Cytek Biosciences, Inc.

At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the SciTech Biosciences 3rd Quarter 2025 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 followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Paul Goodson, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Earlier today, SciTech Biosciences released financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2025. 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. A copy of this news release is also available on the investor relations section of Scitech's website at investors.scitechbio.com. Joining me today from Scitech are Wenbin Zhang, CEO, and Bill McComb, CFO. Please note that we will be referencing a slide presentation during the call today that has been posted to the investor section of our corporate website. As a reminder, we will make statements during this call that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements regarding CITEC 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 in these statements. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in our slide presentation in the section entitled Forward Looking Statements in the press release CITEC issue 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. Additional information regarding our use of non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, may be found in our slide presentation and in today's press release. While the company believes these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. 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 the live broadcast November 5th, 2025. I want to thank those of you who attended our user group meeting on October 22nd in New York City. Our next and last user group meeting for 2025 will be just two days from now on November 7th in Montreal. SciTech also participates in a variety of industry conferences worldwide, often hosting a booth where attendees can see our products and learn about them from our knowledgeable team members. As always, these events are primarily geared to the scientific community, but they may offer an opportunity to investors and analysts to interact with our users of technologies and to learn why Scitex instruments are so highly valued by our customers. We have a limited number of spaces to accommodate members of the financial community, so if you are interested in attending any of these events, please contact me in January when we will have a list of 2026 events. With that, I will turn the call over to Wenbin.

Thanks, Paul. Welcome everyone and thank you for your interest in SciTech. On today's call, I would like to start with a discussion of our performance in the third quarter. Next, I will give you some highlights of our progress during the third quarter on our strategic priorities before turning the call over to Bill for a more detailed look at our financials and our outlook. Turning to slide three, in the third quarter of 2025, total revenue reached $52.3 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 2% compared to the same period in 2024. This growth was primarily driven by strong double-digit gains in the Asia Pacific region and the continued momentum in our recurring revenue businesses, specifically service and regions. Turning to slide four. Geographically, APAC, including China, led our performance with robust revenue growth across all categories, including instruments, regions, and service. In the U.S., we saw double-digit offering year-over-year overall revenue growth driven by continued momentum in service revenue. In contrast, AMIR experienced a double-digit year-over-year revenue decline, largely due to significantly reduced instrument sales to academic and government customers, and a modest decline in instrument sales to pharma, biotech, and CRO customers. In our rest of world region, which includes Canada and Latin America, we achieved a double-digit overall revenue growth compared to the third quarter of last year. Turning to slide five. Notably, I wanted to call out that excluding the performance in a year, CITE has posted a double-digit revenue growth in all worldwide regions in the third quarter, as you can see from this slide. focusing now on instruments. Our instrument revenue to farmer and biotech customers grew 12% worldwide, including 10% in the U.S., driven in part by the launch of our Aurora EVOS instrument. Instrument revenue in APEC, including China, grew 20% year-over-year, and it grew 32% year-over-year in rest of the world. This strong momentum is being driven by a positive funding environment for academic institutions in these regions. In the U.S., overall instrument revenue was flat compared to a year ago. U.S. instrument revenue was driven by improving demand from pharma, biotech, and the CRO customers, which we believe stems from greater clarity around the macroeconomic and industry factors. However, these instrument revenue gains were offset by continued softness in the academic and government sectors, where founding uncertainty persisted due to the evolving U.S. policy landscape. In the quarter, we did begin to see some stabilization in this end market. However, academic and government demand remained under pressure. resulting in no