Stuff, fireside chat. I'm joined by Kim Kelderman, Chief Executive Officer, and Jim Hippel, Chief Financial Officer. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. Thanks for having us. Format's going to be a fireside chat, and then we'll open up to the audience. If there's any questions, just raise your hand, and we can squeeze you in as well. I guess just to kick things off, you reported fiscal Q3 results recently. Solid results, especially considering some of the macro headwinds and macro uncertainty. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about that, but maybe you can just give us some highlights from the quarter, just sort of how it played out relative to expectations. Where were you a little bit able to exceed expectations? Were you seeing a little bit more headwinds? Yeah, thanks for the question, Michael. Of course, thanks for acknowledging that it was a very solid quarter considering the volatility in the market. Yeah, 6% growth. We were quite pleased with that. We have the largest part of the company in the protein science segment. Actually ran at 7% growth, and that's really what drove the result, top and bottom line, which was very broad-based. We are very pleased to see that our core reagents, which is still over half of the company, did really well. Our instrumentation related to detecting and analyzing proteins, the Protein Simple franchise, did also really nice. That's the second quarter back in the black, which we really applaud. Last but not least, our cell and gene therapy has continued to be a driver and also boosted the results. We jumped to the other segment, the diagnostics and spatial segment Their growth was a little muted, 2%, boosted by the continued growth of the EPI, the prostate cancer tests, as well as by the other diagnostic side. The more volatile corner, where we saw some timing of orders, not really end markets, but related, but timing of orders related, was the diagnostic reagents and controls. Having some timing issues as well as the assurance and kits that go into laboratory also related to timing issues. We did our homework there. We're quite pleased that we know it's not a market-related issue and/or a competitive issue, but pure timing. That put that segment at 2% growth and an overall 6%. Something the team should be very proud of as well is the bottom line. 34.9% EBITDA margins in these conditions. I applaud the efficiencies we've continued to show, of course, very deliberate in efficiencies around our operational footprint. Combined the top-line growth with these efficiencies, yeah, we were quite pleased how that rolled out. Okay. Next, I want to touch on some of the specific headwinds we've all been focused on in the market. First, let's talk about U.S. academic, U.S. A&G. Can you remind us sort of what your exposure is here, what you've seen as calendar first quarter fiscal Q3 played out, sort of how April's gone for you? Yeah. Academic globally for Bio-Techne, 21% of our revenues come from academic business. 12% is related to U.S. academic. We believe that half of that or so is exposed to NIH funding partially or fully. We do less than 1% of our revenue as direct business with NIH. That scopes kind of the revenue exposure. February when this got announced, of course, these end markets specifically got very nervous and did not fully understand what it all means. I think they still do not fully understand what it all means. That is all to be settled. One thing is certain is that there will be more clarity around these uncertainties. There is definitely a stalling for a little bit. Fortunately, we saw a more normalized activity a month later in March. We're happy to see that things, at least as it comes to new grants, etc., are back up and rolling. We clearly saw that our consumables, actually, which is fortunately the largest part of our company, right? 80% of our business is related to consumables. We held relatively steady, and it was really the equipment that took the majority of the hit if it comes to activity. That's fortunately not only related to us. We saw that also from our peers. Something that obviously, if you hear that your budgets are not certain and your grants are not certain, that's the first thing that you hold back on. We are actually still very positive about the end markets. Maybe not short-short, but short, mid, and long-term, just because we, as I mentioned, our product portfolio mix of 80% consumables, we feel it's less volatile there. We also feel that the use of proceeds of the grants, the rhetoric has it that they are more focused away from the pandemic and resource-related to the pandemic, the vaccinations, etc., and going more into chronic diseases, neurology, immunology, and oncology, which are actually research fields that are much better aligned with our product portfolio and our usage of our instrumentation. We feel that the use of proceeds, even though they could come down, them going more into the fields that are aligned with our product portfolio, we feel that there could be a positive boost to our results. We saw the opposite, by the way, over the last couple of years. Where funding was obviously very focused on research in infectious diseases, and there were significant increases, and we were still growing mid-single digits because we were not the benefactor of it. We feel that the other way around, we would definitely see a little boost. Okay. What should we keep in mind as far as forward indicators of how the end market's going to do? There's a lot of indirect funds and indirect cost caps. There's a question on fiscally a 2026 budget. The president's put out his initial proposal, and now we have to wait for Congress. You talked about shifting funds priorities within U.S. A&G. Sort of how do we