10x Genomics, Inc.

Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call

4/30/2024

spk14: Good day, everyone, and welcome to the 10xGenomics first quarter 2024 earnings call. Today's call is being recorded, and I would like to turn the call over to Cassie Corno, Director Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance. Please go ahead.
spk13: Thank you,
spk14: and
spk13: good afternoon, everyone. Earlier today, 10xGenomics released financial results for the first quarter and it's March 31, 2024. If you have not received this news release or if you would like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investors at 10xGenomics.com. An archived webcast of this call will be available on the investor tab of the company's website, 10xGenomics.com, for at least 45 days following this call. 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 federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated, and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Additional information regarding these risks, uncertainties, and factors that could cause results to differ appears in the press release 10xGenomics issued today and in the documents and reports filed by 10xGenomics from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 10xGenomics disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. Joining the call today are Serge Saxamoff, our CEO and co-founder, and Justin McIner, our chief financial officer. We will host a question and answer session after our prepared remarks. We ask analysts to please keep to one question so that we may accommodate everyone in the queue. With that, I will now turn the call over to Serge.
spk10: Thanks, Cassie, and good afternoon, everyone. During today's call, I'll start with an overview of our first quarter progress and performance, highlighted by the launch of four major new products that we believe set a new standard for single cell and spatial biology. Next, I will discuss the exciting opportunities we have ahead across our three platforms and the steps we're taking to deliver on this future. Then I'll turn the call over to Justin for a more detailed look at our financials, business trends, and outlook for the rest of the year. For the first quarter, total revenue grew 5% to $141 million. We continue to drive strong growth and spatial, led by our Visium franchise and the highly anticipated launch of Visium HD. We also saw strong interest in our new Chromium GemX technology, which delivers substantially higher performance at a lower price. A significant number of customers trialed the new architecture, contributing to lower than expected quarter and orders for Chromium overall. Despite the near term sales impact, we believe GemX will invigorate Chromium growth over the long term and ultimately enable wider single cell adoption. And while we're working to deliver on the vast opportunity ahead in Chromium, our strategy has always been focused on the strength of the entire portfolio and on providing the full breadth of our capabilities to customers. With our three complimentary platforms in single cell and spatial, we're committed to innovation that enables the scale and resolution necessary for researchers to better understand biology and disease. We believe that we're still early in this opportunity and in adoption of these tools. This year, we're introducing franchise defining products in each platform to enhance our performance leadership and accelerate long term growth. These products are a testament to the enduring strength and velocity over innovation engine and its value for customers around the world. These launches also reflect how we listen closely to customer feedback and build products that are most responsive to their needs. Let me highlight a few of our latest advances and how we expect them to extend our technology leadership. First, we were thrilled to officially start shipping Vision HD at the end of March. For our team, there's really no better feeling than seeing new products in the hands of researchers. That's especially true here. Vision HD has not only been the most requested product in our history, but also one of the most ambitious development projects we've ever taken on. It is precisely the kind of challenge 10X was built for. It is yet another example of our ability to tackle hard problems and arrive at the best solution possible for our customers and their research. Vision HD enables whole transcript on spatial analysis at single cell scale resolution. It runs on existing side assist instruments, leverages the same robust and easy to use workflow as standard Vision, and brings the field of spatial discovery to a whole new level. While it's still very early, we're really pleased with the strong initial demand and tremendous enthusiasm we're seeing from our customers. The positive momentum further fuels our ambition to establish Vision HD as the platform for translational discovery. This quarter, we also continue to deliver on our robust Xenium R&D pipeline. We began shipping both our multimodal cell segmentation product and our new Immune Oncology gene panel in March. Cell segmentation includes an add-on kit compatible with existing Xenium assays. It leverages advances in assay chemistry and sophisticated machine learning algorithms to significantly improve the determination of cell boundaries using multiple morphological features and modalities. While Xenium launched with a robust nuclear-based segmentation approach, many researchers have been waiting for this new solution to enable the most accurate biological interpretation for their Xenium runs. Xenium is already well-recognized as being C2 performance leader. There is still much more to come. We're planning to launch our 5,000 plex capability mid-year, scaling up plex by an order of magnitude while still delivering high quality sensitivity, specificity, and throughput. We're also developing panels of 1,000 to 2,000 genes to give customers even more options and flexibility. We're moving forward with integrated protein profiling, which will significantly expand Xenium's existing protein capabilities. And longer term, we have architected Xenium to allow for tremendous technological headroom and enable more applications, higher throughput, and lower cost. With the long awaited launch of Visium HD, the performance of Visenium in the field and the interest and buzz around the Xenium pipeline, it's clear we're in the forefront of the spatial biology revolution. We're seeing some cutting edge researchers and technologists start to reprioritize their team's resources and mindshare from single cell approaches to explore how spatial methods can push their research forward. We're also seeing spatial resonate with new researchers who have never done single cell or other genomics work before. Take this year's annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research, or AACR for example. There was resounding energy and conviction on spatial, which emerged as a huge theme of the conference. In fact, the majority of the plenary sessions featured or referenced 10x spatial data. This burgeoning interest in spatial is drawing the attention of both new and existing customers. And we have work to do to ensure we can satisfy that interest and drive growth across the portfolio.
