Azenta NASDAQ: AZTA executives used a presentation and fireside chat at the Raymond James Institutional Investor Conference to outline what CEO John Marotta described as a turnaround underway since he joined the company in September 2024, emphasizing portfolio focus, operational improvements, and a shift in resources from overhead into growth investments.
Business overview and market positioning
Marotta said the company operates in an ecosystem that is “front and center” for large pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers, noting Azenta’s presence within the top 20 pharma and biotech companies and a “deep installed base” that includes more than 150 stores globally and thousands of instruments. He said this footprint supports share gains and consumables growth.
He described Azenta’s current serviceable addressable market (SAM) as roughly $6 billion, with the company at about 10% penetration. Marotta said Azenta is “around a $600 million business” and grew about 3% last year. He added that about 55% of revenue is recurring, and said the company has “clear plans” to expand recurring revenue over time.
Marotta also provided several operating statistics, including a customer base of roughly 14,000, a workforce where “one of three” employees holds a PhD, and a revenue mix of about 55% pharma and biotech and about 46% academic, medical, and government. He said Azenta manages about 60 million samples globally and supports more than 1 billion samples through customer sites and biorepositories.
Two segments: sample management and multiomics
Marotta said Azenta has two primary business segments:
- Sample Management Solutions (SMS): Includes a global biorepository footprint with nine repositories and an automated solutions business focused on ultra-low temperature storage (down to -90°C) through ambient conditions, including robotics. He also highlighted the company’s consumables and instruments offerings that support automated workflows.
- Multiomics: Encompasses next-generation sequencing services through 14 labs globally, supported by a network of about 4,000 “dropboxes,” which he characterized as providing proximity to customers. He also described gene synthesis as a “very profitable” business focused on more complex genes, which he said is lower volume but “very high margin.”
He added that the portfolio is supported by a digital ecosystem that allows customers to order and manage samples remotely or onsite, and said the company is making investments in that area.
Turnaround actions: portfolio changes, restructuring, and KPIs
Marotta said Azenta’s story had been “confused” after years of acquisitions and centralization, and he outlined efforts to simplify operations and improve execution. He cited inherited complexity such as 13 IT systems and 39 legal entities, along with quality and on-time delivery challenges.
Among early portfolio actions, Marotta said the company decided within about a month of his arrival to divest B Medical because it did not fit the portfolio. He said the company had divested B Medical and was targeting a closing “at the end of the month.”
He also described organizational redesign, including a smaller corporate headquarters and a shift to business- and region-focused leadership. As part of cost actions, Marotta said the company restructured roughly 300–350 corporate headcount and later removed an additional 40 headcount from the SMS business. He said the company is continuing to reduce G&A and redeploy resources into R&D and sales and marketing.
To track progress, Marotta said the company implemented monthly business reviews and standardized KPIs, including customer-facing measures (quality and on-time delivery), shareholder measures (top-line growth, operating margin expansion, working capital, free cash flow, and return on invested capital), and employee measures (turnover and internal fill rates).
Commercial reboot and regional progress
In the fireside chat, Raymond James analyst Andrew Cooper asked about the pace of salesforce repositioning. Marotta said Europe was “eight to nine innings” through its commercial changes and performing well. In North America, he said the SMS automated solutions team had been behind but was progressing, estimating “seven to eight” innings and noting the final two sales representatives had recently been hired.
Marotta said the Sample Repository Services (SRS) organization required a broader reboot after COVID-era sales coverage left personnel in locations that did not align with customer density. He said a new leader is in place and changes were implemented in late summer and early fall.
In multiomics, he said Europe was in better shape, while North America was still in a reboot. He noted the company is in a lawsuit with Twist and said Twist had taken some employees, adding that Azenta felt “very good” about its position regarding restricted covenants. He said managers and sales representatives had been brought in, with a North America sales leader position still to be filled, estimating the reboot at “inning six to seven.”
Operational excellence and early indicators
Marotta and CFO Lawrence Lin discussed Azenta’s “ABS” continuous improvement approach, describing it as a method to improve operating leverage, gross margin, and cash conversion through targeted “Kaizen” projects that produce step-change improvements rather than incremental changes over long periods.
Marotta cited examples in the GENEWIZ business, including reducing a customer delivery time from 25 days to nine hours after a week-long effort. He also said work on sample registrations reduced backlogs from weeks to days, which he linked to revenue and efficiency. On customer execution, he said complaints in stores were reduced by 55%, and said on-time delivery in the company’s consumables and instruments business improved from about 15% to 65%, with a goal of reaching 95% this year.
Lin added an example from back-office operations: an accounting close Kaizen that he said was expected to deliver a 35% to 50% improvement, which he framed as improving both G&A efficiency and the timeliness of internal dashboards used to run the business. Marotta also said the company intended to bring accounting work back in-house after a prior decision to outsource accounting functions abroad, describing process mapping and waste elimination as prerequisites to doing so.
On capital deployment, Marotta said Azenta has about $550 million in cash and plans to use four tools: gross margin and productivity improvements, growth investments, M&A, and buybacks.
About Azenta NASDAQ: AZTA
Azenta, Inc NASDAQ: AZTA is a life sciences technology company specializing in sample management, cryogenic storage and genomic services for research and clinical applications. Formerly the Life Sciences division of Brooks Automation, Azenta provides integrated solutions that enable customers to store, track and analyze biological samples with high levels of automation, data integrity and efficiency. Its offerings span automated storage systems, biorepository management software and end‐to‐end sample tracking workflows.
In addition to hardware and informatics platforms for sample storage, Azenta's Genomics business delivers next‐generation sequencing (NGS), DNA synthesis, and molecular biology services.
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