monitor that and try to get a forward indicator of how that can play out? I'm not sure if you have an opinion on that. Yeah, I mean, it's really just getting more and more certainty around how that does play out, right? I think our view is that we got to ask earlier today, when's the other shoe going to drop in academic? And my joke was, there's no more shoes to wear. They've all dropped, right? I think all the possible worst-case scenarios and bad news is out there. Just play out anything like the tariff thing, that's kind of how the strategy has been with the administration, is put the worst-case thing out there and then negotiate your way back. There's still even a lot of uncertainty around the 40% and 40% of what? Is that just the indirect cost saving? We've heard that that's the intention. It's not really meant to intended to impact direct spending. I think you got to step back and say, rationally, what are the likely outcomes here? We've heard from our own customers that the indirect cap is probably the biggest issue, although not as big as sort of impact most every university different. We've heard some customers that they were shocked to hear that some universities got the cap rates they got because they never saw that. It was kind of crazy how it was done historically, right? It was all just individually negotiated. Whatever political clout you had would depend on how much your university got. A lot of this money also goes to general funds, which general funds could be spent on anything. At the same time, we've also heard from our customers that a 15% cap is probably on the stringent side, and there probably would need to be some cuts in direct funding to help cover for that. Like everything else, the truth is somewhere in the middle in terms of where a win-win would play out. I think there's still a lot of opportunity for that win-win to happen. Congress hasn't even gotten their hands on this. Let's remember, it wasn't that long ago in the first Trump administration, he proposed 20% cuts. The Congress that was bipartisan, but it was still controlled by the Republican Party for a couple of years or two of those years, came back with very solid increases. I think you got to kind of see the forest for the trees on this. I think at the end of the day, when that settles, it'll be fine. In the meantime, in the very near term, as Kim mentioned, it does cause distraction, if nothing else. Some of our academic customers are distracted by work, thinking how they're going to write their next grant or where that may come from, they're not as advanced doing the current work. That's what we have to work through in the very near term. Yeah. You mentioned earlier when you were talking about performance in the first quarter and A&G, sort of the differentiation between consumables and instrumentation. When we're thinking about the consumable side of things from a customer spending perspective, I think probably one of the better indicators is just absolute headcount, scientists at the lab. If you're at the lab, you can't not be ordering reagents and consumables. You got to do something. What have you seen there in terms of hiring freezes, maybe actual reductions in force on some of the academic labs? Is there anything there that makes you concerned about forward momentum? I mean, I've seen reported on our customers are telling us, and we also saw the headlines around this first hit, first week of February, around universities postponing new students for PhD programs, etc. That was right out of the gate in the very early stages of this. We haven't heard any feedback that that's continued. That's the short answer, that we haven't heard that that's still the case or not. We definitely haven't heard about central labs like that laying off people in academic at this point. I think it'd be very premature for them to do so because it's not like they don't have the money now. They're worried about maybe the money 12 months from now where the next grants come from. To take those kind of drastic actions when there's still so much uncertainty of where this all plays out, I think for most of our academic customers, it wouldn't be wise to do that anyway. Okay. I want to talk about the other big policy issue, which is tariffs. Give us an update on your tariff exposure mitigation efforts, and especially in light of the news yesterday of China tariff reductions of 30% and 10%. Yeah, the new news is obviously welcome. Even before that, over the last couple of weeks, we've talked about our exposure. If we would do nothing, we would be exposed by $20 million or so when it comes to cost and tariffs. Fortunately, we had the luxury of having a nice global footprint that we can utilize to shift some manufacturing from A to B and with that reduce the number of cross-border shipments and with that reduce the tariffs. We had line of sight to do those shifts within months. We have line of sight to do it in months. It might not be as necessary anymore, but we think it's still prudent to exclude some of those projects in case things go backwards. With that, negate almost, and I'm talking hundreds of thousands of dollars off from the negate almost all the $20 million within the quarter so that we would have a fresh start without that cloud of tariffs hanging over us for the fiscal year 2026. Now, most of our products are being produced in the U.S. Our highest exposure was really instruments that we produce in the U.S. that would go into China. For that reason, we have several locations that build our instruments, not all models, but we would have swapped some of those models around and negated relatively easily. That might now be less of a savior because things resulted south already, which is welcome for the industry, and we applaud. Yeah, so