Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Sartorius and Sartorius Stedim Biotech conference call on the Polyplus acquisition. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg, CEO. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you very much, welcome also from our side to today's conference call on the acquisition of Polyplus. Sartorius. By Sartorius Stedim Biotech. Thank you for your interest in our acquisition and our business development overall. We are happy to host this call after we learned last week that there is quite a significant need for further explanation and wishes from quite numerous investors to have the opportunity to go into some more detail. We are happy that so many of you have found the time to dial into our call today. Let me briefly introduce Polyplus on the first chart before I then later hand over to René Fáber, my colleague on the Sartorius AG's board, responsible for the Bioprocess Solutions division, and most recently also being appointed CEO of Sartorius Stedim Biotech. Rainer Lehmann is available as well, particularly to talk to you about the financing structure that we are considering and of course, also discuss any upcoming questions. Polyplus is a company and a business that has been very much recognized by a lot of players in the industry for, I would say, two reasons. One is because it's a very strongly positioned and highly recognized company for the supply of transfection reagents to a lot of companies in the gene therapy market. It has a strong position in this market, and therefore, I think everyone knows Polyplus very well from that end. Secondly, it was clear that this company would be for sale at some stage, as it was owned by two private equity firms. For quite a while, it was owned by ICNET. Most recently, since 2020, also by Babel-Piekenstein, by ICNET and Babel-Piekenstein together. I think it's fair to say that therefore it has been quite a competitive process now when the two owners were looking for selling the business. Polyplus is headquartered close to Strasbourg. It also has locations in Belgium, the U.S. and China. The majority of the 270 employees though are employed in France, the majority of those again are close to Strasbourg. It runs a GMP manufacturing activities and has expanded those significantly over the last couple of years. As I already said, René will go into more detail in a minute, it's particularly known for transfection reagents, but has expanded the portfolio significantly for, let's say, further upstream applications, particularly in the field of viral vectors, that are used in cell and gene therapies, but again, more details to come later. You will also see later or get some more information about how strongly this business is positioned within this crucial application, and that this together with Sartorius really will lead to a complete or at least very broad portfolio along the different workflows of those customers. The financial profile of this business is also very strong. It will achieve, or that is expected to achieve upper double-digit EUR million sales revenues in 2023 based on strong growth rates, top-line growth rates, but also EBITDA growth rates. Very substantial gross margins that are driving also the bottom line profitability, therefore also very significant EBITDA margins today. As you would imagine, when talking about reagents, we are talking about a high share of recurring revenue that this company is achieving. Again, as I already said, I will now hand over to René, who will walk you through the details of this business. René, please. Yeah, Joachim, thank you very much. Hello, everybody from my side. Good morning, good afternoon. I'm gonna walk you through a bit more in detail through the portfolio, the main applications, market and synergies we see for Polyplus moving forward. On the chart here, you see the like three main product groups Polyplus is offering. In the middle, Joachim mentioned what Polyplus has been known for mostly is transfection reagents. Those are reagents used in virus or viral vector production, both the reagents for adherent cell cultures and also more modern suspension cell culture. The management of Polyplus has been developing the company very nicely operationally, but also in last couple of years, added to the portfolio, interesting, highly relevant plasmid capabilities. You see that on the left side. It's both plasmid design through the acquisition of e-Zyvec. Plasmid production through the acquisition of Xpress Biologics, a company based in Belgium. Plasmids, as most of you probably know, are also critical input materials, critical additives to make viral vectors, but also inputs for DNA or RNA-based therapeutics. On the right side, you see some products which have been developed organically, if you like, by Polyplus last in the last few years. Launched recently also novel reagent for the direct type of delivery, in vivo delivery of RNA and DNA, so also a nice complementarity to transfection reagent and plasmids. Moving to the next chart. I will explain you briefly what is the main application of a transfection reagent plasmid viral vector and manufacturing. On the left side on the chart, you see a scheme of upstream process and the critical materials which are needed to make a viral vector, plasmid and transfection reagents as the most critical materials here in terms of impact on overall process economy and process performance, product profile, quality of the product. Transfection reagents is needed to bring a plasmid into a cell, which is then growing in cell culture media in typically in a single-use bioreactor. The product out of it is a viral vector. On the right side, you