net overall incident revenue growth in the U.S. in the third quarter. In EMEA, incident revenue declined, particularly in the academic and government sector, which we believe reflects a broader shift in public spending priorities. Looking at our recurring revenue sources, service revenue continued to grow strongly contributing meaningfully to our overall base of recurring revenue. APAC was particularly strong broadly, including in service and reagents. Service revenue growth was driven by our expanding in-store instrument base and the strong utilization of our products. Reagent revenue grew 21% globally year over year, supported by operational improvements, including faster delivery times and enhanced customer service. I would now like to update you on the progress our team has made across our core strategic pillars, instruments, applications, bioinformatics, and clinical, to further solidify site exposition as a market leader in next-gen cell analysis solutions. Starting with our core instruments on slide six. In the third quarter, we expanded our global footprint by 161 instruments, bringing CITES total in-solder base to 3,466 units. Within our instrument portfolio, our Aurora cell solder was the strongest contributor in Q3, growing 35% year over year. We believe this strong growth is notable during a time when competing instruments have been recently introduced to the market. Late in the second quarter, we introduced the Aurora Evo analyzer, and I'm pleased to report that it has had a strong reception. The Aurora Evo system is a demonstration of SciTech's commitment to maintain its position at the forefront of technology development in the flow cytometry industry. It offers a unique combination of high throughput, industry-leading data quality, more particle detection, ease of use, and automation and harmonization features. We expect it will be the standard against which other systems are measured. We included these new features after listening to what our customers wanted, and by the strong reception during Q3, it's clear that they are deriving value from the new features we added to create the Aurora Evo. Finally, regarding instruments, I want to mention that our Muse micro-analyzer has gotten a very strong reception since it was first introduced this past March. The Muse Micro offers advanced micro-capillary fluidics, enhanced optics, better software, and a broader assay compatibility, all while maintaining affordability and a compact design. It's an ideal choice for researchers and the lab seeking cost-effective flow psychometry systems. Turning to our next growth pillar, applications, which include reagents, we remain focused on driving our relation product engine growth, and as part of this commitment, we recently announced the expansion of our European headquarters at our facility in Amsterdam's Lifestyle District. This site increases our footprint in EMEA by more than 40%, including a dedicated customer service and training center. To further advance our region business, We additionally transition the reagent warehouse operations to this site to improve operational agility and efficiency, reduce turnaround time, and provide reliable and consistent experiences for our customers. Over time, we expect our recurring revenue base to continue growing. Moving to bioinformatics, as we have mentioned before, Our SiteTech Cloud continues to provide important benefits to our users. Our software tools empower customers to streamline their experimental workflow, which drives adoption and utilization of our cell analysis solutions and growth in our relations and service businesses. As of September 30, 2025, we had more than 22,600 SiteTech Cloud users. representing remarkable growth of over 40% since the beginning of 2025. This represents an average of almost eight users per installed CITES SSP instruments. We believe this goal reflects the loyalty our users have to our product portfolio and the halo effect of the CITES cloud driving the utilization of our technology platform including our recurring revenue offering in reagents and service. As a reminder, our site cloud is transforming how researchers design and conduct complex flow cytometry experiments. At its core is our proprietary AI-powered panel builder, which saves weeks or months of time by automating critical steps like selection and matching. Scientists can then conduct a virtual experiment before committing to a real wet lab study, reducing trial and error and improving data quality from the start. Moving to clinical, we continue to believe the clinical market represents an attractive business opportunity for SciTech. In the third quarter, SciTech took center stage to showcase our complete cell analysis solutions at several industry conferences. One notable event was the APCA meeting in Montpelier, France in September. The event featured presentations by independent researchers discussing the importance of special flow cytometry in performing in vitro diagnostic procedures and acknowledging that Cytex Northern Lights CLC system is the only special analyzer approved for clinical use in the EU. With that, I will now turn the call over to Bill for more details about our financials.