for us, really, what we did over the last couple of months is assess it, make sure that we plan for the worst and be ready for if things get better. That is exactly what happened. I am really proud of the fact that management had really precisely dedicated certain groups of people with limited exposure for the whole company to this tariff stuff, right? The one risk you really have is that your whole company is suddenly working on the tariffs. I have certainly chatted with peers where that seems to be the case. I want to make sure that we have real clean teams that have all the authority and know-how to make a dent and negate these things, but ring-fence it so that the rest of the company is still innovating, still making sure that we launch products and send high-quality products and selling and helping our customers going through this nervousness. I think we did a good job on it. Okay. I mean, you talked about the mitigating steps you're doing and potentially scaling back on them. Are any of them sort of, we're going to move ahead no matter what, or are there areas where it's relatively quick and easy to say, you know what, at 30% versus 145%, it doesn't make as much sense to implement that? Yeah, so we. Or 10, 1.5? Yes. 10, 1.5. Yeah, we're going to make that distinction. It will be 10% going into China. Yep. Yeah, I mean, the NPV of these projects goes down drastically. I was mentioning that how big of a workload it is, it's also very small, and that's why we could do it on such short term. Therefore, I think since we started lifting, we'll just finish the lift. We internally didn't even look at how much it costs and how much distraction it is because it was just so limited. We figured those are, we called them internally, what are the no-regret moves? We'll execute on those. Okay. The other topic I want to touch on before we go into specific products is just biopharma overall, your biggest exposure there. What did you see in the third quarter? How do you expect the rest of the year to play out? Any changes there? Yeah, bio-pharma is 50% of the revenues, right? With large pharma, 30%, and biotech, 20% of that. As you might remember, when we guided for the year, we did our soft guidance thinking that our first quarter would be relatively flat to the fourth quarter of last year. We would slowly see biotech stepping it up, and we would see China getting back into the black, and we would see at the end of the year, our year, which is more or less right now, we would see pharma kicking in. That was a real good logical approach to the year that almost came out like that. A couple of changes if it comes to timing and which were the real drivers. I think pharma, large pharma really surprised us to the upside. It was stronger earlier than we thought, so it was already in Q2, so the end of the calendar year last year. We saw some traction, and then our Q3 and our Q4, oh, I'm not talking about Q4 yet. Our Q3 certainly saw a huge tailwind from pharma being in double digits, right? That was really good. The biotech, though, was relatively flattish, and that's very much in line with how we all look at funding levels, and we saw that funding levels have not been extremely strong in biotech, very much related to capital markets, right, and appetite to invest in new ventures. They struggled a little bit more, and we saw that in the results with kind of flattish results in that end market. In aggregate, it was more or less how we expected it. We'll talk about a Q4 forecast a little bit later, so I won't go into that part, but obviously, those two dynamics are going to play an important role in our Q4 results. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. The China component, as well as the academic component we just talked about, China component was supposed to come back in the black, but basically was on track to do that in Q1, Q2. It took a step back to negative mid-single digits this last quarter, and more or less in line with the overall sentiment. We saw that there was a little bit of stimulus, but not a whole lot. We know that there is a housing or a real estate market crisis. We know that there is unemployment that is relatively high, and that consumer sentiment in China has lowered. I think that is not going to change significantly in the upcoming quarter. That would be basically flattish in our assumptions. However, this newer deal could spark activity levels, right? We don't know how fast and to what extent, but that could be a positive jolt to the local economy. Okay. You're talking about the change in the de-escalation of the trade war? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about some of the various product segments, the core portfolio of research reagents, antibodies, assays, proteins. There's been a decent amount of consolidation in that space over the last couple of years, over the last two, three, five years. Has that changed the industry dynamic a little bit, and how do you feel like your position relative to some of these more consolidated vendors? Yeah, it changed the dynamics probably because it used to be many, many small and some mid-sized players, and now obviously, several of the very successful assets became part of larger conglomerate companies. Obviously, well-run companies, and they will do really well. We focus on what we are famous for, and that's having a tremendous portfolio of choice after 49 years of being at it, and then combine that with very high quality and consistency of these reagents, and therewith a good reputation. Very important is also that we have a sales force that's highly technical and can help customers pick the right stuff very quickly. That's how we've competed in the past. We've always outperformed by a couple of percent of the