spk18: During the
spk10: single cell and the launch of our new GEMEX technology, the first major overhaul to our chromium architecture since 2019. With this completely re-engineered market-fluid chip design, GEMEX delivers superior performance at larger scale and lower cost. In March, we began shipping the first two products on GEMEX, our highest volume chromium assays, three prime gene expression and five prime immune profiling. These assays take single cell analysis to the next level, giving researchers meaningful performance advantages across the board, from increased sensitivity and capture efficiency to improve robustness and scalability, all at a lower cost. In fact, the new technology provides researchers a more than two-fold reduction in cost per cell. We believe GEMEX raises the bar for the field and sets a new standard for single cell analysis. Our customers have been eager to see and validate this for themselves. In Q1, more customers than expected trialed GEMEX to see firsthand the power of this technology on their own samples. And more recently, customers, including the Fred Hutch Innovation Lab, have started to share their own independent comparisons of GEMEX and their next GEM technology, verifying our performance claims. We're encouraged by the early enthusiasm, adoption, and feedback on GEMEX, despite the near-term headwinds as we help customers navigate this product transition. GEMEX delivers great value to customers now. It opens up meaningful possibilities to expand the field long-term. As we have said before, we believe there is significant price elasticity in single cell, which presents a significant long-term opportunity for a broader adoption. GEMEX is one of several steps we have planned to take advantage of the elasticity. By delivering superior performance and superior economics, we believe GEMEX will help us enable larger projects, reach new customers, and encourage more routine use among existing researchers. We fully intend to expand the single cell opportunity through a robust Chromium roadmap and other efforts to drive better awareness and broader adoption at large scale. Put simply, our goal is to make single cell analysis the standard for most biological research. While we believe there's huge untapped potential for single cell, our conviction is not just in Chromium. It's in the combined performance, leadership, and differentiation of all three platforms together. Our strategy has always been about the power of the full portfolio and the choice it enables for customers. Our goal is to ensure that researchers, and ultimately clinicians, have access to a comprehensive suite of the best performing products to resolve biology in the way that's best for their work. We intentionally designed distinct yet complementary platforms to support a broad spectrum of customers' use cases, and how their research and research questions may evolve over time. The strength of our execution in R&D and operations has enabled us to deliver a full portfolio of groundbreaking products. And as we continue to evolve our commercial execution, it will better position us to maximize and deliver on the incredible potential ahead. We believe there are clear opportunities to drive growth, utilization, and scale with existing customers, to bring new researchers into the 10X ecosystem, and to accelerate translational and biopharma opportunities. Olken's Mosaic study, which we first announced in November, is a powerful example of the progress we're making in translational applications. This large-scale project is on track to complete spatial profiles and thousands of tumor samples across seven different cancer indications by the end of the year. The team is looking to discover biomarkers and to build predictive models that could transform how we diagnose, treat, and ultimately cure cancer.
spk18: In addition,
spk10: we firmly believe there's a long runway ahead for single-cell methods in biopharma. Importantly, we're not the only ones who share this conviction. Some of our pharma customers recently published on the value and impact of our products in therapeutic development. Sanofi reported that 90% of the company's disease targets are credentialed using single-cell genomics. A recent preprint in MedArchive helps shed light on why. The study analyzed single-cell data across 30 diseases and 13 tissues to examine associations between genes, cell types, and diseases. They found that support from single-cell analysis significantly increased the odds of clinical success for a given gene to be a viable drug target. In fact, the authors estimate that their approach could approximately triple the chances of a drug target reaching a phase three clinical trial. So while we have established strong beachheads in translational and biopharma, it's still very early relative to the expected large potential. With all of the advances in our portfolio, we're in a better position than we've ever been to deliver. As one customer at ACR told me, FFP changes everything. Our FFP capabilities, available on all three platforms, open up vast archives of biobank samples along with exciting possibilities for new biological discoveries. These capabilities reflect yet again, how we listen to our customers, think deeply about their research, and build innovative products to accelerate and advance their work. We believe the long-term potential for single-cell and spatial is boundless. While we're focused on delivering in 2024, we will remain steadfast in maintaining the long-term orientation that has always guided us. I have every confidence when I say we're still just getting started. With that,
spk18: let me turn it over to Justin. Thank you, Serge.
