Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Pacific Biosciences of California Fourth Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call may be recorded.I would now like to turn the conference over to Trevin Rard. Thank you. Please, go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Pacific Biosciences Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2019 Conference Call. Earlier today, we issued a press release outlining the financial results we will be discussing in today's call, a copy of which is available on the Investors section of our website at www.pacb.com or alternatively, as furnished on the Form 8-K available on the Securities and Exchange Commission website at www.sec.gov.With me today are Mike Hunkapiller, our Chief Executive Officer; Susan Barnes, our Chief Financial Officer; and Ben Gong, our Vice President of Finance and Treasurer.Before we begin, I would like to remind you that on today’s call, we may be making forward-looking statements, including plans and expectations relating to our financial projections, products and other future events. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, because they are subject to assumptions, risks and uncertainties, and may differ materially from actual results. These risks and uncertainties are more fully described in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our most recently filed reports on forms 8-K, 10-K and Form 10-Q.Pacific Biosciences undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements. In addition, please note that today’s call is being recorded and will be available for audio replay on the Investors section of our website shortly after the call. Investors electing to use the audio replay are cautioned that forward-looking statements made on today's call may differ or change materially after the completion of the live call.With that, I would like to turn the call over to Mike.

Thanks, Trevin. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. It's been close to a year-and-a-half since our last earnings conference call, as we were under contract to merge with Illumina for most of that period. Since we agreed to terminate the contract with Illumina at the beginning of this year, we are resuming regular quarterly earnings calls going forward.I'll start with some highlights of our Q4 and full year 2019 financial results. We generated $27.9 million in product and service revenue for the fourth quarter, up 43% from Q4 of 2018. This represents the highest quarter of product and service revenue in our history and was driven by sales of our Sequel II systems and consumables, which I will describe in more detail shortly.For the year, our product and service revenue grew 16% from $78.6 million in 2018 to $90.9 million in 2019. Instrument revenue for the fourth quarter was $15.3 million, up 134% from Q4, 2018. For the year, Instrument revenue was $45.1 million, up 58% from 2018. The growth in instrument revenue was driven by strong sales of our new Sequel II system. We ended the year with an installed base of 114 of the Sequel II systems.Consumable revenue for the fourth quarter was $9.3 million, down 6% from Q4 2018, but up 35% sequentially from Q3 2019. For the year, our consumable revenue totaled $32.6 million, down 14% compared with 2018. Our consumable sales this past year were heavily impacted by customers decreasing usage of their older Sequel I systems in favor of acquiring Sequel II systems.While we expect more customers to move from Sequel I to Sequel II this year, the headwind to consumables revenue growth should be less pronounced, as sales of Sequel II consumables already comprised over half of our total consumables…

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon everyone. I will begin my remarks today with a financial overview of our fourth quarter that ended December 31, 2019. I will then provide details of our operating results for the quarter and 2019 full year with a comparison to Q4 of 2018 and 2018 full year respectively. I will conclude my remarks with a brief discussion of our balance sheet.Starting with our fourth quarter 2019 and 2019 annual financial highlights. During the quarter, we recognized revenue of $27.9 million and incurred a net loss of $91,000. We ended the quarter with $49.1 million in cash and investments.Turning to revenue. The $27.9 million of product service and other revenue in Q4 of 2019 was $8.4 million higher or 43% above the $19.5 million of product service and other revenue we recorded in Q4 of 2018. Total annual product service and other revenue in 2019 was $90.9 million, up 16% compared to the $78.6 million recognized in the year of 2018.Breaking down the revenue. Instrument revenue recognized in Q4, 2019 was $15.3 million, up $8.8 million or 134% above the $6.5 million recognized in Q4 of 2018. Annually, instrument revenue was $45.1 million in 2019, up 58% compared to the $28.5 million recognized in 2018.Consumable revenue in the fourth quarter of 2019 was $9.3 million, compared with $9.9 million reported in the fourth quarter of 2018. For the year, consumable revenue was $32.6 million in 2019, compared with $37.9 million in 2018. Decline in consumable revenue from 2018 to 2019 has been primarily a consequence of our customer bases transition from Sequel I to Sequel II.Service and other revenue was $3.4 million in the quarter, compared to $3.1 million in Q4 of 2018. For the full year of 2019, service revenue was $13.1 million, an…

