Serge Saxonov
Analyst · Bank of America.
Yes, Mike. Yes, let me kind of take that. So I mean a fair point. There has been, I mean, a number of legitimate reasons why Chromium has been particularly buffeted over the past couple of years. The fact that our business in China went down a lot all this current period. So that certainly put a lot of pressure. We are this quarter, like I said, going into a particular product transition. So those factors are all at play, for sure.
The -- but ultimately, the question of the underlying potential of Chromium, there is still -- it's still there for the same reasons we've always articulated. Like I said earlier, most first principles, most researchers should really be using single-cell analysis to understand their tissues. That's where the biology is, and that certainly is not the case now.
And like we said before, the main obstacles to that are workflow ease, which we're in the process of addressing through various means and price, which we're also addressing through a number of steps, and then also driving greater awareness through commercial execution and general market development.
We do believe there's lots of robust growth ahead, but those obstacles do need to get addressed, and we are in the process of addressing them. The question of competition is, yes, certainly, it's a relevant one. There's always been stock competition in single cell. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Over the last year -- a couple of years, there has been a few more players that have come into the space. We've talked about this before.
There's -- compared to a year ago, there's somewhat more awareness and somewhat more prevalence of them out there. I would still say that the story is largely the same. Customers do trial them, which does create -- introduce some friction to sales process. It does put pressure on prices. But by and large, customers come back to us due to all the various advantages our products have, like much better performance, much better data quality, much better workflow, much better breadth of applications, customer support and all the other things that people love about 10x.
So it's still largely the same story. And we -- the reason we've been successful up to now is because of the product innovation and the product quality. And that is our North Star. The goal is to keep delivering value to customers. We're continuing to invest both in terms of product development and in terms of customer focus. And we believe the much, much larger opportunities to drive the overall growth of the market relative to the effects of any particular type of competition.