spk09: I'll start by reviewing our financial results for the three months ended March 31st, 2024, and we'll then provide an update on our outlook for 2024. All growth rates provided will be on a year over year basis unless otherwise noted. Total revenue for the quarter was $141 million, up 5%. At a high level, the quarter played out largely in line with total revenue expectations, with stronger contributions from spatial, partially offsetting lower chromium contributions. Looking at our revenue breakout, total consumables revenue was $110.3 million, down 2%. Spatial consumables revenue was $26.4 million, up 134%. This growth was driven primarily by our Azenium platform, along with strong adoption of Visium HD, which started shipping at the end of Q1. Chromium consumables revenue was $83.9 million, down 17%. Some of this year over year decline was expected. As discussed on our year end earnings call in mid February, we anticipated headwinds for chromium revenue in the first quarter, while customers began their transition to the new GEMX products. As part of this transition, we anticipated that customers would trial GEMX and would not stock up on either the legacy or newly introduced products at quarter end. While we believe this increased trialing created stronger headwinds for chromium consumables in Q1, we are nonetheless encouraged by the initial adoption and enthusiastic feedback from customers thus far. The lower price of GEMX will continue to drive some near term revenue pressure, but over time we believe there is elasticity that will more than offset the lower price. We also believe that the stronger than anticipated spatial demand took some customer mind and wallet share away from chromium this quarter. As Serge shared, we are seeing both new and existing customers prioritize spatial studies given the burgeoning interest in the space. How this plays out over time remains to be seen, but we continue to believe in the power of our full portfolio and offering customers a comprehensive suite of products to fit various needs. Moving on to instruments, total instrument revenue increased 33% to $25.5 million. Spatial instrument revenue was up 133% to $17.6 million, primarily driven by zinium instrument placements. We also saw sustained demand for our CITES instruments as customers purchased the instrument along with Visium HD consumables. Chromium instrument revenue was $7.9 million, down 32% driven by fewer units sold. Services revenue was $5.2 million, up 91% driven by increased service contracts revenue and increased zinium instrument training and installation revenue. Looking at our revenue by geography, America's revenue grew 1% to $79.6 million. EMEA revenue grew 22% to $34.7 million and revenue in APAC decreased 2% to $26.7 million. Turning to the rest of the income statement, gross profit for the first quarter was $92.9 million compared to $98.4 million for the prior year period. Gross margin declined to 66% compared to 73% in the first quarter of 2023, primarily due to a change in product mix driven by zinium instruments. Total operating expenses for the first quarter increased to $154.4 million compared to $150.4 million for the prior year period, driven by higher legal expenses and cost for facilities and IT, partially offset by lower personnel expenses. R&D expenses increased slightly to $68.6 million compared to $67.1 million for the prior year period, primarily driven by higher facilities and IT cost and increased personnel related expenses. ST&A expenses increased to $85.8 million compared to $83.3 million for the prior year period, primarily driven by increased outside legal expenses and higher facilities and IT cost, offset by a decrease in personnel related expenses. Operating loss for the first quarter was $61.5 million compared to a loss of $52 million in the first quarter last year. This includes $36.1 million of stock-based compensation compared to $42.1 million of stock-based compensation for the corresponding prior year period. Net loss for the period was $59.9 million compared to a net loss of $50.7 million for the first quarter of 2023. We ended the quarter with $371.8 million in cash and cash equivalents in marketable securities. We burned $17 million of cash over the course of Q1 while making a $20 million payment in January related to the asset acquisition that we recognized in Q4 2023. Turning to our outlook for 2024, we continue to expect four-year revenue to be in the range of $670 to $690 million, representing growth of 8% to 12% over full year 2023. We believe this range represents a balanced view for the year. It incorporates both the upside we've seen in spatial and the headwinds we are experiencing now in Chromium, which we expect to continue into Q2 as additional customers trial and transition to GenX. When looking out over the next 12 months, we are anticipating about $15 million to $20 million of total capital expenditures. We are maintaining cash discipline in 2024. Overall, we believe we have a great setup to drive positive cash flow for the year while making targeted investments to continue driving growth. Ultimately, our goal is to self-fund our innovation and scale by investing cash generated back into our business. At 10X, we continue to be laser focused on execution to drive growth and impact. We are excited about the strong enthusiasm for the products we launched in Q1 and look forward to providing more updates on our progress throughout the year. With that, we will now open it up for questions.
spk14: Operator? Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. If you find your question has been answered or you would like to withdraw your question, you can press star one again. As a reminder, we do ask that you please limit yourself to one question. And with that, we'll take our first question from Mason Carrico with Stevens.
spk04: Hey guys, congrats on the quarter, particularly in the tough macro backdrop. If you could, could you give us some, maybe just a bit more insight into the adoption trends and early feedback on HD and GemEx. How many of your CITESys customers have purchased HD at this point? And how do you think about that driving sustained demand for CITESys this year? And then similarly, adoption rates among existing customers on GemEx and has initial interest made you maybe more bullish on the opportunity for Chromium in the back half of this year and in the next year?
