Chris Linthwaite
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Your line is now open
Thank you, Agnes. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining our third quarter 2018 earnings call. As detailed in our press release this afternoon, in Q3, we had strong 17% revenue growth, powered by mass cytometry. Over the last few quarters, revenue has accelerated as customers adopt our premier tools to provide deeper insights into immune function. This quarter, we saw robust instrument placements around the world with exceptional strength in our Hyperion Imaging System. We are seeing evidence of market expansion with a couple of seminal publications, including our first mass cytometry publication in a prestigious clinical journal. We will update you on our progress today. As has been our norm, I'd like to begin with an overview of our financial results for the quarter and then discuss markets and strategy. Then I'll turn the call over to Vikram Jog, our CFO, for a more detailed financial review before offering closing remarks and taking questions. Total revenue for the third quarter was $29 million, an increase of 17% from the year ago period. Our third quarter results included considerable strength in mass cytometry in both instruments and consumables, but with a decline in our microfluidic genomics business. This quarter, there were robust instrument placements across translational research and cancer centers, with acceleration in Hyperion Imaging Systems and Helios Systems. We are seeing a significant pipeline of prospects over the coming quarters, contributing to a larger funnel compared to last year at this time. Mass cytometry consumables growth is ramping with notable adoption of our Maxpar Human Immune Monitoring Panel as well as other consumable products, including repeat purchases from early adopters, who were scaling their usage. We are seeing an uptick in global research efforts and commensurate technology adoption around the world, with well over 500 publications profiling insights from our premier mass cytometry instrument technologies. In 2018, mass cytometry publications have grown 28% since the beginning of the year. For microfluidic genomics, we have more work to do. As we expand the customer base for our high-throughput genomics business, our team is implementing a series of strategies to drive adoption of our newer content and workflows. While these initiatives will take time, we remain confident in the potential of the microfluidics business as a part of our long-term multi-omic strategy focused on immuno-oncology and immunology. More details on our strategy and general market expansion later. Closing up the financial overview, our results this quarter also reflected operating leverage and disciplined cash management. We are ramping up our Fluidigm operating excellence program; we call it FOX, to drive continuous improvement. With Brad on Board since April, we have taken the first steps in implementing a multiyear program. I will be providing updates on the program and our progress in the future. There is plenty of opportunity ahead, and we'll be patient and methodical in the execution phase to manage risks and costs to achieve change. Let's turn now to a discussion of our revenue performance in our geographic regions. All our regions did well this quarter, exceeding our expectations. Asia-Pacific was the top performer, again. Year-over-year revenues in the third quarter were up 34% in Asia-Pacific powered by strong performance in China and Japan, reflecting a performance trend in the region. We hit an important milestone this quarter with mass cytometry adoption in India. Adding more color to China and Japan, we had multiple system placements in these countries with traction in both industrial as well as medical institutions. In addition, we are seeing increasing pharma demand, driving growth in CRO services in the region. We see a strong funding environment in our focus areas and we have a great sales team -- great sales leaders and team in place to capitalize on the opportunity. Shifting to Europe, year-over-year revenues in the third quarter were up 14%. European consumables and service revenue were both up, again, this quarter. Customers have been investing in technologies to further their research. As an example, Queen's University in Belfast has invested in a new building and added Helios CyTOF technology to use in their state-of-the-art flow cytometry core facility. This institution told me that mass cytometry will be "a game changer" to their world-leading research programs. They are pushing the boundaries in both clinical and fundamental research to tackle major global health problems, including diabetic complications for eye and cardiovascular disease and lung inflammatory diseases, such as asthma, COPD, and sepsis. It is anticipated that deploying CyTOF improves their competitiveness for funding and powers new insights. Broadly speaking, across Europe, pharma and academic researchers are forming new consortia to focus on immunotherapy. We've kicked off initiatives to ensure our participation in those large programs. We look forward to talking in more detail about this work in the future. Turning to our largest market, the U.S. delivered 19% year-over-year growth. This region has been a soft spot for us over the past two years. However, I'm pleased that we are building on the momentum we established last quarter, delivering sequential growth for the first time since I arrived two years ago. Our U.S. team has massively improved our financial performance in this region. We've hit key milestones for instrument placements with strong uptake of the Hyperion Imaging System. Similar to Europe, we are seeing customers invest in mass cytometry. Particularly, Hyperion Imaging Systems has a critical technology for comprehensive cancer centers. As an example, we sold Hyperion to the University of Miami, a sale motivated in part by their NCI accreditation application. There are additional opportunities like this one in our sales funnel. As we approach the end of 2018, we are seeing momentum all around the world. We are executing on a robust pipeline of targeted opportunities across academic, translational research, CROs, and cancer centers. Looking towards the future, we see large opportunities to expand our customer base and add capacity at existing customers as their research needs grow. As a continuation of last quarter's trend, we saw approximately