AptarGroup 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Hello, everyone, thanks for being with us today.

Joining me on today's call are Stephan Tanda, our President and CEO, Vanessa Kanu, Executive Vice President and CFO, and Gaël Touya, our CEO Designate and President of AptarGroup Pharma. Our press release and accompanying slide deck have been posted on our website under the Investor Relations page. During this call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. These measures are reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure, and the reconciliations are set forth in the press release. Please refer to the press release disseminated yesterday for the reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measure discussed during this earnings call. As always, we will post a replay of this call on our website. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Stefan.

Thank you, Mary, good morning, everyone. As many of you know, this is my final earnings call as CEO of Aptar before I will retire later this year. It has been a tremendous honor to lead this company and work alongside our talented teams around the world. I'm incredibly proud of what we have accomplished together and confident that Aptar is well-positioned for continued success. With Gaël Touya assuming the role of President and CEO on September 1, I am assured in the future success of the company and excited as a shareholder. Gaël and I have worked closely together throughout this transition for much of the last decade. I know Aptar will greatly benefit from his deep experience, leadership, vision. Gaël is joining us on the call today and will be sharing our outlook towards the end of the call.

On a personal note, leading Aptar has been the greatest privilege of my career. What I will remember most is not any single accomplishment, but the people I've had the opportunity to work alongside, the relationships I have built with employees, customers, the investment community, and partners around the world. I have always believed that great companies are built by great people, Aptar is fortunate to have an exceptional team, a strong culture founded in performance and purpose, a consistent focus on execution, innovation, agility, and value creation. While there is always more work to do, I believe Aptar is entering its next chapter from a position of strength. I am excited about the future under Gaël's leadership and remain confident in the company's ability to deliver profitable growth, create long-term value for shareholders. Now, back to the business at hand.

Let me begin my earnings remarks by highlighting our second quarter results. Later in the call, our CFO, Vanessa Kanu, will provide additional details on the key drivers for the quarter. I am pleased to report that all three of our segments delivered positive sales growth during the quarter, and we delivered adjusted EPS results above our guidance range, due in part to better-than-expected Pharma performance. The Pharma segment continued to perform well, driven by strong demand across our injectables, consumer healthcare, and prescription businesses, highlighting the strengths of our innovation-led portfolio and the dedication of our teams around the world. We saw continued momentum in injectables, supported by demand for elastomeric components used for biologics, vaccines, and GLP-1 therapies, which according to a recent survey, showed that 11% of Americans are currently taking GLP-1 for weight loss, up from just 3% in 2024.

Consumer healthcare benefited from strong nasal decongestion and eye care solution sales. Prescriptions saw growth in central nervous system therapeutics and asthma COPD applications, which helped offset the anticipated destocking-related decline in emergency medicines. Beyond Pharma, Beauty benefited from double-digit core sales growth in prestige fragrance, while Closures saw strong beverage demand, particularly in bottled water. Operational performance in both segments improved progressively from the first quarter. Shifting gears from performance highlights, I want to spend a few minutes discussing how we continue to strengthen the pipeline and long-term growth of Pharma. Beyond our core delivery systems, we continue to expand the capabilities we bring to customers across formulation development, analytical services, regulatory support, and patient engagement. A few good examples include the patent applications we announced during the quarter related to inhaled and nasal GLP-1 therapies.

While these programs remain in the early stages, they build on formulation expertise that we currently provide to customers and demonstrate our continued exploration of capabilities that could create future growth opportunities in the delivery of biologics and other high-value therapeutic areas. Turning to active material science, our U.S. patent application for N-Sorb has been approved. N-Sorb is designed to address unacceptably high levels of nitrosamine impurities in pharmaceutical products. The FDA has issued guidance on nitrosamine, its predicted carcinogenic potency categorization, and recommendations on when a manufacturer should recall a product. As a first-of-its-kind packaging-delivered solution, Aptar's N-Sorb technology is intended to give pharmaceutical companies a new tool to reduce risk, meet regulatory demands, and deliver safer products. Additionally, we announced a collaborative system framework for injectable therapies, providing customers with earlier insight into assembled system performance for injectable therapies.

