Emily Leproust
Analyst · JPMorgan. You may begin
Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to take a moment to welcome our new investors to Twist. This is our first earnings announcement as a public company, and we are pleased to have you with us. Fiscal 2018 was a year of exceptional growth for Twist with progress across every area of our business. For those of you who are new to Twist, we have developed a disruptive DNA synthesis platform that pioneers a new method of manufacturing synthetic DNA by writing DNA on a silicon chip. Well, other companies make about a hundred oligos and one gene at a time, we make a million oligos and thousands of genes at the same time. That improvement in scale is driven by miniaturization, which leverages development of the semiconductor industry. We combine our platform with proprietary software and a scaleable commercial infrastructure to create a world-class operation that allows us to first market differentiated products; second, take market share of existing markets; and third, expand in adjacent markets for short-term and long-term value creation. The overall vision of Twist is to leverage our ability to manufacture DNA at an unprecedented scale to disrupt existing and emerging applications of biology. Thanks to our products, while improving the productivity of our customers which enables them to improve health and sustainability. We manufacture a broad range of products based on synthetic DNA for multiple industries. For the synthetic biology industry, these include genes, oligonucleotide pools, and DNA libraries. Some examples of the way our customers use our synthetic products, include discovery and production of new therapeutics, the sustainable production of specialty chemicals and biomaterials, the production of drought tolerant or disease resistant crops, and in academia for a broad range of applications to advance the understanding of biology and drive future innovation. For the genomics industry, the products we market include kits for targeted NGS. Our products are used for molecular diagnostics, such as for the understanding of disease causing genetic mutations, the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases, as well as for liquid biopsies. Last but not least, with even DNA [ph] that is used for the storage of digital data. In fiscal year ‘18 which ended on September 30, we sold DNA to more than 700 customers across a broad range of industries, more than double the number of customers we sold in fiscal ’17, and we reported record revenues of $25.4 million, an increase of 136% over fiscal year ’17. For fiscal Q4 ’18, I'm pleased to share we again reported record revenues of $8.4 million, an increase of 27% over fiscal Q3, ’18, and 139% growth over the same period last year. This strong growth is the result of our commercial objective to provide a great customer experience with competitive turnaround time, success rate, and competitive pricing. On the [indiscernible] side of the business, in fiscal ‘17 our turnaround time was 25 to 30 days, and in fiscal ‘18 we improved significantly with an average of 15 to 20 days. Today, we are shipping genes at speed slightly below or/at industry average, and our genes are still saliently below the average market price. We shipped a record number of genes to customers in fiscal Q4, ‘18 with an average of approximately 23,000 genes shipped per month. For fiscal ’18, overall, we shipped approximately 247,000 genes in total which compares to approximately 125,000 genes for fiscal ‘17. In addition, we launched our proprietary e-commerce platform in January, which allows customers to design, validate, and place on-demand orders of customers’ DNA online. We still haven’t [ph] removed the minimum gene order to one gene, allowing small customers to obtain what they need for their research. I'd like to point out that the synthetic biology industry is growing and attracting significant investment as evidenced by more than $1.3 billion of funding last week alone. We believe this investment will continue to show substantial growth for the industry and for Twist. Turning to genomics. We have leveraged out technology platform to create sample preparation tools for use in targeted NGS. In whole-genome sequencing, the entire patient DNA is read. For the entire kit NGS, synthetic DNA that we make is used to precisely target and extract specific segment of the patient DNA, compared to others Twist-targeted NGS kits have considerably lowered the bias and inefficiencies in a downstream sequencing analysis saving our customers time and money as we can sequence more samples per each run on their sequences. February 2018, we launched Exome and custom target enrichment and library preparation kits at AGBT, which is a premier conference in the field. For large potential users of our kits, the customer transition journey starts as a pilot to test the performance of our products compared to the competition, then a scale up and validation phase, and finally a production phase. This is a lengthy and technically intensive process as our customers needs to make purchasing decisions for molecular diagnostic tests that will be run at scale for years. However, it's a slow process where high performance and lower sequencing costs can be unambiguously measured and our key decision drivers giving us a great advantage. Currently we have eight customers in production phase with