see the description of the impact or criticality of those input materials in the process with plasmids and transfection reagents, both being the most critical inputs here. Moving to the next slide, what is the key, and this is what we are very excited about in such application, is to make the combination of those critical materials like plasmids, transfection reagents, cell culture media, and cells work properly together, make it as an integrated system which delivers to the client the most efficient process. And here we see the combination with the Sartorius products and technologies, like cell culture media we have in the portfolio. Also later in the process, downstream technologies, monolithic columns, which we acquired by through the acquisition of BIA Separations, you will remember in 2020. This combination provides a really industry-unique, highly differentiated, fully integrated workflow offering which addresses the main pain points of customers. On the next chart, let me talk briefly about the market, which we are addressing with these products or Polyplus been addressing quite successfully with the transfection reagents and plasmids, particularly cell and gene therapies. You see on the left side, these type of therapeutics represent today already quite a significant portion of the R&D pipelines of our customers. We see those pipelines being meanwhile well distributed across the clinical phases, from pre-clinical to late phase three clinical up to commercial approvals. Of course, this is not yet a mature market. This is like, you know, 20- 30 years ago, monoclonal antibodies market also did not, or it took some time until the molecules made it to commercial, and you have the base commercial business consumption of materials in such applications. Here, however, we see the market maturing, molecules moving towards later clinical phases, which will and is driving the demand to for such, for such input materials and of course, with the upcoming approvals, that will drive the growth of that business. Last but not least, also new indications with larger patient populations is another growth driver and the expanded use of DNA or RNA now beyond the vaccines is also an application where we see a growth coming for that business. On the next chart, let me talk briefly about the synergies, the potential we see. Again, very excited about the unique combination we are creating here of solving unmet urgent market needs, both on the portfolio side. The cross-selling capabilities, we will be able to average across the portfolio in upstream, downstream technologies. Our use of our global platforms, not only in R&D, where we see a very interesting complementary capabilities, which will bring new innovations to the market, but also our global reach to the customers, through the sales organization and manufacturing network. If we look at Polyplus as like a fifth acquisition in a row in our journey to build highly relevant, attractive financially and with the growth profile of portfolio we have been putting together since last few years. You will remember 2019, we started with Biological Industries, cell culture media for cell therapies, added in 2021. CellGenix growth factors used in cell therapies manufacturing. Xell, company specializing on cell culture media used in viral vector manufacturing. Highly complementary, very close to plasmid and transfection reagents used or provided by Polyplus. Albumedix, another critical material for cell therapies, formulations and cell culture media. Now with Polyplus, this portfolio we will, moving forward, bring together, build a kind of specialized cell and gene therapy, business unit within the division. Polyplus, both products and the management team will play a key role in building that attractive business unit, in the bioprocess division. With that, I hand over to Rainer, who will walk you through the financials. Rainer? Yeah. Thanks, René, and also hello everyone and welcome to today's call. Let's have a look at the key figures and especially the financing. Purchase price, as we disclosed, is around EUR 2.4 billion. How are we going to finance this? J.P. Morgan provided us with a bridge loan facility on Sartorius AG level for up to two years, and it is then the plan after closing to refinance this mainly and potentially only by long-term debt. Of course, the, we used to tap into the promissory note market short-term borrowing for this level. This won't be enough, so we're here thinking, of course, tapping into the bond market. As we always said that in case of large acquisitions, we would be open to use equity. We also put that out there at the end of last week and said we'll be open to raise a smaller portion, if any, in order to finance this, but this is really highly dependent on the market conditions. I really wanna explicitly say it's not mandatory. We have the financial strength and capacity to fully finance this through debt. Of course, the transaction is subject to customary conditions, in this case, particularly by the regulatory authorities. This is really the only thing that will happen in the next few months. We therefore expect a closing during Q3 of this year. With that, I think I'm handing back to Joachim for. Yeah. Q&A, right? Yeah, exactly. Basically Q&A. Thanks, Rainer. Thanks, René. Yeah, I would say stage is open for Q&A then. