Cytek Biosciences, Inc.

time I would like to welcome everyone to SciTech Biosciences second 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 would like to ask a question during this time simply press star 1 followed by Buy the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Goodson, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator. Earlier today, SciTech Biosciences released financial results for the quarter ended June 30th, 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's CEO and CFO, Bill McComb. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will be making 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 of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure may be found in today's earnings release submitted to the SEC. Except as required by law, SciTech 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 live broadcast August 6, 2024. Once again, I would like to invite investors and analysts to attend the industry and academic conferences, meetings, and seminars where we will be exhibiting Scitex products. There are 43 of these events planned throughout the remainder of 2024 in the US and around the world. 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 will turn the call over to Wenbin.

Thanks, Paul. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for your interest in SciTech. On the call today, I will discuss our performance for the second quarter of 2024 and the progress achieved on our strategic initiatives 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 updated financial outlook for 2024 before we open it up for Q&A. Revenue in the second quarter was $46.6 million. an increase of 4% compared to the first quarter and a 6% decline compared to the second quarter of 2023, which was especially strong as it captured some delayed orders from the first quarter of 2023. Collectively, revenue for the first half of 2024 grew 5% compared to the first half of 2023. Value in the second quarter of 2024 was comprised of a continued strong double-digit growth in EMEA and APEX, offset by weakness in the U.S. market, where we continued to experience a slowdown in orders and elongated sales cycles, particularly concentrated in the academic and the government segments of the U.S. market. Further, while weaker versus The prior year, the biotech, pharma, and CRO segments improved sequentially versus the first quarter. We believe our performance in this academic and government segment of the U.S. market was impacted by turnover on our sales team in some sales strategies, a slow funding environment, and an overhang of excess capacity from pandemic-era spending. We are working aggressively to bolster our sales team in this area. We believe the in long-term sales cycle was primarily a result of these market factors and not as a result of a change in competitive dynamics. Importantly, we believe the fundamental drivers of long-term growth remain in place in the U.S. market and expect it to normalize over time. Specifically, we expect the large in-store base of conventional technology flow psychometrics will be replaced over time with special instruments and will be a growth driver for SciTech going forward. As a result of our Q2 results and the slower than expected recovery in the U.S. market conditions, we are slightly narrowing our guidance range and now expect full-year revenue in the range of $203 to $210 million, representing growth of 5% to 9% over the prior year. Bill will provide more details on our financial results momentarily. In the second quarter, we were pleased to achieve 30% growth in service revenue as compared to the same quarter in the prior year. driven by our increasing installed base of instruments. As a reminder, we expect our recurring service revenue will be a strong growth driver for SIDEC longer term. Notably, over the last 12 months, we have leveraged the increasing scale of our service operations to boost the labor and the overhead productivity. Based on these efforts, we substantially increased our service growth margins by 8% points as compared to a year ago. Overall, while ordering activity continues to be weak in the U.S. and the market recovery was not at the pace we would like to see, we believe that the underlying demand for our cutting-edge analysis solutions remains strong. And we are making steady progress with new and existing customers in our pipeline. As we navigate this dynamic environment, we remain focused on driving sustainable growth and productivity. And essential to this objective is strengthening our position as a market leader in flow cytometry. Turning to our growth strategy, as a reminder, our focus is on four key pillars each of which is integral to our long-term growth, instruments, applications, bioinformatics, and clinical. In the second quarter, we expanded our global footprint with 147 instruments sold, reaching a total installed base of 2,656 units, including 299 AMLIS and AGUAVA instruments shipped since the acquisition of the Luminix flow cytometry and imaging business. This total does not include the thousands of installed AMNES and GUAVA instruments sold prior to our acquisition of the Luminix product lines. We believe that this growing interface will serve as a durable foundation to drive adoption of our current and future product offerings. and deliver growth across our diversified revenue base. During the second quarter, we were excited to have announced our Enhanced Small Particle Detection Module, or ESP, a new product that can be added to new or retrofitted to existing Aurora and Northern Lights instruments. This new capability allows our already powerful cell analysis systems to provide the further sensitivity and the resolution improvements for detecting viruses and the other sub-cellular particles, or while maintaining sites with well-known high resolution and the high parameter capabilities for cell analysis. By bringing improved speed and accuracy to the study of extracellular vesicles, cell-to-cell communication and the cell signaling in many physiological states, we expect to accelerate the pace of discovery, therapy, and the diagnostic development and benefit the scientific community as a whole. For SciTech, we believe these new capabilities will further distinguish our cell analysis solutions as the preferred choice among researchers and clinicians. Turning to bioinformatics, our main goal is to enable our customers to streamline their experimental workflow through our software tools, which drive adoption and utilization of our cell analysis solution. Our success in bioinformatics can be measured through user engagement and demand for SciTech Cloud, one of our core bioinformatics offerings. We now have over 11,000 users of the SciTech Cloud. representing an average of about five users per installed Sighted FSP instrument. We are excited to share that just last week, we officially launched a powerful tool to automate panel design and expand the capabilities of the panel builder tool within Sighted Cloud, which we previewed during our last earnings call. Our special panel tool is a proprietary new intelligent algorithm optimized for SciTech SSP technology that automates the assignments of protocols to markers, removing a labor-intensive manual process. This tool will save researchers time and money by jump-starting their panel design process with a tool that suggests to optimize the panels in minutes. As a reminder, SiteCloud supports flow cytometry research from panel design to experiment setup to data acquisition, enabling researchers to design panels with ease, taking into account antigen density, marker expression, and the reagent availability. It consists of a suite of integrated online software tools that streamline workflows, combining all special panel design tools in one place which enables users to prepare experiments remotely. CyclerCloud accelerates time to insight for a wide range of applications and is a vital resource in the research community. On the application front, in the second quarter, we were pleased to share that our one laser and two laser six color TBNK reagent cocktails received the China National Medical Administration approval for clinical use on northern light systems in hospitals, laboratories, and the clinics across China. As a reminder, this is the first one-laser-based six-color assay supported by FFP capability, which gives our one-laser systems a competitive advantage against the more expensive two-laser systems. These reagents help in diagnosing and monitoring various immune-related conditions. Obtaining NNPA clearance is a significant milestone achieved through a rigorous process that validates the safety and the efficacy of phytic TB and K reagents. This achievement enhances our market presence in China and opens new potential opportunities while strengthening our competitive advantage. As we continue to push forward new products and applications, we remain deeply focused on providing a comprehensive sale analysis portfolio to our customers. A critical component of this mission is to expand and enhance our reach and capabilities. We look forward to continuing to provide our powerful cell analysis solutions to the scientific community to accelerate clinical progress and scientific discovery. With that, I will now turn the call over to Bill for more details around our financials.