These expanded capabilities help customers make more informed development decisions, better manage risk, accelerate development timelines, and address the expectation of the United States Pharmacopeia. Taken together, these investments continue to advance our strategy, focusing all the way from drug formulation to the patient and deepen our role in the pharmaceutical development process. During the quarter, we also saw several milestones that reinforced the strength of our core pulmonary, nasal, and injectable delivery platforms. In respiratory health, products utilizing Aptar technologies received FDA approvals across both rescue and maintenance therapies for asthma and COPD, further validating the performance and regulatory track record of our pressurized metered-dose inhaler, or pMDI, platform. Chiesi received approval from the U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for the world's first pMDI utilizing HFA-152a, one of the next-generation propellants with low global warming potential.

This achievement is particularly meaningful because in 2023, Aptar was selected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to conduct research on next-generation propellant pMDIs through our Nanopharm business, recognizing our deep expertise in inhaled drug delivery. It is encouraging to see the first approval with this new propellant come to market, helping expand patient access to essential respiratory therapies while helping to reduce environmental impact. We continue to see growing interest in nasal delivery across a widening range of therapeutic areas. A recent example is Eli Lilly and Company's announced acquisition of AtaiBeckley, centered on an intranasal therapy for treatment-resistant depression that has received the FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation, and the program has begun initiating phase III trials. We believe this highlights and confirms a broader trend we have been discussing for some time now.

Nasal delivery is increasingly being explored not only in allergy, migraine, and emergency medicines, but also in central nervous system disorders, where rapid onset and direct access to the central nervous system may provide meaningful therapeutic advantages. One of the most significant developments during the quarter was the FDA's update to multiple product-specific guidance documents for generic inhaled therapies. These changes remove certain requirements, including certain clinical studies and bioequivalence testing, representing a significant shift in the FDA's expectations for generic pMDI development. We believe this is a positive development for Aptar, as the streamlined requirements should help bring more generic inhaled products to market more efficiently, while also highlighting the value of the scientific expertise and data generated through our collaboration with the FDA.

Moving to beauty, we continue to focus on premiumization, differentiated consumer experiences, and dispensing technologies that help our customers stand out in the increasingly competitive categories. We had the first commercial launch of our auto-loading dosing dropper technology for Dermalogica's FutureCode Booster skincare product. This technology features an auto-loading dropper cap, which fills the applicator with the same dose after each use and addresses consumer needs around dosage control, convenience, and clean usage. I also want to highlight that a new range of fragrances by French Corner have launched in the Middle East market featuring our prestige fragrance pump. Lastly, in closures, recent launches showcase our ability to improve convenience, functionality, and the overall consumer experience through differentiated dispensing solutions. Heinz is featuring our Tab Top closure for clean, convenient, directional dispensing on its new line of flavorful dipping sauces in North America.

In China, our closure with SimpliSqueeze valve is being used for easy, one-handed, spill-free hydration on the go. In terms of sustainability, there are several notable recent accolades to touch on. Aptar was named a CDP supplier engagement leader for the sixth consecutive year. This assessment highlights companies that are engaging their suppliers on climate change and supporting efforts to address emissions throughout the value chain. We have also been named one of the world's most sustainable companies by Time for the third consecutive year, and we have been named among the magazine's top 100 America's Best Companies. This inaugural list highlights top U.S.-based companies during the nation's 250th anniversary. The America's Best Companies 2026 ranking identified the top-performing companies based on employee satisfaction, financial performance, as well as sustainability performance and transparency.

Aptar is ranked within the top five companies nationwide in the engineering, manufacturing, and medical technology category and is ranked in the top 10 companies nationwide for sustainability and transparency. I also want to provide an update on litigation. Recently, the court issued a favorable ruling for Aptar in our litigation against ARS Pharmaceuticals related to Aptar's proprietary nasal drug delivery technology and confidential manufacturing know-how. The court granted our motion to amend the complaint to maintain our state law trade secret misappropriation claim and denied ARS' motion to dismiss the remaining claims. We were also pleased that the court transferred the later filed California action brought by ARS to New York under the first-to-file rule, ensuring the related matters will proceed in a single jurisdiction. The litigation remains ongoing, and the next phase will allow us to further develop the factual record.