Thank you, Susan. I will be providing our financial outlook for 2020. I'll start by mentioning that we are in the process of developing our sales and commercial plan in the wake of the recent termination of our merger agreement with Illumina. We plan on adding to our commercial resources to drive revenue growth. However, it will take some time to bring on new team members and it typically takes more time to bring new people up to speed.Our goal is to drive consistent revenue growth in the long-term. We are not providing revenue growth estimates for the year at this time as our plans are still fairly fluid. Furthermore, the effect of the Coronavirus outbreak has added uncertainty around our sales into China. I will provide more color on this later in my prepared remarks.That said I will provide guidance on what we are seeing in the near-term. Starting with revenue in the near-term, we were pleased with our fourth quarter revenue which was driven by strong Sequel II System placements.Our system sales can vary substantially quarter-to-quarter as many of our customers face the timing of their capital purchases on budget cycles, government funding, and competitive factors. Based on these factors, we expect our Q1 2020 system sales to be sequentially lower than what we achieved in Q4. However, we are targeting significant growth in Q1 system sales compared with Q1 of last year.With regard to consumable sales, we were pleased to see nice sequential growth in the fourth quarter as the declines in sales of Sequel I consumables were overtaken by the growth in Sequel II consumables.For Q1 2020, however, we expect our consumable sales to be sequentially lower than our Q4 consumable sales. Under normal conditions, the Lunar New Year holiday traditionally causes seasonal declines in our…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Bill Quirk of Piper Sandler.

Hi, good afternoon. This is Rachel on for Bill. Thanks for taking the questions and congrats on the quarter. So, how should we think about placements for 2020? And then going off of that how should we think about consumables pacing over the course of the year? And then I have a follow-up as well.

Yeah. This is Ben. So as I mentioned placements can vary quarter-to-quarter, I think they have in the past and no reason to believe that that's not going to happen again. In the near term, as I mentioned, we expect Q1 placements to be lower than Q4, which is not that unusual from a seasonality perspective. Beyond that, as I mentioned before, we are still working on expanding our commercial organization, and so we're not necessarily giving specific guidance on total revenues for the year, and in particular on placements for the year.

Got it. Thank you. And then, what percent of Sequel Is do you expect will be upgraded or traded in for Sequel IIs?

I would say that -- I would say most of the sales and the 114 installs that we had in 2019 were to existing customers. And so, that gives you a sense that whether a customer was upgrading or just buying an additional system, a lot of those folks did so in the first year. We expect that to continue into this year, but we also expect maybe a larger percentage of our sales to be going to new customers this year. I don't have at the top of my head the number of remaining customers who have Sequel Is who have not yet bought a Sequel II.

It's still a substantial number. We focused on the customers that we knew had the sample requirements quickly -- as quickly as possible to justify the increased throughput that you get off to Sequel II, and those have done very well with it. And even ones in certain areas who had a fair number of Sequel Is, have more or less shut down their Sequel Is, as they've converted over to an almost equivalent number now of Sequel IIs. So, they've dramatically expanded their output.We see that happening in a continued way with a lot of those customers who now have more Sequel IIs than they had Sequel Is, which is a good thing. With a lot of the remaining Sequel I customers, they were relatively lower usage. So, it's one of the reasons that we got hit pretty hard last year in terms of Sequel I consumable sales going down. People the minute they saw the improved throughput of the Sequel II systems, they just basically shut down a lot of their older ones.And now, as they've begun to ramp up their number of samples and larger projects, we're getting quite reasonable pull-through for each instrument and already in a lot of those cases the number of Sequel IIs, as I said, has exceeded what they had with Sequel Is. And so, we would look both for getting new customers as well as to continue to expand the operations at the older Sequel I larger customers in particular.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Next question comes from Doug Schenkel of Cowen. Your line is now open.

Hey. This is Chris on for Doug today. Thanks for taking my question. I appreciate predicting the timing of the commercial organization expansion is difficult, but can you give us any parameters on the size of the investment required to address the Sequel II opportunity? And relatedly, are you actively in discussion or open to the possibility of entering into a commercial partnership with a larger company that could support the sales effort?

