Cytek Biosciences, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Liz and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the SciTech Biosciences first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star 1 again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Paul Goodson, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Earlier today, SciTech Biosciences released financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2024. 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 newly appointed CFO, Bill McComb. 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 Scitech's business plans, strategies, opportunities, and financial projections. These statements are based on the company's current expectations and inherently involve significant 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 debt financial measure may be found in today's earnings release submitted to the SEC. Except as required by law, CITEC disclaims any duty to update any forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or changes in its expectations. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast, May 8, 2024. Before Wenbin speaks, I would like to mention that SciTech will be participating in a variety of industry and academic conferences, meetings, and seminars throughout 2024. While these are primarily geared to the scientific community, they may offer an opportunity to interact with users of our technologies to learn why Scitex instruments are so highly valued by our customers. There is a cost to attend most events, and we have a limited number of spaces to accommodate members of the financial community. So if you are interested in attending, please contact me. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Wenbin.

Thanks, Paul. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for your interest in Scitex. On the call today, I will discuss our performance for the first quarter of 2024 and the progress achieved on our strategic objectives to drive sustainable growth and profitability. Then I will turn the call over to Bill for a more detailed look at our financial results and our outlook for 2024 before we open it up for Q&A. Our strategic priorities in 2024 are centered on strengthening our competitive position with an eye towards improving operational leverage. We are focused on driving revenue growth, margin expansion, and capital efficiency. These objectives are part of our balanced business strategy to deliver sustainable profitability and maximize free cash flow. Turning to specifics and our first quarter revenue results, we achieved $44.9 million, representing growth of 21% year over year. Organic revenue grew 11%, excluding acquisition-related revenue of $7.6 million in the first quarter of 2024. We began to see improvement in organic revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2023, which we were pleased to see continue into the first quarter. Total organic revenue grew 11% in the first quarter, driven by strong growth in our services revenue from our increasing in-store base. Organic revenue growth was also driven by continued growth in our product revenue. Longer term. We expect our recurring services and the reagent revenue will be strong growth drivers for SciTech. In the first quarter, we expanded our global footprint with 99 organic SciTech instruments sold, reaching a total installed base of 2,247 instruments. This number does not include the thousands of installed amylase and guava instruments. Ordering trends in the first quarter for both organic and inorganic products were largely within our expectations, but with some missed activity levels by region. Specifically, we experienced increased strength across Europe and China, where cited FSP products are also becoming well established as a market leader in flow cytometry. We are seeing customers gradually returning to their regular buying patterns in these regions. However, in the U.S. and APEC, excluding China, we continued to see some elongated sales cycles. In the first quarter, we continued to make strategic investment to increase the efficiency and the performance of our operations. In March, we announced that we opened a new 50,000 square foot facility in Wuxi, China, to meet the rising global demand for our cutting-edge cell analysis solutions. With this facility, we are able to increase our manufacturing capacity and foster unique vendor relationships to drive operational efficiencies and further our competitive advantage over industry peers. Turning to bioinformatics, our primary goal is to enable our customers to streamline their experiment workflow through our software tools, which drive adoption and the utilization of our cell analysis solutions. When we track our success in bioinformatics, is through user engagement and demand for our core bioinformatics offerings, the SciTech Cloud. I'm pleased to report that we now have over 8,500 users, representing an average of more than three SciTech Cloud users per installed SciTech FFP instruments. As a reminder, SciTech Cloud's digital ecosystem offers a comprehensive suite of special panel design tools seamlessly integrated into a centralized platform, forming a unified ecosystem. Our cutting-edge solution empowers researchers to prepare and optimize their experiments remotely, streamlining the process from panel design to data acquisition. We are also pleased to share that this week at the cycle conference, the primary flow cytometry conference worldwide, we launched our special panel software package through an early access program. Special panel is an intelligent design algorithm that automatically designs high quality panels for optimal marker resolution and is optimized specifically to use unsighted FSP instruments. We expect the special panel tool to make science instruments even easier to use and will save researchers time and money by allowing a broader range of reagents to be selected automatically for the design panel to achieve biological objectives with optimized data quality. We recently pre-announced this solution on our social media channels. and we encourage you to follow the discussion there for more information. On the clinical front, we have previously reported our success at obtaining the IBDR compliance for our single laser six-color TBNK panel in the EU market. I'm pleased to report that just last week, our application for this six-color TBNK panel on our single laser NLCLC instrument was approved in China. This approval is unique to CITAC and is an important development, as previous regulatory approvals for TBNK analysis have been based on using two laser instruments. Using CITAC's one laser system will provide important advantages to our users in the form of lower costs, more reliable operation, and the more consistent results to support laboratory standardization. Overall, the start to 2024 was encouraging with a resumption of organic growth and improved customer purchasing patterns. Trends that we began seeing in the fourth quarter that continued through the balance of the first quarter. It is a testimony to our position as an industry leader in comprehensive cell analysis solution and the clear underlying demand for our products. We are purpose-built to advance next-generation cell analysis with our end-to-end platform, addressing the direct needs of our customers to advance their research, and we believe this continues to be a valuable and important differentiator for SciTech. With that, I will now turn the call over to Bill for more details around our financials.