spk09: Hey Mason, this is Justin. I'll take the first part of that and then Serge can add some more color. So as far as Visium goes in looking at the SD versus HD split, I'd say roughly half and half. And when we're looking on the Chromium side around the GemEx adoption, if you're looking over the last month, as in Q2 to date, seeing roughly about a third of the Chromium consumables on GemEx. And back to the Visium side, with the launch of HD, we have seen that driving sustained demand for the CITESys. We do think that anticipation of the Visium HD launch helped us place CITESys in particular in the back half of last year. And we are expecting that to be a catalyst for CITESys placements going forward in 2024. Same thing with GemEx. That is a product that you need a Chromium IX in order to run. And we do think that that's also going to be driving Chromium IX placements throughout 2024 as well.
spk10: Yeah, Mason, as far as the, so the feedback on products is concerned, it has been very positive. So HD obviously has been perhaps our most anticipated product to date. Lots of customers were excited, and lots of customers were excited to get their hands on the product. And the early sentiment coming back from seeing the data, seeing the data coming from their samples is very, very positive. So all the investments we made along the way for us to be proving the chemistry, the workflows, importantly, CITESys. And now putting HD on top of it has really seemed to be bearing fruit and resulting in great feedback from customers. On the GemEx side, the sentiment is also very, very positive. We're just now kind of going through the cycle where the initial customers who got, who ordered and got their GemEx regions are actually getting the data back and now talking about their results. I mentioned in my prepared remarks this testimonial from Fred Hutch, we're hearing from other customers, very pleased with the fact that there's a substantial boost to performance, great improvements along the number of axes, and also lower price. So the feedback has been really positive. People were really excited when we first revealed GemEx in the middle of February. And a lot of customers have been ordering it now to trial it, to test it against the next gem products that are out there. And the feedback that's coming back has
spk18: been very positive. We'll take our next question from Patrick. Emily with Citi.
spk05: Hey guys, thanks for taking the questions. I wanna focus on single cell, just giving the results a little light in terms of what we were looking for. Justin, I know you talked about, maybe this weakness or softness mingles into two cues, people kick the tires on some of the new products and trials and things. Can you just give us some sense of visibility into what that growth trajectory looks like? How are you thinking about that
spk18: piece,
spk05: what's called single cell chromium for the year? Just wanna try to think about, again, the cadence this year and the overall expectations for this year on single cell, we appreciate it.
spk18: Yeah, Patrick, thanks for the question. When we're thinking about
spk09: single cell for the year, I go back to the three factors that we're seeing impact single cell right now. And so the first is the GEM-X transition. We're talking about a limited timeframe in Q1 that launched in the last month of the quarter. And so there's a limited amount of data that we're going off of for that. But we did see a higher adoption rate than we were originally planning. And then looking at the customer ordering patterns, we were able to see impacts with customers that ordered GEM-X, ordering smaller kit sizes, smaller number of reactions, and just smaller number of orders overall. And as we can tell too, some customers are still waiting to get their results from that. And so this trial is something that doesn't happen right away, it's over a somewhat extended period of time. And so, as I just said earlier for Q2, roughly to date, about one third has been on GEM-X. And so, a higher uptick than we initially expected, but then we would expect a more linear transition for the rest of the year to be substantially cut over by the end of the year. And the other impact that we're seeing is that of spatial. And that's a product that's drawing more mind in wallet share on the customer side towards spatial from single cell. And so we'll see how those both play out throughout the rest of the year. As far as the GEM-X transition, that could be more transitory. We do expect an impact in Q2, I think similar to what we've seen in Q1. Just looking overall, and this is more broadly than just single cell, if we're talking about Q2, I would expect at the top line, somewhere mid-single to high single digits, sequential increase over Q1. So maybe 7%, 8% revenue increase Q2 over Q1. And then the last part is just the macro impact overall for single cell. And I think this is impacting things on the instrument side, probably seeing more of an impact on the instrument side. We are hearing of capex budget pressures, elongated purchase cycles. And I think specifically when you're looking at chromium, when you have a number of spatial instruments out there as well, customers are having to make hard choices. And I think that's having a bigger impact on the chromium side than it
spk18: is on the spatial side. We'll take our next question from Dan Arias with Stiefel.
spk07: Afternoon guys, thanks for the question. Serge, just sticking with the transition and the validation for GEM-X, where is the confidence in understanding the timelines associated with that process? How would you compare it to other processes for your other single cell kits? And Justin, if I could, just to kind of finish off Patrick's question there, last quarter you said you expected chromium revenues to grow this year. Does that view still hold, just given the way that the start of the year has played out? Thanks.
