What Happened?
Shares of life sciences company Avantor (NYSE: AVTR) fell 21.2% in the afternoon session after the company reported a weak first-quarter 2025 performance, as its organic revenue and total sales both missed Wall Street's expectations. Sales dropped 6% from a year ago, reflecting softness across both major business segments. Lab Solutions declined 8% while Bioscience Production slipped slightly. Encouragingly, management raised its cost savings target to $400 million by 2027 and signaled urgency to fix performance issues in the Lab Solutions segment. Overall, this was a softer quarter.
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What The Market Is Telling Us
Avantor’s shares are not very volatile and have only had 9 moves greater than 5% over the last year. Moves this big are rare for Avantor and indicate this news significantly impacted the market’s perception of the business.
The biggest move we wrote about over the last year was 3 months ago when the stock dropped 9.4% on the news that the company reported weak fourth quarter results. Its revenue missed and its organic revenue fell slightly short of Wall Street's estimates. Despite the return to organic growth and margin improvements enabling the company to beat analysts' EBITDA and earnings estimates, markets seemed unimpressed. The top line miss indicated the bar set for the company was high. Overall, this was a weaker quarter.
Avantor is down 40.5% since the beginning of the year, and at $12.62 per share, it is trading 54.5% below its 52-week high of $27.70 from September 2024. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Avantor’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $887.76.
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