Gajus Worthington
Analyst · Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is now open
Thank you, Ana. Good morning everyone. In the back half of 2015, we stabilized our business. 2016 is about returning to growth and with that objective in mind, 2016 is off to a good start. Our first quarter revenue of $29 million was up 9% from the year ago period. Growth drivers were those that we projected for this year, namely single-cell biology, production genomic consumables and new products launched in 2015. Before I go through the highlights of the first quarter, I’d like to update you on our strategic initiatives to realign our commercial organization begun a year ago. We made the decision to build out a dedicated team for our production genomics business to enhance our focus on this distinctive customer group and to enable our sales force on the single-cell side to concentrate on research-focused customers. By the end of the fourth quarter of last year, this commercial reorganization was essentially complete. This included a number of new hires of senior commercial leadership and the build out of sales, support, and marketing with these areas in mind. We believe we entered 2016 with strong experience and dedicated teams on both sides of our business. The strategic rationale to build a commercial team dedicated to production genomics was motivated by the fact that purchasing decisions in this customer group are distinct from single-cell customers in academic research. However, over the past year, we saw the adoption of single-cell technologies expanding into the Applied markets, especially, biopharma and CROs. As a result, classifying accounts by single-cell for production techniques was less relevant and it became more sensible to orient our commercial organization based on whether the target customer was in an academic research or in Applied setting. Single-cell has become central to both. It’s exciting to see the drug discovery paradigm in several key areas including immunology and oncology beginning to embrace single-cell to the more fundamental practice. So we made the decision last year to task the team we built formerly focused solely on production genomics with Applied markets. Hence this morning, in our earnings press release, for the first time, we are externally reporting our product revenue categorized by research or Applied markets to align with the new structure of our commercial teams. The research markets refers to our customers principally in academia, making ground-breaking discoveries with our platforms. Applied markets refers to the businesses that we historically refer to as production genomics including clinical labs and ad Ag-Bio, but with the addition of biopharma and CRO customers. Importantly, we still plan to provide our current single-cell biology metrics. These metrics will continue to be directly comparable for those we have previously provided. Total product revenue, which excludes service from research customers was $15.7 million revenue up approximately 3% or $0.5 million year-over-year driven by customer higher instrument sales. Total product revenue from Applied customers was $9.7 million, up approximately 10% or $0.8 million year-over-year, driven by higher consumables sales. As I mentioned earlier, the main growth drivers were exactly what we projected during our last earnings call and I’ll now go through some detail on each. Most importantly, single-cell biology product revenue was up approximately 15% year-over-year. Our proteomics product line delivered solid year-over-year growth in both instruments and consumables across research and biopharma customers. Adoption of our single-cell technologies and biopharma is a major opportunity for us and this has only just begun. In the context of our performance in single-cell biology, I’d like to take a moment to share our progress on resolving the C1 doublet addition. As part of our customer outreach programs, we have now spoken with hundreds of customers. We are grateful that by and large our efforts and communications have been met with support and expressions of competence. Last week, we began shipments of a new medium-cell 96 IFC with substantially improved single-cell captures based on an optimized capture site architecture . The performance of this IFC demonstrates that we can address this issue, not only for this IFC, but also for the medium-sized high throughput IFC. On that note, when we introduced the medium cell 96 IFC we also announced that we fast track the development of a new small cell high throughput IFC, which we now expect to introduce in early Q3. That is, we change the order of the medium and small high throughput IFCs in our development pipeline simply swapping their availability dates. As a result, we now expect the medium cell high throughput IFC to be introduced in early Q4. After our announcement of the availability of the new IFC and the timelines for these other IFCs there was some speculation that we had run into technical challenges for medium-sized high throughput IFCs and that was in fact the reason for the change in schedule. We simply re-prioritized the small cell IFCs due to growing interest in the field of immunology, and immuno oncology. There was also a conjuncture that this schedule implied a slip in our 10,000 cell chips, that’s also not the case. These two projects are independent and both are proceeding apace. We are pleased to report production genomics consumables overall rebounded in the first quarter delivering robust growth of over 30% year-over-year driven by increased sales of genomics analytical IFCs. This is a welcome result, but as we have noted in the past, consumable streams can fluctuate quarter-over-quarter and we expect that pattern to continue as our Applied markets team gets fully productive. While genomics analytical consumables are up year-on-year, our pull-through for preparative system is down. This is partly due to the effects of the doublet issue on C1 consumables with actually more the results of decline in access ratio. We are generally guiding our customers through a transition from the access ray that you know, we believe the shortfall will be temporary that may continue in the near-term. Encouragingly the Juno platform which includes new preparation chemistry and new IFCs has been well received. Our enthusiasm is bolstered by the pipeline of opportunities building for Juno, especially in our Applied Markets group and anticipate the impact to build over the course of the year. New products, which include Juno, Polaris and Callisto were another primary contributor to growth in Q1. Customers are starting to have meaningful success with Juno and Polaris in particular and based on this, and our pipeline, we feel confident that these new products will contribute to growth in 2016 as we have previously guided. For 2016, our revenue guidance of $124 million to $128 million is unchanged. We continue to expect that our guidance will be supported by growth in single-cell biology, growth of consumables and Applied markets, and new products launched in 2015. Notwithstanding our results in Q1, we still expect growth to be concentrated in the second half of the year. Historically, our revenue contribution in the first half has been approximately 45% of our total and we expect 2016 to reflect this pattern. In closing, we had a solid start to 2016 and are continuing our efforts to lay the foundation for sustained growth in our target markets.