spk10: Yeah, Dan, thanks for the question. So as far as the transition to GEM-X, if I were to put it in a historical context maybe, things to keep in mind is that it is a straight up replacement over the existing products. It's literally a product that's better on multiple dimensions with very little trade-offs that people have to make and it's at a lower price. So we do expect that once people go through their initial validation to confirm our claims, to make sure they replicate in their own hands, in their own samples, the transition should happen relatively quickly. So kind of a different kind of thing than what we had seen previously with Flex, for example, which is a very different kind of workflow for different kinds of applications, oftentimes different kinds of customers, and also likely faster than what we had seen previously, for example, with the NextGEM transition, which did entail some trade-offs and not necessarily huge performance advantages. So the question is, what is the feedback that people are going to be, the customers are going to be giving us, what are they going to be actually seeing in their own hands? And so far, it has been very positive. And so we're feeling optimistic that as they go through this transition, that that will be happening on a pretty rapid pace relative to our previous product introductions.
spk09: And Dan, as far as the second part of your question, given the results that we've had in Q1, it's certainly going to be more challenging to achieve growth year over year in Chromium. So at the midpoint of our guidance range, we are modeling more spatial upside, and we're also modeling more Chromium downside. And so with some of the headwinds that we're seeing related to the GEMEX transition, we do think by the end of the year, those will smooth out. We definitely saw an impact in Q1, and we're expecting to see an impact for that in Q2 as well. As far as the offset coming from spatial, to the extent that Chromium growth is being impacted by spatial, we would expect to see a offsetting upside in spatial. And that's what gives us the confidence to keep our guidance range the same, 670 to 690 that we had on the last call.
spk18: We'll take our next question from Doug Schinkel with Wolf Research. Good afternoon. So I'm
spk15: gonna try to package in two different things here. First, just as a follow up to Dan's last question, keeping in mind you launched GEMEX with a week or two left in Q1, that obviously stalled the market a bit, but it doesn't sound like I'm hearing anything to suggest that there was momentum, or there is momentum coming off of that launch over the last five or six weeks that makes you feel like you can get close to the target on single cell. So this is not just a timing issue. There are other dynamics that are basically hitting performance here on the single cell side. I just wanna make sure the answer to that is yes. And then my second unrelated thing I wanna talk about is Brooker's purchase of NanoSpring. That brings to market a high quality company with a much more formidable commercial and innovation infrastructure, a much bigger balance sheet. Obviously they're poised to invest here. How is the emergence of Brooker as a direct competitor changing how you budget and tactically plan? Thank you.
spk10: Thanks, Doug. So let me take that first question. So on Chromium, so I mean, first of all, just stepping back at a high level, Chromium, like it's not, fundamentally, the franchise is not where we want it to be, where we think it should be. You know, we've been talking about for several quarters and there's been a lot of focus on spatial among our commercial team, and actually more generally for the company in the last few years. And we've been making efforts to shift more of a balance and more focus, more resources onto Chromium. And we still have a lot of work to do on that front and a lot of work continues. For this particular quarter, like you mentioned, there's the GEMAC transition. And I would just say that we actually announced GEMAC in mid February, so it's not just the last few weeks, the last couple of weeks of the quarter, it's kind of a longer stalling period and it had a substantial impact on the quarter. We also seen, like I said, in my prepared remarks, more attention from customers on spatial. So kind of as we're making internal efforts to bring more research to bear on the Chromium, we're also fighting a little bit of that that has been from the market. And then of course, there's sort of macro factors in play as well in terms of pressure on budgets and this elongated sales cycle. Again, I would say stepping back, like I said before, for our first principles and based on our customer feedback, we see a tremendous long-term opportunity here. We're still very early in our opportunity and we're taking many steps to realize that opportunity. On the question about Brooker, so the spatial field like we've said before is very attractive. We've seen that for several years going back. We've made a lot of investments in innovation in product development because of that conviction. It's not surprising that new companies are going to be entering the space. Again, very attractive field, very attractive applications. We've done a great job of developing products that customers, that really resonate with customers. We've been getting great feedback and that's really our North Star. And we continue to make investments and rolling out new products. That's how we established our leadership now in spatial. And we anticipate as we progress through the coming quarters and coming years that that's going to keep propelling us to
spk18: do a great and great success in the market. We'll take our next question from Dan Brand with TD Cowan.
spk16: Great, thank you. Thanks for the questions. Maybe just a follow-up and then a couple other parts on single-cell and spatial. So I know part of the push coming into this year was the reorientation of sales incentives to get into focus more on single-cell. Serge, I think you just mentioned there's still a lot more work to do. So maybe if you can just clarify that. Secondly, I'm just wondering, obviously Serge, you sound extremely bullish on the untapped opportunity and the demand elasticity. So obviously we're working through this Gen X transition right now, but could you speak to as we're through this transition, it sounds like by year end, kind of how we would think about what a steady state single-cell growth could look like. And then C, you've talked more about cannibalization and we've talked more on this call in the past, but you know, arguably that also drives more spatial growth. So I'm just wondering as we think about the cannibalization, like is your outlook for single-cell growth lower today than it would have been given as cannibalization? And is there an offset on higher spatial growth? Thank you.
