Gajus Worthington
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Your line is open
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Fluidigm finished 2014 strong with total revenue of $116.5 million ending at the high-end of our guidance of $114 million to $117 million. We grew organic revenue for the year by 35%, driven primarily by increased sales of the C1 systems and robust consumable demand across production genomics and single-cell genomics applications. Our CyTOF single-cell proteomics product line grew 70% sequentially and bookings growth was also robust. Finally, we introduced several new products, including a new High Throughput Single-Cell mRNA Sequencing IFC for the C1 and announced our microfluidic cell culture system Callisto. I am proud of the efforts and focus of the Fluidigm team, particularly in light of the challenges we faced with the DVS acquisition earlier in 2014. I'm pleased to say, we have now successfully completed the integration of DVS Sciences and have expanded into single-cell proteomic. This solidifies our leadership position in the single-cell biology market, enables us to shape its future and direction, and helps set the stage for 2015. The single-cell biology market is vibrant, compelling science abounds and publications are growing at an accelerating pace. As a result, the research community increasingly recognizes the requirement to study biology at the single -- at single-cell resolution. We estimate the overall single-cell biology market across genomics and proteomics was approximately $416 -- $460 million in 2014, growing 30% per year to $1 billion in 2017. We believe the underlying growth indicators of the market point to continued strength. For example, in the fourth quarter, Sweden became the fourth country with dedicated single-cell funding. Moreover, we announced in a separate press release today that the science for Life Laboratory has established the Swedish National Center for Single-Cell Biology. SciLifeLab is a collaboration between four Swedish universities, which have established the Swedish National Center for Single-Cell Biology with a goal to implement infrastructure and advanced methods for high throughput genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic analyses of individual cells. This new center will house multiple Fluidigm single-cell systems. Specifically, this new single-cell biology center has purchased six C1 systems, three CyTOF 2 systems and a Biomark HD system. Across the globe we had a landmark year for publications. At the end of 2014, the total number of single-cell publications citing Fluidigm technology reached 251, including 23 C1 publications and 72 publications citing mass cytometry technology, up 58% from 159 total single-cell publications at the end of 2013. Our total installed base at the end of 2014 was 1,325 instruments. Of this over 600 systems were designated for single-cell biology research, including 275 C1 and over 235 single-cell Biomark units. As a reminder, we had initially communicated back in Q3 of 2012 a goal of approximately 700 Fluidigm systems for single-cell research comprised of C1 and single-cell Biomark systems by the end of 2015. I'm happy to report that we expect to meet or exceed this goal by the end of the year. However, given the broadening of our single-cell portfolio to now include the CyTOF platform. This metric is now outdated. Accordingly, we plan to provide a more informative metric in the future based on a combined single-cell biology installed base footprint. Overall, single-cell biology revenue, including single-cell genomics and proteomics represented approximately 65% and 60% of total revenue in the quarter and year, respectively. Our single-cell genomic sales in 2014 was robust and increased approximately 50% year-over-year. We sold a record number of C1 units in the quarter and approximately 25% of C1 units sold in the quarter were combined with a Biomark HD, consistent with historical trends. In the fourth quarter we realized commercial synergy between single-cell, genomics and proteomics at a customer and sales representative level, which we believe further validates our single-cell biology thesis and strategy. To add to this, we are delighted to report that we had another combined sale of the CyTOF, C1 and Biomark system for the second consecutive quarter. But it’s still too early to report trend off of two quarters we believe we are just beginning to realize the potential of our cross-selling opportunities within our genomics and proteomics platforms. We believe our new products will continue to enable a new phase of discovery in single-cell science. In December of last year, we announced that we will be launching Callisto in mid-2015. Callisto is an integrated high throughput microfluidics platform that enables automated cell culture and combinatorial dosing on a standalone device that supports either bulk or single-cell analysis. It will be used upstream of the C1, Biomark and CyTOF systems. Current techniques include manually feeding cells at the 96 well plate or robotics which force researchers to look at a limited number of factors at the time. Callisto allows for fully-automated, highly complex, combinatorial long-term cell culture experiments. Researchers can walk away without re-feeding or changing media, because the instrument is program to do it for them. Target customers include cell biologist