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. The first question comes from Michael Leuchten from UBS. Your question please. Thank you very much. Two questions, please. Just going back to the equity part that Rainer just commented. I mean, it's pretty clear that, you know, the parameters you've given in the past means you don't have to dip into equity. I think the market is concerned that you are going after more sizable assets now and you, with this one, you've basically used your debt capacity. Whatever else you need to do then will require some equity. I was just wondering if bigger picture you could comment on, why this one in particular was the one to do right now and sort of what the opportunity costs are of maybe having to look at equity should there be something else out there. Basically, do you need to chase higher growth assets because some of your portfolio is slowing down, and that's the only way to stay dynamic? Then the second question, Polyplus seems to be specced in for Zolgensma and Luxturna. I suspect it might also be specced in for the Sarepta DMD drug. What percentage of the revenues roughly are dependent on end market sales, and is that a drag on the top-line momentum for the next few years? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for these two questions. Maybe I take them at least to start off with an answer. Maybe one thing we ask you for understanding and acceptance is we have announced the signing of an agreement, and now we are on the path towards closing. As Rainer just said, we expect that during Q3, so we think another, whatever, let's say roughly four months maybe that this will take. Therefore, we are really limited in regards to giving certain details on the business of Polyplus. Further, we also would hesitate to give any details on specific drugs that products, be it Polyplus or other Sartorius products, are specced in. Therefore, I would say let's postpone a more granular answer on your second question, and again, I would like to ask you for your understanding. In general, I think what one can say, we consider the, as René I think said, we consider the pipeline for gene therapies to be healthy with a healthy distribution over the different stages of clinical trials, and we think that Polyplus is very well represented across this pipeline. On your first question or this rather spectrum that you opened there and were asking for. First of all, I really would like to underline again that we consider Polyplus to be a extraordinarily attractive business. It really has been on the top of our strategic agenda for a while. As I said, it was clear for everyone in the industry that this would become a sale at some stage. It's not that, you know, that this is by any, whatever chance only that we were really so highly interested in this business. In other words, it's hard to take this case as a proxy for numerous others. As we always said, indeed, finally refer to that, during all the recent capital market days, there was a section where we were showing how our financing capacity was structured and of the components this would be composed of. We always said that equity would be a certain portion of that. I think what is also clear is that at times with high interest rates, there is a certain shift at what level a certain equity portion might become attractive and meaningful, also in regards to EPS. Also that comes at price now again, differently to quite a couple of years before. I guess what we are very carefully looking at is what would be the best balance also in regards to earnings per shares on the, let's say, shorter time horizon, whereas on the midterm time horizon, such businesses, such assets would be accretive in any scenario with or without a certain equity portion. Therefore, I would, I would say, I understand these concerns by the market to some degree, even though, as I said at the beginning, we have been a little bit surprised because we always have been very very transparent about the fact how our financing capacity would be structured and how we would look at that. Then finally, also thank you for how clearly you address other potential strategic motivations to acquire such businesses, and whether that would be to compensate for lower growth rates in other businesses also. I think maybe before I try to answer that, I would like to say, well, we are in, you know, at actually at very special times because we are going through this normalization. Therefore, I think maybe it's also important to adjust what's the underlying growth rate in such more established businesses like whatever filtration, for example, or fluid management technologies or also some of the cell culture technologies. We have seen extraordinary growth rates for at least two years during half of 2020, the full year of 2021, et cetera. Maybe that's just as a disclaimer upfront. That's really not the motivation for us. Our viewpoint here is, as always, we are looking for complementary additions to our portfolio to make the entire portfolio then even more relevant to our customers. Since a couple of years, René was relating to that, we have a specific focus on new modalities, because these new modalities really gain traction, become increasingly important, and complement and adding complementary technologies means also generating synergies. Yes, of course, that means that we believe that the addition of this business is accretive to the growth of all existing businesses, as René walked you through, mostly in the area of other critical raw materials, but also in regards to some downstream technologies. So I wouldn't qualify this transaction as a defensive move at all. We believe it's really a straightforward move, really at the center of our strategy, fully in line with what we have done over the last few years and also always communicated what we intended to do going forward. Thank you. The next question comes from Richard Vosser from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. You mentioned a growth rate of the market