spk10: Thanks Dan. So a number of questions in here. So let me kind of go through them in sequence. So first of all, the chosen efforts that we're making on Chromium. Yes, you're right. So we identify that as a priority and we've been making progress. It does take time. I would say, you know, one of the, like the foundational elements here is, it starts with leadership. And we have great new leadership in place across all our three regions now, this quarter, AMR, EMEA, and AIPAC. We also have a great interim CCO leader in place, Nina Mustapak, who's doing an amazing job in the transition. And we have been implementing a number of initiatives within the commercial organization to bring more focus on Chromium. So I've talked about in the past about setting up explicit quote targets around Chromium, the Chromium business. We have not had that in the past. We're creating a great amount of specialization within the commercial team to provide more headroom, more bandwidth for salespeople to be able to spend more time and more focus on Chromium. We also have implemented direct KPIs and management expectations around driving Chromium. We're also putting to bear more marketing resources and campaigns specifically for Chromium as well. And we do expect that that's going to bear fruit in the coming quarters, for sure. And of course, this is being done on the background of really exciting product launches as well. Can I get a second question on elasticity? Yes, yeah, I've commented a lot in the past around the fact that yes, we do believe there's a tremendous elasticity of demand in the single cell market. And one way you can look at it is from first principles. Biology, like I've said before, really should be studied in single cell context. And the vast majority of it currently is not studied. That's the level most people who should be using single cell are currently not using it. And we know that price is a major obstacle to them using it. And we hear it, and that's the second chain of evidence. We hear it a lot from our customers consistently that price is a major obstacle, both in terms of new customers who are interested in single cell when they see price, that tends to turn them away or at least slow them down in adoption. We hear it from existing customers who are interested in making single cell becoming a more routine part of their research as opposed to a method of exception when you need to get really, really deep insight into a particular sample. And then we hear it from the customers who want to scale to really large projects. The main obstacle consistently is price. And so we do see a lot of opportunities, both from first principles and based on the feedback we've been hearing from customers. And we've been making efforts, JAMAX is a strong example of that, to kind of walk down the price curve and to generate increasing demand. We have strong conviction that over time, this will lead to the expansion of a total market. And then kind of the third point you mentioned was around the trade-offs with Spatial. And it is definitely the case that there's been a lot of excitement around Spatial recently, certainly especially with the launch of Vizium HD, with the progress we've been making on Zenium. And it's certainly the case that we see customers making those trade-offs, thinking about their budgets, their mind share, where they're going to be kind of spending their time. This was true, we've talked about in the past, certainly for early technologists, people who are specifically focused on what is the latest and the greatest innovation. They are looking at Spatial where in the past they might have been looking at single-cell and other customers too. And also this interest from customers is drawing attention over sales team as well, naturally, and as one might expect. Now, it is not the case that people are just switching over from single-cell into Spatial. The insights that you get, the kinds of research questions you can ask and answer are complementary, they're different. And we're also seeing a lot of customers that are new to this whole ecosystem coming in through Spatial, people who have not done single-cell before, people who have not even done genomics before. And so there's going to be ebb and flow as customers kind of figure out specific use cases as new technologies come to prominence to figure out the precise appropriate use of them. Ultimately, we see huge potential for all three of our franchises, we expect them to coexist and complement each other. And we expect that there's great future ahead for Chromium
spk18: and really for the whole portfolio. We'll take our next question from Matt LaRue with William Blair.
spk02: Hi, good afternoon. Maybe just picking up on that last
spk12: point, Serge. Obviously, for a long time, you've been talking about the value of the ecosystem and building a portfolio of platform assets within the ecosystem. Could you maybe update us with sort of the proof points you track internally to validate that thesis, be it adoption of newer spatial technologies by perhaps legacy single-cell customers or retention of single-cell customers in labs where they might have other TEDx products that they've committed to? Is there anything that speaks sort of strategically to the value you're seeing
spk02: of having different modalities in house?
spk10: Yeah, so I would say there's good kind of example data and substantial number of examples of customers purchasing platforms together when they're kind of looking at kind of setting up their genomics infrastructure where they buy their sizes, they buy Chromium, they buy Zinium, and they contemplate kind of use cases that define all three platforms. We're also seeing kind of results getting published in papers and data sets that get released and a consistent kind of feedback when we talk to customers that oftentimes people do use these platforms together. It's rare that you have a Zinium run, for example, that doesn't make use of some single-cell information. And same, to some extent, same for Visium. And we see kind of the interest going back and forth where people might run a Zinium experiment and then kind of look at the Visium or Chromium to put those results in context, or going the other way, you run your Chromium experiments, you generate data, and then you want to follow up and validate it using Zinium for your specific biological system. So we see plenty of examples in there, a lot more of them getting published along those lines. I do wanna emphasize it's kind of early in this whole process in terms of collecting kind of reliable statistics because all these products are coming in customers pretty fast at this stage, and it is a pretty dynamic field. But when we look at, again, the use cases and the applications, we see plenty of evidence of customers being excited about using
spk18: multiple platforms. We'll take our next question from Matt Sykes with Goldman Sachs. Good afternoon, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe this is a bit premature,
spk06: but I know you've addressed the cannibalization comments, but I just wanted to take a little different take on it, and just giving your comments on spatial taking time and wallet share from single sale, is there a way to maybe effectively manage the potential cannibalization if you believe this focus stays on spatial? Meaning, would you wanna use this transition to spatial to your advantage and just try a much more proactive approach to cannibalization? Are they're encouraging existing Chromium customers where spatial makes sense towards spatial, which I'm sure you're doing commercial standpoint, but I just think that given your earlier comments about the ecosystem, keeping the customer within the 10X platform is probably the first priority, and therefore maybe actually managing that cannibalization could help ease that transition into it, or is that just too early at this stage to really go forward with those efforts? Thanks.