and stem cell researchers looking to develop new culture conditions to explore, manipulate and drive cell populations into specific cell states and functions. Initial applications include cellular reprogramming and characterization, drug screening and biomarker discovery. In December of last year, we launched the Single-Cell Whole Genome Sequencing Application for the C1 system designed to help cancer researchers discover and define specific mutation profiles to predict cancer -- cancer susceptibility, metastatic development and therapeutic efficacy. This workflow is optimized to provide robust amplification of DNA templates from 96 single-cells without compromising fidelity, in addition to offering greater than 75% savings on sequencing prep costs. Importantly, our solution has a strong performance advantage over plate-based workflows due to decreased reaction sizes with our microfluidics technology. Traditionally, sequencing a bulk samples has been used to identify mutations across whole population cells within disease tissue. However, it is impossible to associate mutation profiles to specific cells that identify genetic trait responsible for aberrant cell behavior. With the single-cell whole genome sequencing, researchers can get a more complete picture and identify mutations in both regulatory and protein coding regions of the genome and directly associate them -- these areas to specific clonal populations. With the release of this workflow, Fluidigm now has a complete suite of sequencing protocols that enable researchers to easily pursue whole genome, whole exome and targeted sequencing from an individual cell. In November of last year, we also announced a high throughput single-cell mRNA sequencing application for the C1 system. [This fluid] [ph] designed to provide an eight-fold increase in throughput per run allowing for studies of 10,000 to 100,000 cells that also includes breakthroughs and IFC designed to enable capture and processing of up to 750 single-cells per run. Other investments include barcoding step on the IFC with subsequent sample pooling, decreased hands-on time and costs and optimize reagent kit and software. We believe single-cell research is evolving to require high throughput studies to increase the statistical power of the studies that expand the types of samples analyzed. In addition to broadening the customer base, we believe this application will allow C1 customers to scale their experiments to higher throughput. We will provide more details on pricing and per sample costs. We’ve launched the new high throughput workflow, which is expected in the first half of 2015. Finally, the early access program for our imaging mass cytometry platform which closed fully subscribed at the end of the quarter through very strong interest across a diverse customer base including academia, pharma and clinical diagnostic research. We believe the IMC platform which allows for ultrahigh parameter in-situ tissue imaging will enable researchers to move to the next phase for single-cell biology research. That is to incorporate the effects of the biological niche and context and to preserve the spatial relationships of cells. We expect to launch the IMC platform in late 2015 or early 2016. We estimate the overall production genomics market was approximately $295 million in 2014 growing 16% per year to $495 million in 2017. It’s still early days but we saw a very favorable reception to Juno in our early access program in Q4. We expect to launch the system this quarter. The Juno platform allows scientists to genotype low concentration or low-quality DNA samples such as FFPE with a fully automated, high throughput workflow. Conventional systems that require high quality, high concentration samples impose substantial upstream cost on production level testing. Juno alleviates this burden. Moreover, conventional systems limit the types of samples that a high throughput laboratory can test, especially when high-quality data is a requirement. We’re very pleased with the initial reception of Juno and expect to continue to broaden its menu over time. Based on our trajectory coming out of 2014, the strength and health of our end markets single-cell biology and production genomics, our confidence in the prospect for the CyTOF product line and the breadth of our new product offerings, we are reiterating our January 13, 2015 revenue guidance range for the full year of 2015 of $142 million to $149 million. This includes an estimated negative currency related impact of approximately 3% to 4% at the midpoint of the range. In closing, in 2014 we completed a transformative acquisition of DVS, successfully executed on our organic growth strategy and announced the wave of integrative beta products and applications across our single-cell biology and production genomics portfolio. We expect significant momentum in 2015 and believe we have a tremendous amount of runway ahead of us as we execute on our single-cell biology strategy of building upon our leadership position. Finally, by the portfolio products I highlighted, Callisto, Juno, single-cell DNA sequencing and the high throughput C1 chip is extensive, we are not finished. By the time 2015 concludes, we expect it will be by far the most productive year of new product launches in Fluidigm’s rich history of innovation. I’ll now hand the call over to Vikram for a more detailed review of our financial results.