competition, and we have continued to do so. Is more visibility now for us in some of the disclosures as to how we do and how others are doing. We are actually quite happy to see that we continue to outperform. Even though the dynamics might have changed, our formula is still effective. Okay. Got about 10 minutes left. If there's any questions from the audience, feel free to jump in. Otherwise, we'll keep going. I want to ask about cell and gene therapy, especially GMP reagents, a big part of that business. So what's the split of your exposure there between cell and gene? And can you talk about how Q3 played out relative to your expectations, what you're seeing in that end market? The expectations for that market, we mentioned basically quarter by quarter just because the percentages were fluctuating so significantly. We had a 40%, 60%, and a 90% quarter, I think. We always went back and said like this, and we want to talk about trailing 12 months because it is just very volatile, and that is inherent to having some larger accounts. If you think about it, we have 550 or so customers in the pipeline. Of that, 85 are in clinical studies, and of that, 6 are in phase III. In phase III, obviously, the volumes are exponential compared to the other phases. That means the orders related to those getting through those phases are much bigger. That means timing becomes the main fluence. This quarter was mid to high single digits, and that puts us at a trailing 12 months of a little over 30%. That is where we kind of expected it, where we also guided throughout the year that people should. We had guardrails of between 20%-40%. Thirty sits nicely in the middle, and that is where we are currently sitting. Okay. There's been a lot of noise from a policy perspective here in terms of new political appointments within FDA, HHS. Obviously, still very recent, but has that changed any of your conversations with your customers, or has that changed their sentiment or their appetite to invest in these cell and gene therapies? Yeah, there's several of them, so I can go one by one. I think in cell and gene therapy, the nice side of the conversations are that nobody is questioning that the new therapies are groundbreaking. They are just going to enable the cure diseases that we've in the past not even been able to partially treat, right? There is no discussion on whether this is a very promising field. The discussion is how stringent you should be and how high the regulatory hurdles should be before you can go to market with them. I think that's a good discussion because at the end of the day, yes, we make money in all the clinical stages. Of course, if a drug then goes commercial, we would make money there too, probably in larger volumes, so that's all good. Sometimes a drug doesn't make it. The most important part is that you don't want a great opportunity like cell and gene therapy to enter the market too quickly and then have a negative blowback where a drug doesn't do what it's supposed to do or you have fallout or recall. That would set the whole industry back. We are actually much aligned with take it in a good pace, have a good pipeline, pick the right diseases, and we want to play in all of them. We will make money along the line. As long as nobody, as long as there's no big recalls and missteps, which we saw 50 years ago with small molecules of things going horribly wrong, right? At some point, people start doubting, is that actually the right way to go? We don't want that in cell and gene therapy, so that's pretty much aligned. If you hear the FDA appointment and you think about the drive towards using organoids more than animal models, that is very much aligned with our philosophy already. Like you saw earlier this year, we separated a business from the fetal bovine serum because we did not believe that animal-derived products are going to be long-term beneficial for us. We have a fantastic portfolio of a whole menu of ingredients to help customers build their organoids. This would just put wind in the sails of that bet we have made over the last 5- 10 years to build a whole portfolio around organoids. We were big believers in it. Last but not least, what was the third one? I think it might be the drive of NIH towards chronic diseases. Those were the three kind of announcements with new directions when it comes to regulation. Three of those so far we like. Okay. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about the spatial business. Can you give us an update on how that's fared? Where are you most focused and where do you see some of the opportunities going forward as that field matures a little bit? Yeah, the spatial business, basically, you can separate it in a couple of components. At the end of the day, we're going to make this offering in a full workflow, but we have a very competitive instrument that is doing really well in the market. We talked about in the earnings calls, still hit the double-digit growth in spite of the turbulence that we had last quarter that we saw last quarter. Very competitive, fully automated, multi-omics, high-plex. It's just the state-of-the-art instrument in the industry, and we're very proud of that. Now, what is really cool is that it uses the different reagents, right? You want to look at RNA or mRNA. You want to look at your proteins, and this system can do both in the same slide and even protein-protein interactions. That is very unique, but in the meantime, that means it pulls through all the RNA reagents we have, and we have 70,000 different probes, and that is a $110 million or so in run rate in reagents. It is the largest reagent portfolio in the spatial industry. Secondly, we have fantastic antibodies, and we now have completed more than 50 that would run on the spatial