spk10: Yeah, so one thing I would say, you have to be careful using the word cannibalization, because it's not so much a substitution where people kind of are getting results they could have gotten with Chromium using these spatial technologies and approaches. You can't. They're complimentary. They extend, they compliment, and they supplement. So it's important to keep that in mind. I think for us, our North Star is really kind of customer success in delivering the value for their particular applications and their questions. And so we want to present the full solution to our customers, and the way that our sales team kind of interacts with our customers is to really try to understand deeply what are the questions they're asking, what are the research goals, and then making sure they understand the capability of the products to give them the most efficient way to get to those goals. And so I think I would frame it as less about what we're driving for ourselves, but making sure that we've got the full set of solutions
spk18: that our customers can take advantage of. We'll take our next question from Sue Bunambi with Guggenheim Securities.
spk01: Hey guys, thank you for taking my question. Regarding performance in China, revenue was down 15% in the quarter. Could you provide any initial color on the status of the strategy here, given that inventory filing up created some obstacles in last year, how did one queue fair, and are there any material updates regarding your priority to continue building up
spk18: backup sales force in China? Hey Sue, thanks for the question. As
spk09: we talked about on our previous calls, over the last year, we've worked actively to bring down inventory levels at the distributors and service providers. And just for the context here, we sell to distributors who sell primarily to service providers who actually perform the service for the end customer. And so then when there's any kind of fluctuation in the demand at the end, you can have inventory stack up at either one of those levels of the chain. And so we saw that throughout last year, and each quarter we worked to bring those inventory levels down. We developed closer relationships with the service providers and shared more information with them and they were able to share more information with us. We've also made some progress on adding distributors in the region to reduce the burden on any given one and also allow us to get closer to the customers as well. And so going back to the last part of 2023, Q3 and Q4 played out roughly like we expected them to. I would say the same with Q1. And at least right now at this level of demand, we do think that we have, we don't think that we'll see the same issues that we saw last year with inventory, but that could change if
spk18: demand changes like it did at the beginning of last year. We'll take our next question from Michael Reisgen with Bank of America.
spk17: Great, thanks for taking the question. I hate to belabor the curling for Seymour's point, but I just wanna ask sort of a big picture theoretical question, not just focusing on the first quarter. If you take a look at Chromium consumables over the last couple of years, now going back to 2021, 2022, I think it's safe to say that that's been somewhat disappointing over the last two years plus. There's been a number of different issues, commercial missteps, Justin, you're just talking about China headwinds. Now you've got the GemEx transition, the broader macro, you're having some of this shift into other spend into spatial, we'll call it cannibalization, but call it what you will. Given that performance over the last two years, I mean, and your comments on what feels like a revised Chromium consumables outlook for this year, it sounds like you're not expecting to hit the levels you were talking about before. If there's some deeper issue at play here, where it's not just any one of these, whether it is competition and someone brought up nano strength, but there are a number of smaller vendors coming into the single cell market that are making inroads in the market, whether it is just budget constraints from customers, whether it is price elasticity, just, I mean, is there where we can revisit to the single cell opportunity in the near term, and maybe take a look at it from that perspective?
spk18: Yeah, Michael, yeah, let me kind of take that.
spk10: 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 is our business in China went down a lot over this current period, so that's 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. But, you know, ultimately the question of the underlying potential of Chromium there is still there for the same reasons we've always articulated. Like I said earlier, most from 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 your workload 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 in 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, yeah, not only is it a relevant one, there's always been some competition in single cell, sometimes more, sometimes less. Over the last year, a couple of years, there's been a few more players that have come into the space. We've talked about this before. 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 and 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 the reason we've been successful up to now is because of the product innovation and the product quality. And that is on our star. The goal is to keep delivering value to customers. We're continuing to invest in that, 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
spk18: the effects of any particular competition. We'll take our next question from Tejas Sabant with Morgan
spk14: Stanley.