a large number of key accounts either pursuing personal pilot programs or validation. Our work with these customers continue to do well and we expect that many of the pilot and validation accounts will move into scale up and through production with us over time. We are following a similar commercial strategy in genomics as we did in symbio [ph] which is to go for the top of the market with large users, and then move to the long tail of small customers. While we are early in the adoption of this product, we are encouraged that that the orders and revenues are both fronting nicely based on our technical superiority. To support revenue growth across both the synbio and targeted NGS product line we have built a scalable commercial platforms that enable us to reach a diverse customer base. We are playing a multi-channel strategy comprised of a direct sales force by getting synbio and NGS settlement and an e-commerce platform to smaller companies to get access to our innovative products. This platform facilitates more orders and exceeded our sales force to focus on prospecting. Currently our e-commerce solution is available for our synbio products and we expect to launch our e-commerce platform for NGS early in calendar 2019. We've already started to test our API with key early customers including Ginkgo and Azera [ph]. The API allows our customers to connect directly to our system from them and automate all transactions without going through the e-commerce platform. It enables a digital direct communication between organizations which significantly enhances the customer experience and the stickiness of the relationship. While the majority or our sales today are in the U.S. we are making rapid progress in EMEA and beginning our growth trajectory in Asia. I will let Jim provide details of the progress, but we have built a global commercial team to drive that growth which is now supported with agreements in place with digitals to cover Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, India, as well as digitals in China. To support the rapidly growing Asian genomicand NGS market, we plan to build a wholly owned production plant in China. By building such a plant we believe this will be able to have products made in China for China and therefore more appealing to the Chinese market. We believe that this will also insulate us from any unexpected retractions. We will solidify the choice for allocation in the current quarter and we are planning to have the facility operational by the first - calendar 2019. To protect ’18, we plan to move only part of the technology such as just that key component made in other locations are still required for manufacturing the final product. Turning to development. We are pushing two verticals that leverage our DNA working platforms to create options for last time. The first is our biologics drug discovery groups Twist Biopharma. Building our DNA library business, we formed Twist Biopharma to begin to explore the supporting team and we believe our platform continued against the acceleration of time it takes in social to go from Target to IND. The measure of success will be the completion of a partnership deals or outpacing [ph] of assets, which will enable us to participate in the long-term economy value of drugs core and in development without the large deployment of our own capital. We are on track to produce the proof of concept data that we expect would form the basis of this business development deal. The second ethical market entering digital data DNA uses a massive amounts of data created across many industries, planning an efficient means of storing call data – data that is not read often has become a large business opportunity. Through our relationship with Microsoft and the University of Washington, we have demonstrated the unique benefit and feasibility of storing data on DNA. Examples are ongoing projects including the Time Machine and the Arch Mission. We believe that DNA is the best format to start that for the long term. However, the cost of synthesizing DNA is currently too high for routine use as a storage medium, lowering the cost of DNA is the greatest technological opportunity for making DNA commercially available as a storage medium and we believe that with additional R&D our silicon base units disease platform has the potential to make DNA cost competitive. We're currently innovating our DNA writing platform to increase synthesis density, moving from a platform capable of storing megabytes of data to a platform capable of storing terabytes of data. Our cancer disease to accelerate that R&D effort by the addition of funding from non-diluted source of capital. We're currently working with Microsoft [indiscernible] projects to increase its speed [indiscernible] and we are awaiting the outcome of an application for significantly larger grant to expedite our effort in making DNA data storage commercially viable. This will continue to explore the push need to further non-diluted [ph] funding for the development of DNA data storage. Finally on December 7th we attended a case management conference related to the ongoing litigation with Agilent. The judge said the trial date to begin on February 24th 2020. And we are looking forward to our day in court. As a statement on our website with my information for your reference. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, Jim for review of our financials.