instrument. We like that the instrument is very competitive, and it will pull through all our reagents, and that is exactly the model that we were aiming for. Okay. We got a couple of minutes left. I want to hit on a couple of topics. You mentioned, oh, we got a question. Yep. Yep. Can everyone hear me? Okay. You've made a lot of acquisitions over time, your last one being in spatial. Do you think you'll continue that trend, and what areas do you think it'll be in to kind of add on? Yeah, M&A is definitely something that has our highest priority when it comes to allocating our capital. Yeah, spatial was the last one. That was the instrument I just talked about. That definitely had this symbiotic model that we tend to have where, yes, we buy an instrument or a disposable that pulls through our reagents because we have really high-quality, high-margin reagents. That makes the model very viable. It is high on the priority list. Expectations when it comes to value were somewhat out of whack in our minds, so we stayed very disciplined. We wanted to make sure that there is a return on investment at a certain point and a return on capital and that there is potential that whatever asset we acquire has potential to grow double digits and hit margins over 30% so that eventually is not diluted to the company. That is what we hold in high regard, and we will continue to aim for that. Right now, even though the turbulence and inconsistency in the end markets are unsettling, they are working towards more reasonable price expectations. We have been really busy in the last nine months or so. We have landscaped. We looked at all the specific targets. We, of course, maintained relationships. We have looked at several acquisitions that would have been nice, but out of whack from expectations. Now we feel that things are coming closer to being able to take place, and it would be a good deal for both, right? Sometimes it is a good deal for a seller, but if a buyer overpays, then it is painful for a while as well. I think we are entering an environment where you could have win-win. Got maybe one or two minutes left. I want to throw in a couple of last questions altogether. Maybe talked about fiscal force here earlier, sort of your expectations going for that. Could you walk us through that, and then I'll bridge that to a fiscal year 2026 question. Just how do you approach setting guidance in an environment like today? So much volatility, so much change on a day-to-day basis. How's that going to impact your thinking ahead for the next 12 months? At a very high level in terms of Q4, I think we're still in the midst of uncertainty, even though there's positive uncertainties and then followed by negatives and then followed by positives. At the end of the day, we're still in uncertainty. And when there's uncertainty, there's distraction regardless. That being said, we saw our academic run rates level out in March, and we kind of expect to continue that continuing in April. Basically the same kind of relative performance we're expecting in Q4. Same goes for biotech. As Kim mentioned, we think biotech is right now being psychologically, if nothing else, impacted by the concerns around the greater capital markets. The announcement the last couple of days around the easing of China tariffs may help that, which would be welcome. Nonetheless, we've seen that level of large growth rate we continue for small biotech. Same for China, kind of the same there, but I think China's also been influenced by the macroeconomic situation around tariffs. Who knows? It could be from upside there, and maybe it'll turn the corner there this quarter next. We'll see. For now, we assume the same kind of level of performance. The only difference really is large pharma, right? Large pharma really carried the day for us in Q3 at double-digit growth. Now with the most recent activity here in April and in May around, and still we got to come, we think, with regard to large pharma and impacts of whether it be tariffs or most favorite nation, no one really knows yet what's that neutral, positive, or negative, but it's definitely uncertain if nothing else. We still saw growth in our pharma in April, but it was definitely a lower growth rate, which made sense to me. We basically got that lower growth rate built into our Q4 forecast, which gets you down to a more low to no digit overall growth rate. That's kind of high level of thinking behind the current quarter. All I can say about fiscal year 2026 is I'm glad I have another quarter to wait on that one yet because how is it different from where we were a year ago when we thought a year ago we were sitting in rather uncertain times, but yet not nearly as the recovery and the pace of recovery was uncertain, but the here and now was not. It was more stable, right? We were already well under the thick of the bio-pharma revamping their pipeline in response to IRA. We were seeing uptrends in biotech funding. We heard about stimulus coming in China in the back half of our fiscal year. We saw a pathway to recovery, and that pathway, as Kim talked about, was more or less right on track up until the end of January. When these other bombs started to fall, but we did not see it, of course, coming nine months ago. Right now, we are not in any kind of real stable at all. We are still very unknown as to how this all plays out. I am just hoping that three months from now, things are more stable so now you can start building a constructive case for what the road to recovery looks like and that we can do something similar. It gives kind of guidance we gave last year for next year. Got it. Okay. That is fair. All right. With that, we are out of time. Thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you, Michael. Thank you.