of around 20%, I think in the slides. Just wanted to think about how that growth rate develops over time. You know, as products maybe enter the commercial phases, do you see a step up in growth followed by slightly lower growth? You know, is that linear or are we gonna see step-ups as products are approved? And then I suppose more general question on Polyplus, you know, how should we think about that growth over the next few years for Polyplus, and how has that been historically for them? You know, are we expecting in say 2024, you know, ahead of market growth and then that coming back towards market growth in 2025? How should we think about that? second question, just thinking about the maybe the exposure to individual customers. You mentioned exposure, you know, well spread across the product pipeline of gene therapies. How should we think about exposure to individual customers in the revenues now and how that will change? Of course, we know that across your total business you have exposure. It's well diversified for by like 5% for each customer. How should we think about that for Polyplus? One final question, just thinking about the transition, you mentioned the two technologies, adhesion and suspension technologies for making viral vectors and making gene therapies. Does Polyplus get a step up in volume as you transition from one process to the other or is that not relevant at all? Thanks very much. Yeah. Thank you very much. Maybe I start and then René will add to that. On market growth, we wouldn't consider the growth of that market to slow down anytime soon. We are still talking about early times. René made the comparison to the monoclonal antibody market a couple of decades ago, actually. I think the times where commercial products run off patent, and therefore growth would slow down, we think is not close to us or we are not close to those times. We also have seen recently over the last couple of years that Polyplus, also because of they were expanding the portfolio, expanding the relevance of their offering to the quality and performance of their customers, they were able to rather grow a little bit ahead of market growth. One can also say is over the last couple of years, because you are rightly addressing the, let's say, potential cluster risks, I think Polyplus managed quite successfully to reduce such let's say, cluster risks within their portfolio over the last couple of years, as we said before, quite nicely present across the different stages of such products within the pipeline. Of course, when you relate that and compare that to the Sartorius business currently, it lays a little bit in the nature of such early stages, earlier markets, less mature markets that you have less players, a smaller number of large products, blockbusters, if you wish so. Therefore, yes, in relation, maybe it's a little bit more clustered, but yet I would say it's really not a highly clustered business as one sometimes has seen that in some other areas of technologies recently. Also, in regard to technologies, for example, that played a major role for the manufacturing of mRNA-based vaccines also. It's not at all such a clustered business, for example. Maybe with that, I hand it over to René to answer or to add to that and answer further aspects of those questions. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Joachim. Richard, thanks for the question. Let me talk about the adherent and suspension, your question around that. Today, the most of the pipeline, the molecules in the pipeline are based on traditional adherent cell culture processes. There is an effort in the industry to move from that to the more modern, more scalable, better to control processes, suspension processes. We would not see that like moving within a drug candidate from adherent to suspension with during the development, but rather a trend in the industry to- Put more candidates on suspension processes due to the reasons I mentioned, better scalability, better control, in that regard. Thank you. You're welcome. The next question comes from Hugo Solvet from BNP. Please go ahead. Hi. Hello. Thanks for taking my questions. First on the potential, size timing of equity component, can you maybe should market be in a better shape, by the time of the closing, give us a bit more indication on what size of equity component you could be doing? Are we talking about a minority or majority of the EUR 2.4 billion? Second, when you updated the 2025 targets for Sartorius Stedim, does Polyplus fits into the bolt-on type of deals that were included in the guide? Lastly, can you give us some indications on the size and growth profile of, how we say the more legacy portfolio of transfection reagents from Polyplus and the new offer from Custom plasmid vector designs and the growth rate, so that compare to the 20% growth of the broader market. Thank you. Rainer? Hugo, regarding the equity side, of course, as I mentioned, it really depends on the market environment after closing when we're looking into refinancing. Really wanna point out that we're talking here really about a smaller portion. By really, keep it in the, in the lower, let's say, double-digit percentages around there. It would be only a minority part, if any, that we would do on the equity side. Again, highly dependent on the market environment at the time of the refinancing. Focus here will be rather the debt side and tapping into the bond market. Maybe if I may add, Rainer, the lower double-digit% of the transaction volume. That is what you meant here. Yes. Yeah. Thanks for clarification. Yeah. The next question comes from Odyssey- No, no. Sorry. Hugo had three questions. Sorry. Yeah, and maybe not in