Cytek Biosciences, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the SciTech Biosciences first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. As a reminder, today's program may be recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Paul Goodson, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator. Earlier today, Scitech Biosciences released financial results for the quarter ended March 31st, 2022. If you haven't received this news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investors at scitechbio.com. Joining me today from Scitech are Wenbin Zhang, CEO, and Patrick Jean Monod, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements regarding SITAC's business plans, strategies, opportunities, and financial projections. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled Forward-Looking Statements, in the press release CITEC issued today and in CITEC's filings with the SEC. This call will also include a discussion of certain financial measures that are not calculated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure may be found in today's earnings release submitted to the SEC. Except as required by law, CITAC disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast May 11, 2022. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Wenbin.

WENBIN WENBIN That's follow-up. and welcome everyone joining the call today. I want to start by thanking the incredible site team for their dedication and execution as we close out the first quarter of 2022. On today's call, I will begin with a brief overview of our company. Next, I will discuss our recent progress since the end of 2021. And finally, I will turn the call over to Patrick for a more detailed look at our financials. For those of you new to the SciTech story, we are a leading cell analysis solutions company advancing the next generation of cell analysis tools by leveraging novel technical approach to create our full special profiling or FSP platform. Our FSP platform includes instruments, reagents, software, and application services, and utilizes the full spectrum of fluorescent signatures to deliver high resolution, high content, and high sensitivity cell analysis. Our technology and the solutions address some of the key limitations of conventional methods. While flow cytometry is a widely used tool for single cell analysis, conventional flow cytometry and the early approach to special flow cytometry have been challenged as they are able to detect only a few markers in a single tube. Their limited dimensionality, suboptimal resolution, low throughput, high cost for performance, and the significant technical expertise required to operate their systems has limited scientific progress in the advanced cell analysis field. By contrast, SciTech is transforming the full cytometry industry through technology disruption. Our patented SP technology expands the number of colors that can be analyzed and optimizes sensitivity and accuracy through our novel optical and electronic designs that utilizes an innovative method of light detection and distribution. This novel technological application allows us to address the inherent limitations of other technologies by providing a higher density of information with greater sensitivity, more flexibility, and increased efficiency, all at a lower cost for performance. Part of our performance and the cost advantage, which helps our manufacturing consistency and operating gross margin, is due to the application of light detection technology adopted from the telecom industry, which benefits from decades of development in manufacturing supremacy and cost reduction. Meanwhile, this is not the case with conventional flow cytometry, which continues to use expensive vacuum tube detection technology. Our innovative technology has been validated by the 463 peer-reviewed publications as well as over 1,200 instrument placements at the end of the quarter and a growing number of applications. At Scitec, we provide our customers with an end-to-end solution consisting of instruments, reagents, software, and application services. In addition to our robust suite of comprehensive solutions, last year, we began shipping our cell sorters, which enabled additional downstream genomic and proteomic analysis. Importantly, our sorters allow researchers to isolate living cell populations from higher complexity panels beyond the 40-mile markers. While our cell analyzers have been strong drivers of our revenue growth to date, we expect that reagents and the cell sorters will play an important role in driving our learning growth over the next three to five years. I'm proud to say that our installed base of instruments continue to achieve robust growth. In the first quarter, we placed 116 instruments, bringing our total installed base to 1,226 instruments as of the end of Q1. We continue to execute on our core strategy and have achieved a solid adoption with high-dimensional cell analysis users while also bringing full special profiling to entry-level users as well. As Patrick will discuss later, we once again achieved a strong revenue growth this quarter, with revenue increasing 44% over the prior year. These results reflect strong demand given by the recognition from customers of the advantages of our technology in addressing their needs. Even in the face of macro pressure, including global supply chain disruptions, our team continues to execute well and achieve operational excellence. While the industry as a whole is experiencing a difficult operating environment, MCITEC has not been immune to inflationary pressures. Our dedicated team is managing through, in part by leveraging our global workforce. Additionally, our global presence has also helped us to mitigate supply chain problems. And we are further insulated by supply issues by our past inventory buffer. In all, we continue to be focused on execution and I'm confident in our team's proven ability to manage it through this environment and continue to succeed. We began the year by announcing the opening of our new facility in Fremont, California, which tripled our previous manufacturing capacity to meet growing global demand for cell analysis solutions. In addition to the new Fremont location, We also opened new offices in Seattle, Washington, which are dedicated to key R&D initiatives and the customer application support. And at the end of April, we announced the appointment of Todd Garland as our chief commercial officer. We are excited to have Todd join Scitech and are pleased to welcome him to our team. Todd's expansive experience including previous role at Cardinal Health, Care Fusion, and most recently at BD Biosciences, will bring tremendous value to our organization. Since first being introduced in 2017, our cell analysis systems have gained widespread adoption across the globe with use in more than 40 countries. we have seen great traction in diversifying our revenue base through the launch of new products, including recurring sources from reagent sales. While still a small part of our overall revenue, demand for our reagents is growing rapidly, and we are excited for the potential of this contribution to our enterprise. As I mentioned earlier, Our technology has been validated by 463 peer-reviewed publications as of the end of the quarter. End of this quarter, there were 95 peer-reviewed publications mentioning SciTech, the highest figure in any quarter so far since SciTech was founded. I'm proud of this accomplishment, which speaks to the momentum of our platform and validates the use of our offerings in the scientific community. The work we do at SciTech and the technology we bring to the field continue to demonstrate proven real-world results that touch on highly relevant issues that impact the life of the general public. During the first quarter of this year, for example, there were two particular papers in Nature and in Nature Communications, examining issues related to COVID-19. The first paper, Germinal Center-Driven Maturation of B-Cell Response to mRNA Vaccination, published in Nature, elucidates how the reaction of our immune system to mRNA vaccination leads to long-term protection from the virus. The second paper, in Nature Communications titled stratification of hospitalized COVID-19 patients into clinical severity progression groups by immunophenotyping and the machine learning discovered that COVID-19 patients cluster into three distinct groups and these groups predict clinical cause. As these two papers and countless others exemplify, Our technology is being used today in real-world applications that address critical pertinent issues. I'm grateful for SciFix's role in these consequential scientific findings and I look forward to sharing further stories of our platform's use in future periods. In all, I'm excited by the progress our team has made this quarter. and expect to make throughout the course of the year as we continue to establish ourselves as a leading cell analysis solutions company. As we push forward a cadence of new products and applications, we are deeply focused on providing a complete cell analysis solution to our customers. We look forward to continuing to provide our novel FSPE platform to these customers as They push the bounds of scientific discovery and the clinical progress. With that, I will now turn the call over to Patrick for more details around our financials.