Thanks, Wyndon. Turning to slide seven and our third quarter financial results, total revenue for Q3 was $52.3 million, a 2% increase versus Q3 of 2024. This reflects strong growth in service and reagents worldwide in instruments in Asia Pacific and stabilization in U.S. instrument revenues. These were offset by continued weakness in EMEA instrument revenues. We saw 14% growth in total revenues from biopharma customers globally versus the year-ago quarter, offset by a similar decline in revenues from government and academic customers. Product revenue, which is comprised of instruments and reagents, decreased 4% versus Q3 of 2024, driven by a 26% decline in EMEA, offset by 19% growth in APAC. U.S. product revenue was up 20% versus Q2, but flat versus Q3 of 2024, which was the strongest quarter of product revenue in 2024. Our performance in the U.S. was attributable to a 10% increase in instrument revenue from pharma and biotech customers, driven by the launch of our new Aurora EVO instrument and an improved industry environment. This was offset by a 13% decline in instrument sales to academic and government customers as funding pressures continued. In EMEA, the decline in product revenue was primarily driven by a significant percentage decline in revenue from academic and government customers, which we believe is a result of a shift in government spending priorities, and a single-digit decline from pharma, biotech, and CRO accounts. While our reagent revenue is still a single-digit percentage of our total revenue, it achieved its highest ever quarterly revenue in Q3, representing 21% growth over the prior year quarter. As Wenbin mentioned, this was largely due to a concerted effort by our reagents team to shorten delivery times and to improve customer service. Service continued to deliver strong revenue growth with 19% growth in Q3 versus the prior year quarter. This was driven by growth in the installed base and active usage of our systems. Turning to geographic market performance, U.S. revenue grew 12% in Q3 versus prior year, driven by service revenue growth. EMEA declined 28% due to lower instrument revenue. APAC, including China, increased 25% in Q3, driven by growth in instruments, service, and reagents. Gap gross profit was $27.6 million, a 5% decrease versus Q3 of 2024. Gap gross profit margin was 53% versus 56% in the prior year quarter. This was due to both a lower service gross margin resulting from an increase in headcount and travel costs and a lower product gross margin as a result of lower product revenues higher materials and tariff costs, and higher overhead. Gap gross margin improves sequentially from 52% in Q2 due to higher product gross margins on higher product revenues and improved overhead absorption. Adjusted gross profit margin, which excludes stock-based compensation and amortization of acquisition-related intangibles, was 55% in Q3, down from 60% in the prior year quarter, and down from 56% in Q2. Operating expenses were 36.7 million in Q3, up 3.5 million or 10% versus Q3 2024. This was driven by higher general and administrative expenses, partially offset by lower R&D and sales and marketing expenses. Research and development expenses were $9 million, down 9% versus the year-ago quarter, primarily due to lower headcount and compensation expenses, partially offset by higher engineering expenses. Sales and marketing expenses were $11.7 million, down 6% versus the year-ago quarter, due to lower headcount and compensation expenses and lower outside services expenses. General administrative expenses were $16.1 million, up $5.2 million, or 47% from the year-ago quarter. The increase was primarily attributable to legal expenses related to a patent litigation case and, to a lesser extent, a $0.7 million non-recurring, non-cash write-off of deferred offering costs for an at-the-market equity financing facility entered into in 2022, which expired in the current quarter. Loss from operations was $9.2 million for Q3 versus $4.2 million in the year-ago quarter, driven by $1.5 million lower GAAP gross profit and $3.5 million higher operating expenses. Net loss was $5.5 million in Q3 versus net income of $0.9 million in the prior year quarter. This was driven by three factors. First, higher loss from operations of $5 million as mentioned above. Secondly, net other income decreased by $3 million to $1.4 million from $4.4 million in the prior year quarter. This was primarily driven by 0.9 million of FX losses in the current quarter versus 1.1 million of FX gains in the prior year quarter and lower interest income of 0.9 million. The higher loss from operations and lower net other income, totaling 8 million, were offset by an increased tax benefit of 2.3 million in the current quarter as a result of a higher effective tax rate versus a tax benefit of 0.8 million in the prior year quarter. Adjusted EBITDA, which excludes stock-based compensation, foreign exchange impacts, and the non-recurring charge of 0.7 million for the write-off of deferred offering costs, declined to 2.5 million from 7.6 million in the year-ago quarter. This was due to lower gross profits of 1.5 million and higher operating expenses of 3.5 million due to the factors I described above. Free cash flow was slightly negative at minus 0.3 million and a quarter, modestly decreasing our total cash and marketable securities to 261.7 million. Lastly, turning to our full year guidance on slide eight. We are reaffirming our full year 2025 revenue outlook for a range of $196 million to $205 million, assuming no change in currency exchange rates. This is based on our year-to-date results, our pipeline of instrument sale opportunities for Q4, and the good momentum we see in our service and reagent businesses. Our performance this quarter showed continued strong growth in instruments in APAC, stabilization in U.S. instruments, and solid growth in our recurring revenue businesses. We expect these trends to continue, and our outlook remains consistent with our views in previous quarters that we would see slowly improving trends as the year progressed. We have noted this in the U.S. market, whereas EMEA remains challenged. Importantly, we continue to believe our performance in Q3 and in 2025 year-to-date reflects a strong market leadership position in what has been a difficult environment. Our core business is showing positive growth in all regions except EMEA, and our recurring revenue continues to grow. Notwithstanding some temporarily elevated operating expenses, we delivered positive adjusted EBITDA, which we anticipate will continue in Q4. We believe we will perform well relative to the overall flow cytometry market, which is also beginning to show signs of stabilization. Finally, our strong balance sheet also gives us the ability to continue investing for growth. With that, I will turn it back over to Wenbin.