addition, but answering the other two questions. Yeah. 2025 ambition, Hugo, just briefly, it is such a, yeah, bolt-on or whatever, you know, really, following the central whole strategy kind of acquisition, that we had in mind when describing our 2025 ambition that always included a certain portion of inorganic growth. No idea at this point to adjust our 2025 ambition indeed. Growth profile, maybe I'm not 100% sure whether I got that right because you said in how far that would relate to the legacy portfolio. What exactly was your point? Sorry. What. You presented the chart on the three businesses, let's call it them, for Polyplus. Can you share maybe the split of the total revenues and the growth rate for all of them so we have more indications on. Yeah, no. where growth come from? Yeah. I of course also understand that question. I have to really ask for your understanding that we cannot disclose more details at this point in time. It's a transaction that is not yet closed. We agreed upon the all terms. It's now waiting for regulatory approval. We cannot answer more details at this point. Sorry for that. All right. Thank you very much. The next question is from Odysseas Manesiotis from Berenberg. Please go ahead, sir. Hi there. Thanks for taking my questions and for putting this presentation together. Very helpful. Firstly, considering this one and your other recent acquisitions in the viral vector and advanced therapy space, which I'm assuming you're outgrowing your monoclonal antibodies business, would around 20% advanced therapy plus viral vector sales exposure for your bioprocessing business by 2024 be a reasonable estimate? Secondly, understand your ability to disclose might be limited, but I have to try. On the EBITDA margin of the group, with taking publicly listed nucleic acids product peers of Polyplus who are at around 40%-50%, as a comparison or at least decently above the group EBITDA margin. Thank you. René, do you wanna take that? Yes. Yeah, I can take it. When I referred to the combined businesses, which we have been acquiring in the space of cell and gene therapies or particularly, adding critical raw materials, cell culture media to our portfolio for these type of modalities, your question was if it's fair to say that the portion of revenue within the Bioprocess Solutions for these type of products would be around, I think your question was around 30%. I would say, heading towards that longer term. Short term, it's gonna be somewhere around 10%, rather. Great, thank you. Maybe the margins? I can take that. I would say basically you're thinking in the right direction, in the ranges that you provide there, and they are accretive to the Sartorius Group and also the BPS side. Hello? Sorry, could you repeat the last point? I got cut for a second. Okay. All I said, basically, you are absolutely right in your assumption that you put out there with the comparables, and they are accretive to the Bioprocess as well as the Sartorius group level EBITDA margins. All clear. Thank you very much. The next question is from Ed Ridley-Day from Redburn. Please go ahead. Good afternoon. Yes, thank you for the detail you've given thus far. Just a couple of follow-ups. Just on the sort of revenue and cross-selling synergies, can you give us any more color on where you particularly see opportunity there in terms of either specific areas of the market or indeed particular regions potentially where Polyplus is not present? That would be helpful. Thank you. In terms of the overall growth opportunity long term that we've been discussing, are there particular areas where, I mean, you've given some detail where Polyplus has significant market share. If you could give any color on particular areas where it has specific market share, that would be helpful. René? Yeah, I take it, Ed. Thank you for the questions. First of all, your first two questions around cross-selling opportunities on the portfolio side and region side. Starting with portfolio, as I mentioned, looking at the upstream processes in viral vector manufacturing, very strong synergies we would expect in areas of cell culture media from our Sartorius portfolio. Acquisition of Xell, I mentioned. These are media. Xell is a specialist company for media used in viral vector manufacturing. Also, here on the innovation side, we, when combining capabilities and biologics knowhow of Polyplus with cell line development knowhow of Sartorius, we would expect and, yeah, would target to develop innovative cell lines for that type of applications as well. I mentioned that these type of processes are run in single-use bioreactors, talking particularly about suspension cell culture, the newer, the more modern type of processes. Here we have a strong position both with process developmen,t with high throughput bioreactors and manufacturing single-use bioreactors. Again, last but not least, in downstream processing, purification of such molecules, not only viral vectors, but also DNA plasmids, RNA, the CIM technology, monolithic columns- Yes. Are very well suited for that type of application. Here we expect also synergies. On regions, that's mostly around moving from distributors where Polyplus in some regions is running the business today via distributors. We have direct sales organization in place that is I would expect. Any particular areas where Polyplus has strong market position, it's, I would say if you look at the viral vector landscape, the clinical pipelines, half of those are based on so-called adeno-associated virus, viral vectors, AAVs. For that significant part of the pipeline, Polyplus has a strong, very strong market position in the upstream as a, with the transaction