a third of our mass cytometry instrument placements related to capacity expansion. We have ample headroom for growth. Now, a brief overview of our long-term strategy. Fluidigm is well-positioned as a leading provider tools to answer questions that are increasingly multi-omic. Increasingly, researchers require a 360-degree view of tissues, cells, and circulating biomarkers, and thus demand tools and workflows that address single-cell-level analysis. Our premier tools, powered by mass cytometry and microfluidic technologies provide deep insights across a range of many diseases. In particular, this is a large market for immuno-oncology applications. We believe this will move to other diseases like autoimmune, chronic inflammatory conditions, infectious disease, pregnancy and preterm labor, to name just a few. Clearly, a huge opportunity for us as more funding flows to these areas or those areas of translational research at the intersection of patient needs and cutting-edge scientific capability. We are delivering excited or executing new innovation and strategic partnerships to add recurring revenue streams via comprehensive end-to-end workflows and enhanced services. Combining essential multi-omic technologies with large market opportunities, our strategy is to grow our instrument placements at influential accounts, build recurring revenue streams, resulting in long-term double-digit growth. Moving to our business execution this quarter, in September, we hosted our second Annual Global Imaging Mass Cytometry User Group Meeting. In a year, we have moved from discussions on the capabilities of our technologies at the first user group meeting to now early adopters showcasing data-driven studies, powered by insights and delivering greater context that was once unimaginable. We had 120 attendees with more than 10 presentations focused on health and disease insights, who used imaging mass cytometry to characterize the tumor microenvironment for lymphoma, Crohn's disease, encephalitis, and lung cancer as well as pharma customers exploring their role of tissue and tumor heterogeneity in drug delivery, response, and resistance. These Annual Global User Group Meetings, coupled with regionally oriented programs throughout the year are critical to accelerating market adoption. Two important advances were made through our imaging mass cytometry user group meetings. First, we announced an exciting partnership with Visiopharm at the recent user group meeting, and customers were able to experience the new automated software solution Phenomap from Visiopharm. While the software is the headline, I have an interesting story to tell about how this partnership came to fruition that shows the power of these meetings on new technologies. A leader from Visiopharm attended our first user group meeting, and he was inspired by the capabilities of imaging mass cytometry and the challenges of depicting high content images. As a result, he developed software on his own to further automate the workflow. These software partnerships strengthened our offerings, increased the pull-through of reagents and drive faster market adoption. To some extent, this explains our accelerating Hyperion Imaging System sales. A second result from our user group meeting was the announcement today we shared in concert with SironaDx. At this year's meeting, SironaDx witnessed the incredible presentations by pharma and academic medical center customers. As a result, they made the decision to market imaging mass cytometry services using the Hyperion, and they launched with a number of new pharma contracts already in hand. Shifting to microfluidics, we are adding new applications and partnerships to expand our customer base. Although we don't often talk a lot about our single-cell genomics franchise, the new applications that we have launched this year have sustained that business. This quarter, for C1, we launched two single-cell total RNA sequencing applications, providing our customers with new tools to deeply characterize unique cellular subtypes and functional states unavailable on competing systems. In our high-throughput genomics business, we announced an agreement with GenomOncology to market and expanded immuno-oncology gene expression workflow, providing a best-in-class solution for IO research from RNA extraction to comprehensive data analysis to advance therapeutic development. Finally, we saw some notable publications recently that point at deepening market potential. Let me share just Two Examples. First, mass cytometry was included in a publication as part of the foundational 10,000 Immunomes Project, conducted by UCFS and Northrop Grumman Information Systems Health IT. Similar to the thousand genome project for genomics space, the 10,000 Immunomes project provides an open reference standard to measure the human immune system, an important step forward for research. It provides a base line of diverse healthy human subject that will be used to further understand immune system responses across a range of diseases and populations. I encourage you to visit the UCSF website to learn more. The next example, that I would like to highlight is an exciting clinical research project that was published a couple weeks ago in The New England Journal of Medicine. In this study, researchers used a 40 parameter mass cytometry panel to functionally characterize allogeneic T cell expansion and differentiation in a Phase II clinical trial for PML, a fatal brain infection that is often associated with diseases that compromise the immune system, including cancer, AIDS, and autoimmune diseases. Specifically, the researchers use mass cytometry to deeply profile immune cell phenotypes and functions using Fluidigm CyTOF technology. They were able to characterize the donor and recipient T cell populations across a wide range of cell service and intracellular markers in a manner that other technologies simply could not match. We are pleased to see mass cytometry taking a prominent role in informing the development of new immunotherapies. It is still early days; however, these results offer additional steps forward toward utilizing the power of T cell therapies to save lives. These are just two examples out of many, demonstrating how our technologies are leading the way to new insights within tissue, the cell repertoire and free floating analytes. I'd now turn the call over to Vikram, our CFO, for a further review of our financial results. Vikram?