Wenbin Zhang Let's go. Turning to slide nine. I want to close by first thanking our CITES team for their continued commitment to advance our mission amid a challenging and evolving market environment. We believe our third quarter results are encouraging and demonstrate our established brand and strong technology and underscore our market leadership position. Our team continues to execute with discipline, expanding our global infrastructure base growing our recurring revenue streams and sharpening our focus on profitability and cash generation. At the same time, we are committed to making targeted investments that will reinforce our competitive position and accelerate our growth. While we remain mindful of broader market conditions, we believe CITES is well positioned to deliver long-term value through our differentiated technology portfolio, durable growth drivers, strong balance sheet, and global reach. I want to thank everyone for joining today's call, and we will now open it up for questions. Operator.

At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, Press sort and the number one on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of David Westenberg of Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Hi. I wanted to actually maybe just start with the product launch, the Aurora Evo. Can you talk about the differences in this product versus the other products in the market and how we could think about growth contribution from new products in the next couple of years? Thank you.

I think this new product, basically what we have done is we listened to our customers, specifically from biotech customers. In terms of the features, we have included like a higher throughput and small particle detection, automation, and harmonization. All of those are really suited for those farmer customers.

Oh, got it. Thank you. Just maybe speaking of pharma customers, and actually I was going to say, is there anything to take away from the double-digit growth in CROs? Meaning, are they potentially leading indicators that biopharma might want to own their own instruments?

When we talk about biopharma and CROs, we're talking about one category. So when Wenbin talks about biopharma customers, we're grouping all of those together and as we noted in the remarks, our instrument revenue to that group grew 12% worldwide and 10% in the U.S. So we've received a very favorable response.

Maybe I'll ask another way. In a press release it mentioned CROs. I think it said it grew at 14%. Now normally when I think about CROs and their usage...

Yeah, no, what we referred to was the aggregate group of customers which are comprised of pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, CROs, and distributors. That's one group of companies. And so what the press release said was that total revenues to that aggregate group rose 14% in the quarter. And what I just mentioned is to that same group, instrument revenue rose 12%. And the big pharma companies are probably the largest subcomponent of that group. So that's the way to think of it.

Got it. Thank you very much. Just maybe on the double-digit revenue growth in the U.S., Can you remind us of how much of that might be, you know, sorry to say, but, you know, easier comps versus just, you know, good execution? And, I mean, are we now, in your opinion, at kind of the late endings of a, maybe I'd say early endings of a recovery instead of late endings of stagnation? Thank you. And I'll take it offline from here.

Yeah. I think, no, it's not. The third quarter of last year was pretty strong. So the performance in the US is a function of strong service and reagent growth, and the fact that our instrument in the US were flat. But as I mentioned in my remarks, the U.S. instruments, that Q3 of last year was the highest quarter of 2024 for U.S. instruments. So the benchmark was actually pretty high. And so to be flat against that is quite a good achievement. I'm talking about it's quite a good achievement on the instrument side. And then in addition to that, we had strong growth in services and reagents. Does that answer your question?

Your next question comes from the line of Brendan Smith of TD Cohen. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks, guys, for taking the questions. I appreciate all the color. I wanted to ask just a little bit more actually about the quality of the conversations you're having with customers in recent weeks. And if there's any additional call you can maybe provide about their appetite to spend more on some of these instruments next year as they're really starting to put together their 2026 budget. And I guess if so, do you have any sense which of your offerings you think they'd maybe reach for first once some of those dollars start to become maybe more readily available into next year? And then I guess just if you have, if you're noticing maybe any geographic differences in your answer to that question.

Thanks. Yeah, I think, you know, The trends that we currently see in the business are that Asia-Pac is strong, is growing strongly. The Asia-Pac instrument business is growing strongly. Service momentum continues to be strong, as does Reagent. As we noted, EMEA is continues to be challenged, and the U.S. is following the path that we expected from, you know, that we talked about in earlier quarters of gradual improvement as the year progressed. And we've seen that, and so we've, you know, we've seen a stabilization in the U.S. in the U.S. instrument business where it's been, you know, basically flat versus last year for two quarters in a row now. And look, we don't have a crystal ball about next year. But based on assuming there are no exogenous shocks, we expect those trends to continue. Within the US, the biopharma sector, as we noted, has been, within US instruments, the biopharma sector has been strong. Academic and government has been weak, but the two have offset each other. So it's a bit early for us to be talking about 2026. The only comment we would make is we generally expect the areas of the business that are growing to continue to grow absent exogenous factors. And I think at some point that Europe has to hit bottom. It was down quite significantly this year. And you'll see it's down almost 30% this year on an aggregate revenue basis. And one would think that that rate of decline has to slow.

Your next question comes from the line of Mason Carrico of Stevens. Please go ahead.

Hey, this is Harrison on for Mason. Good afternoon and thanks for taking the questions here. Can you walk us through your key assumptions behind the 2025 outlook? Are you assuming the typical 4Q step up in instrument placements or something more muted given the macro environment?

