Science 37 Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:SNCE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mike Zaranek: Sure, and just a point of clarification, the bonus payout is more a cash burn item as opposed to necessarily an EBITDA impact. In terms of the revenue phasing throughout the year, as I mentioned earlier, we do expect to have more skewing of revenue towards the second half of this year, with second half of this year being more than 25% higher than the first half, and that’s embedded in the guidance. We also expect to see year-over-year growth in the second half of this year.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is coming from the line of Matt Hewitt with Craig Hallum. Please proceed with your questions.

Matt Hewitt: Good morning, thank you for taking the questions. Maybe first up, as you look at the current pharma biotech landscape, I think there’s been a lot of news talking about rationalization of pipelines, reprioritization that happened maybe spring of last year and obviously happened again in the fall of last year, which impacted your Q3 results. But as you talk to your pharma customers, partners now, do you get the sense that we’re through that now and it’s really about just driving trials, getting that remaining pipeline kind of going, and what does that imply for, I guess, this year and more importantly for next year for your business?

David Coman: I get a sense that we continue to see from an industry standpoint longer decision making timelines because they’re being a lot more intentional with their spend, a lot more cost pressure that they’re feeling that I think is being translated into their discovery efforts, and then we are seeing funding issues within the biotech space still, so I don’t see that changing in the short term.

Matt Hewitt: Got it, and then maybe one modeling question regarding gross margins. How should we be thinking about those from a cadence perspective, is there another step-down here in Q1 and then we start to see those grow over the course of the year, or just any color there would be helpful. Thanks.

Mike Zaranek: Sure. Yes, I think gross margin–you know, obviously we’ve taken some actions around the costs to pull some excess capacity out of the organization in Q4. Gross margins will be impacted by revenue, and so from that standpoint, I think as we have that skewing towards more revenue in the second half of 2023, you should see some improvement on the gross margin side. But up until that point, from our modeling perspective probably not a material change versus where we’ve been.

David Coman: Yes, so flat out of the gate and then sequentially moving up as the year progresses.

Mike Zaranek: Correct.

Matt Hewitt: Got it, thank you very much.

David Coman: Thanks Matt.

Mike Zaranek: Hey, sorry – I want to come back to one question from Christine that we were asked earlier and we did not address, regarding the mix between new and existing clients. I think we’ve said this previously but want to re-emphasize this, at the current size and scale, one or two projects can make a material difference in terms of the bookings in a particular quarter, and for example to David’s earlier point, we did win a very large project from a top 10 pharma that was a repeat customer in the fourth quarter of 2022. But if you look at overall throughout the course of 2022, we were able to increase gross bookings from new customers by more than 40%, and fair to say that if you look at the mix between new and existing customers for the full year 2022, it was skewed roughly about two-thirds to the new customer front and about a third from existing customers, so good mix between the two. It can vary by quarter, but for the full year those were the stats.