regions particularly. Very good. No, thank you very much. The next question comes from Shubhangi Gupta from HSBC. Please go ahead. When do you think this acquisition becomes EPS and returns accretive? Reiner? Basically, we expect, it really depends, of course, on the financing side. Within, I would say within two years, basically, it is not diluted compared to the current one anymore. Thank you. The next question comes from Falko Friedrichs from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. For everyone, my first question is, can you share the interest rate that you're paying on this bridge loan? Secondly, I'm not sure if I understood your growth comment earlier correctly. Did I understand it correctly that you said that Polyplus should be rather growing around 10% over the shorter term? If that was the case, why is that so much lower than what you're expecting going forward? Thank you. Maybe I take first quickly the interest. Yes. I take quickly the interest rate. Then René or Jochen can comment on the growth. I'm not gonna disclose any details of the current bridge loan. On the long-term out financing, we of course expect a far more, let's say, substantial rate, more in the around 4-4.5% on the long-term side. All in. On growth, René, you wanna answer that? When I think when I mentioned 10% was about expectation on the portion of this type of critical raw materials within bio process or portfolio revenue-wise. Regarding growth rates, you could see market growth, we estimate for gene therapy is 20%, cell-based therapy is around 30%. That's a range where we would see Polyplus growing moving forward now. Perfect. Thank you. The next question comes from Delphine Le Louet from Societe Generale. Please go ahead. Yes. Hello. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. I'm sorry, because apparently my voice was not cut at the beginning, so I really do apologize. Two question on my side. The first one deals with the more or less the CapEx and the manufacturing investment which has been made over the course of Polyplus life and even recently with EUR 30 million envelope. I was wondering where are you in term of manufacturing lines and productivity? Do you have to invest massively in the short term? If yes, can you give us a bit more idea about that? Certainly will be probably on the setup, because we Polyplus has been built over the time in effectively many acquisition around in Europe. I was wondering if we can think about a more productive footprint, and especially considering Novasep assets. Finally, last question regarding the niche markets and the barriers to entry. There is many many vectors in place for the gene therapy with, let's say, plus or minus advantages or plus or minus obvious use and an idea. There is also a lot of new vectors coming into the market because it's a very, very difficult and effectively a key element to for the gene therapy. Where is the barrier to entry or the most innovative either reagent or vector that Polyplus has just for us to know and probably have a bit of a understanding of, you know, of the key asset of the company. Thank you. Maybe before René answers the two last questions, I answer the first one. CapEx, it's correct. There's some CapEx that already has been kicked off at Polyplus to further expand their GMP manufacturing capabilities and capacities. Beyond that, we don't see any, you know, near-term capacity expenses being necessary because it's well, well set up. Of course, a business that is growing very substantially will need further capacities going forward. We don't, you know, expect any massive extraordinary CapEx beyond normal CapEx ratios to back up the growth here. René? Yeah. Let me take your third question first around different type of viral vectors which are in the pipelines. I understood your question, what is like the entry barrier where Polyplus is how Polyplus is positioned. I mentioned already the strong position in AAVs, in adeno-associated viruses, with Polyplus. Looking into the future, our view is that it's gonna be more and more key and differentiating and important to provide the total integrated solution, a system, a combination of plasmids, which are designed together with transfection reagents to make those processes much more efficient than they are today. Today, it's really a pain in the industry to make viral vectors. The economies of processes are not there. That's why we are so excited about the combination with. Our, with Sartorius Technologies portfolio, which brings us in this position to design the right combination of reagents, and then overall process, with the equipment, other consumables, bags, filters, chromatography I mentioned before. I think we believe that's gonna be the differentiating factor moving forward. To your second question, if you Delphine could repeat that was around footprint, manufacturing footprint, but I'm not sure I got that question properly. Yeah, because I was effectively, I was wondering, if we can think in the future of having a more dedicated manufacturing for the gene and cell therapy somewhere because there is some Belgium manufacturing site at Polyplus. There is other in other European countries. I was wondering if there is any willingness to have a more effectively, as you mentioned, centralized approach for this one. Yeah. Okay. Thanks for that question. Delphine, if you look at the type of products or manufacturing equipment you need to make, for example, transfection reagents which, in essence is a polymer, versus you mentioned Xpress Biologics in Belgium, which is a fermentation, E. coli kind of fermentation process to make plasmids or proteins. These are different products requiring