We would, we think that we don't have any reason not, let me back up. You know, we typically see a budget flush of, from the biopharma customers in Q4. We don't have any reason to doubt that that will, or to expect that that will not happen this year. So we would expect some, typical seasonal improvement in Q4. Again, I'd go back to what I just said about the outlook. Service and reagent momentum is strong. Asia-Pac is strong. U.S. is stable. And we think EMEA will continue to be under pressure versus last year.

Understood. And then just wanted to ask a little bit more about the U.S. How is the U.S. academic and government demand trended since last August? And are you seeing any signs of stabilization as we head into next year?

You know, it continues to be down versus last year. And Obviously, the funding pressures or the funding reductions, there hasn't been much change to that picture. But look, on the flip side, the momentum in biopharma has been quite good, quite strong, as we noted. So we don't see the US academic and government We don't have a reason to expect it will get particularly better or worse. We just think it will remain under pressure versus last year's levels.

Okay. And then I know reagents are growing, and you've cited over 150 million annual opportunity with less than 10% captured today. What specific initiatives are you implementing to increase that capture rate, and have you begun to see those initiatives bear fruit?

As you can see, we have really improved our operation efficiency and our logistics functions. We significantly shortened the delivery time. As you know, the region is a recurring business. adjust all of those logistic side of the issues which is what we have been focusing on doing during the last few quarters and clearly it has benefited we have benefited from those kind of improvements we have made and recently we also expanded our European facilities in Amsterdam and moved the warehouse the region warehouse in-house and clearly and we'll continue to see the kind of benefits we have done so far.

We also focused on what we mentioned the past throughout. We call that designing activities where we design a panel for a customer and use that as a way to sell more of our reagents. So that's another initiative.

Cytacloud is another area we have leveraged to help drive our reagent business.

And finally, we continue to invest in R&D and expanding our portfolio of reagents. We do custom reagents for certain customers, and we may then move those into the catalog. That's another way of expanding our reagent business, another initiative. So there are multiple things we're doing on lots of different fronts.

Great. Thanks again for taking the questions.

Again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Cooper of Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Hey, everyone. This is Nolan for Andrew. First question, you know, going off of the other one around the 4Q guide and outlook for the year, you know, we expected a bit of a step up just seasonally, but, you know, you mentioned some budget flush. How reliant is the 4Q guide and the rest of the year on a step up or a budget flush versus pure seasonality? So just trying to get a feel for the mix between the two in terms of the step up.

When we use those terms, we're basically referring to the same thing. Our seasonality that we see is caused by customers spending the remaining available budget or flushing it, if you will. That really, those two terms refer to the same phenomenon. And as we mentioned, we don't see that pretty typically every year. We saw that last year. And we've seen that regularly in previous years. And as we say, we don't have any information to suggest that that would not occur to some extent this year.

Okay.

So the outlook is based on, as we mentioned, obviously our year-to-date results, the momentum in our recurring revenue businesses. So the growth drivers there are the reagent business we talked about, the install base for services. And then we look at our pipeline of opportunities in the instrument business. And we factor all those in, and based on that, we are reiterating our range.

Okay, got it. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify whether when you meant budget flush that there was a significant improvement in the market, but I understand the seasonality.

Yeah, no, it's just the fact that as particularly biopharma companies budget on a calendar year basis, so if they get into Q4, they have some incentive to spend what the remaining amount that hasn't been spent in order to, you know, to make sure they spend the whole budget. Got it.

And maybe lastly, oh, okay. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I was going to say my last one was just on capital deployment. You know, you talked about a pretty strong balance sheet. and you expect to be free cash flow positive. So, you know, any appetite for more share buybacks, maybe what you're seeing in the acquisition pipeline, if there's any interest there.

Yeah, so short answer is we aim to, our objective is to do both share repurchase and M&A to size our share repurchase What we have done in the past is sized our share repurchase to be approximately equal to free cash flow. Year to date, we've actually spent more than our free cash flow on share repurchase. So, you know, as a result of that, because we were in excess of free cash flow, we didn't buy any shares in the third quarter. You know, generally our objective is to buy, you know, our approach to share repurchase is to be opportunistic and to buy, you know, when we think it's particularly favorable. But, you know, to size those purchases at, you know, somewhere broadly in the range of our free cash flow. So we are not making any changes to that general approach and, you know, we'll execute as we see opportunities going forward. And then with respect to M&A, we continue to review, you know, a number of different opportunities. But as you know, M&A opportunities are episodic and, you know, they come and go, you know, sort of in irregular pattern. But we are seeing things, we are reviewing things, and it's our objective to grow through both organic and inorganic means.

Awesome. Thank you.

That ends our Q&A session, and we appreciate your participation. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.