I can go first, and then Mike can go second. So to answer the first part of the question, we haven't specifically quantified the investment. We certainly have open requisitions now to add to the sales team and we expect that to be pretty much something that goes on throughout the year, because as I mentioned before, it takes a while to hire people. So we'll be adding as we go along. I don't have the exact number for you.With regard to partnerships, I'll turn it over to Mike here. But one thing I will mention is the determination agreement that we had with Illumina does not preclude us from working with any third parties including with Illumina. So, we are no longer sort of, I guess constrained in any way to partner with other folks.

I mean, one of the things that we did as we were trying to do a long-time ago, a somewhat different scenario is go after areas like China, where a distributor partner, however, you want to define them in China is essential to get into their clinical market where you have to operate through a Chinese entity. That deal is not exclusive. So, we're free to discuss even similar deals in China.And as Ben pointed out, the termination agreements put no constraints on us relative to other kinds of partnerships distribution deals or whatever with third parties even outside of China. That could include Illumina it could not. And so we'll look very carefully, whether it makes sense to do some of those things from an economic perspective, whether they add to what we can do as we also get a sense of how fast we're able to ramp up in our own commercial organization, which we've begun earnestly to put some plans in place.And we've started as Ben pointed out already to put out a substantially increased set of job openings both in the sales organization somewhat in the marketing organization that goes along with that, as well as in the field support people that on the science side are a key part of our ability to sell into the sequencing market.

Okay. Maybe a related follow-up question. While we know you were careful to run the company as a stand-alone entity practically speaking we have to imagine there were certain instances where that was probably a bit difficult given the Illumina situation. So with that in mind, how would you describe the state of the commercial team today? I guess, really is there any concern in terms of recent turnover if any?

Well, we did it as a commercial organization overall as a separate entity, because we were legally required to do so, right? Not that we didn't have some what-if planning going on with Illumina ahead of time that you're committed to do. But we made it very clear in both organizations not just in ours that we were separate companies until we weren't. And so we did our best to continue going as we would have done independently of the merger deal. And so – and our team did an amazing job of doing that. We introduced a major new product with essentially no hiccups that have performed very well.As we went through the numbers you've seen that. And we continue to do that. Our turnover rates last year were the lowest we ever had in a year. And we're now looking to expand not to contract. So we feel that, there maybe individuals who are looking really forward maybe to moving to San Diego, I don't know. But we're still planning on being able to expand our organization in the areas where on the commercial side it would make a bigger impact. And that's one as Ben pointed out, you have to go out with some degree of caution in terms of the timing that you could do that. It's not just that you could hire people, but certain areas like Europe. They're frequently under legal constraints, but how fast they can move a company even when you hire them. And so the timing of that is always difficult to predict. And then you have to layer on being able depending on who they are and who their background is the training period required to get them up to speed to sell a technology that they may not have been selling. So we feel comfortable that we can do that. We've had good – we've been able to hire sales reps even last year in certain areas. So it's certainly possible for us to do that.

Okay. And maybe for my last question, could you just provide a bit more detail on the mid-40s gross margin assumption? I think that was for the full year. Really, what are the key components to the expansion you expect in 2020? And how should we think about the revenue variability? Thanks.

Yeah. So the main lever there is the top line, trying to get a hint there by saying that in Q1 gross margin is likely to be lower than gross margin percentage that we had in Q4 because the top line is also expected to be lower. The biggest lever for us quite frankly is the ability to absorb the fixed costs with top line growth. And the fastest way for us to increase gross margin is to increase the `top line. The incremental contribution on additional sales, we said this in the past, it's greater than 50%.And so the more we can grow that top line, the faster we can pull up the gross margin. You saw that we got up to 46% this past quarter. And the key to get it to over 50% would be to just keep on growing that top line.

There are currently no more questions, at this time. I will now turn the call back to management.

Okay. So, in closing, we remain steadfast in our commitment to bringing the unique advantages of our SMRT technology and products to our customers in the scientific community.We believe that SMRT Sequencing provides the industry's most complete and accurate picture of genomes, due to its superior performance in sequencing accuracy, uniformity of coverage, long-read lengths and ability to characterize DNA-based modifications.We are excited about our new Sequel II System. And the overwhelmingly positive feedback we have received from customers, who are using it. I'd like to acknowledge the team at PacBio, who did a fantastic job, designing and building the Sequel II products. And the folks who are continuing to market sell and support them.Thank you for joining us. And we look forward to talking again, in three months' time.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.