different manufacturing technologies where I would say a centralization to bring that all together is not necessarily on our agenda. Many thanks. Next question comes from Diane Bruneau from Elver Capital. Please go ahead. Hello. Thank you very much to take my question. I just wanted to check because we read some article where it mentions that Polyplus turnover was EUR 50 million in the year 2019 or 2020. Given the indication of the upper double-digit range that you give for this year, it seems that the CAGR is not so high versus your future expectation. Can you confirm on any explanation for that? Thank you. Let's, let's put it that way. First of all, again, I ask you for your understanding that we cannot disclose details of the business development and any numbers, sales, revenue, profitability detail of Polyplus at this point in time. Therefore, the rough answer that I can give is that we think that the growth rate, that Polyplus and its management has achieved over the recent period has been really strong. And that we see also very healthy prospects in regards to growth going forward. And we do believe, we talked about, you know, market growth expectations. It's shown also on one of those charts, and we said that we think that Polyplus is rather performing ahead of this or above this number, and I would again underline that. Maybe one addition, also coming back to one question that has been asked for good reasons before, and that was regarding clusters and how that business would look like. We tried to bring across that in earlier stages of a market, of course, you always have, by definition, a more clustered customer base than when you have already very broad, mature market with a lot of products being approved, et cetera. That of course is something that any business that is, you know, supplying into the gene therapy market, for example, or some others of the advanced therapy markets, can experience also some, growth dilution in a certain period if the demand for a particular drug may be lower one year after the other. Therefore it's less of a straight line maybe than in other businesses, even though, of course, it's never a straight line. What we can say here is that the growth profile and the, like, track record growth and the growth prospects of Polyplus, we consider both being very healthy. Thanks. We have a follow-up question from Hugo Solvay. Mr. Solvay, please go ahead. Hi. Hello. Thanks for taking the follow-up. Just two quick clarification. First on the metrics that we discussed on the sales growth profile and the margin. I just wanted to clarify, are we talking about, like, targeted target metrics, let's say in 12, 18 months once you will have integrated or before any cost and sales and cost synergies? That could come from the integration. Second, on Polyplus, you mentioned Joachim, that the industry which is going through normalization. Just wanted to check if Polyplus is also going through the normalization we are seeing at the moment for Sartorius. Thank you. Yeah, maybe the second question first. No, we don't see this, the normalization that we are talking about since quite a while, and that has started to happen now, since mid of last year, roughly, is very much related to the more, let's say, standard biopharmaceutical market, and is very much around the consumables like, you know, filters and bags, et cetera, for that market, at least the majority of that. We don't consider this to be really a major impact factor for Polyplus and margin profile. I think, Rainer said that it operates at a very attractive EBITDA margin. Regarding EBITDA margin, we expect Polyplus to be accretive from day one onwards. That's on EBITDA margin. It's also in regards to sales growth to some extent, of course, you know, all on a certain level, given the size ratios. What Rainer said regarding roughly two years is the period for which Polyplus would be a slightly EPS dilutive. The disclaimer, I think that Rainer shared was that this of course will depend then on the exact market conditions regarding interest rates as well as then the exact portion of equity that we might use that could be zero. Has clearly been pointed out by Rainer or could be a little bit higher than that. These are the parameters that will influence that. Ballpark is two years of slight EPS dilution and accretion for all other numbers from day one onwards. Okay. Thank you very much. The last question comes from Richard Vosser as a follow-up. Mr. Vosser, please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. It's just one very quick one on the. If you did use equity, I presume that the group AG would not participate in the equity raise. It would just be a raise that Stedim did, that AG would not participate in. If you could just clarify that'd be great. Thank you. Early days. Most likely I would say yes, but it's not any, you know, fixed playbook or transaction structure yet. You're right, most likely this would probably not be the case that AG participates in such equity increase of SSB. Thank you very much. Cool. Okay, I guess there are no further questions. Therefore I really would like to thank you also on behalf of my colleagues for your interest in Sartorius and Sartorius Stedim Biotech. It was great to have this discussion with you and particularly time for your, for your questions. I hope we were able to clarify your, the other questions, maybe also the concerns. And of course, looking forward to continue the dialogue with you at the next opportunity. All the best for you. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Bye everybody. Bye. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you very much for joining and have a good day.