quarter seems to prove that point as well. Finally, I wanted to ask about the SaaS-based data management platform. Just kind of how are you guys thinking about what the opportunity looks like there? And what are sort of expectations near and long term for kind of the revenue potential?

Jennifer Bath: Yes, that’s a great question, Will. So first of all, with regard to the potential, I would say this is actually one of the things that we’re most excited about after getting the validation that we did in that first round of the RFP approval. This is something that we realized quite quickly had a number of beneficial opportunities for us. One is that we’re very aware of a high market demand for this type of capability that can allow researchers to store and manage and analyze this mass amount of multi-omic data in particular, a lot of the large pharma that are working in the personalized medicine space and have been collecting data in some cases for several decades, but have disparate and unharmonized data that they haven’t been able to analyze.

So we see this as a high priority, in particular, after seeing that BioStrand did so well after being pitted against several dozen companies that were flowing in from across the world to compete for this RFP. And with regard to that, there’s a couple of interesting things that have really dawned on us in this process. In addition to BioStrand being very good at this and being able to offer some unique capabilities with the way that they would actually organize and then provide the ability for these companies to analyze their data. They’re also able to go out and sell these opportunities themselves. So the other activities like off-target analyses and immunogenicity are things that our current sales team means to go out and sell because it’s very much on the biological drug discovery side.

And it’s targeting actually a lot of the same clients that we target with our regular wet lab work even though the activities themselves are not cannibalistic in nature. So one of the things we find really interesting about this is it’s actually a different subset of individuals that are the key decision makers and in some case, completely different companies. And it means essentially that BioStrand being able to pitch this so effectively and having such a service that is distinguishable and deemed in this case, by a very prominent third party to be superior means that they are able to supply their own marketing and sales personnel, even in a different regional distribution to a new market audience, which we find to be highly favorable and exciting.