spk11: Hey guys, good evening and appreciate the time here. So I have one on single cell and then one on Visium HD. So starting with single cell, you mentioned in an earlier answer that the main obstacle to larger projects was price. And you've talked about the commercial refocusing as well. But I just wanna get a sense of how open you are to deeper and more accelerated price cuts on Chromium versus the 10% that you got with the GMX launch. And I understand that that could mean incremental downside to the Neodrome guide, and perhaps it then puts your commercial folks on more even footing versus some of the incumbents or the new entrants you were talking about and helps to reignite customer interest to pull the trigger on larger projects. And then my unrelated second part of the question is on Visium HD. Really good to see the strong start there. And I know there's an interplay of different dynamics here. But to what extent did initial stocking from new users play a role in the upside? Is there a possibility of a natural sort of sequential breather maybe a couple quarters out before we see the big inflection that you've talked about given the strong customer interest and how they were clamoring for this product to come through?
spk10: Hey, Kadeus, thanks for the questions. So let me talk to the first one. So you're right, so with GMX, we showed a 10% drop in per sample price. Now I do have to say that it's a substantially larger drop in the per sell price because you get a lot more throughput with GMX and something that a number of customers appreciate. Your larger point as to whether we intend to drive further into the price, yes, over time for sure. We talked about the fact that ultimately we want to reach the price point of $100 a sample. We're excited by that. We will drive the technology and products in that direction. We just wanna be careful in how we do that and kind of stepping into that kind of commensurate with our other efforts in terms of driving demand and in terms of driving sample volume. So certainly customers should expect to see more along this trajectory and those are the considerations that we're gonna keep balancing as we proceed through the upcoming quarters and upcoming years. Maybe on the second question I can start. So certainly there has been a lot of pent up interest in BusyMHD and we do anticipate there were a lot of customers that came into sort of into this quarter with pent up demand and we'll kind of have to see it thoroughly to make a determination around how much of demand we're seeing right now is sort of the initial bolus versus what the sustained trajectory looks like. There's again, there's good indications based on the feedback we're getting from customers once they actually see the data
spk18: but it's still very early days on that front. We'll take our next question from Luke Sargot with Barclays.
spk08: All right, thanks for the question. So can you guys help us give a sense of how many zumes you placed and then any type of directional commentary on, I know you don't typically break it out but the contribution of Visium versus Xenium in that revenue base on spatial and how that trended and then really just kind of figuring out the momentum within those two businesses to offset the single cell decline for you guys to be able to hit that four year guide because the back half step up is now
spk18: outsized of what you've done in the past. Yeah, Luke, this is Justin, I'll take that.
spk09: In looking at Xenium instruments on our last call, we talked about a quarterly range of roughly 50 to 75 per quarter for Q1 was about 50. We would expect that to continue to ramp throughout the year from the lower end to the high end with what we've seen so far last quarter and this quarter with pressures on capex budget, elongated purchase cycles, I would expect that it would be closer to 50 again. When we're looking at, and that's for Q2, and then when we're looking at Visium versus Xenium overall, looking back at Q1, roughly half and half between each of those on the spatial side. When looking on the consumable side, when you're looking from Q4 into Q1, most of the growth that we saw sequentially from Q4 into Q1 was driven by Visium HD. And so there has been a lot of excitement around Visium HD, like Serge said, we've got to see what the sustained level is, but I would say that the initial level that we've been seeing has been exciting. And then there's the potential for the Xenium consumables to ramp up throughout the year. We haven't released too many details on that, I would say that we're still looking at a wide variety of usage across the customer base, but we are seeing good trends as far as increasing use over time when we're looking back at the older cohorts versus the new cohorts. And this is also allowing a couple of quarters for ramp up as well. And so I do think that there's upside on both the Visium side and the Xenium side within spatial when we're looking at offsets between
spk18: chromium and spatial in our outlook for the rest of the year. We'll take our next question, or I do apologize, we'll
spk14: take our last question from Kyle Mixon with Kanakor Genuity.
spk03: Great, hey guys, thanks for the questions. Quick follow up on the single cell questions, Nick for Surge, you remissed a lot in that business this year, GIMAX, upstream fixation, other things, that includes additional resources this year that replaced those that were kind of taken out, shifted to spatial last year. Wanted to ask what the company's ROI is in single cell today, given that they're decelerating and kind of decreasing even negative growth in some cases, and does that kind of make sense to keep investing at this pace if the returns become less attractive and kind of make the argument that maybe shift that focus to spatial possibly, I guess, just in line with some of the cannibalization questions earlier, thanks.
spk10: Thanks Kyle, so look, we see, like I said earlier, potential, large market potential on all three platforms. We are gonna keep investing in all three platforms. Over the past several years, we made very, very large investments on the spatial front. We talked about in the past how much we shifted resources onto Azenium, bringing up HD was also a pretty massive undertaking. There is, at this stage, we don't see any reason to let go of Gromium, we're anywhere near it. In fact, the investments we're making right now, we feel like have potential to open up a lot of new years cases and much broader use cases with much broader categories of customers. So we are certainly managing the spending investment across our three platforms very carefully and continuously, and feel good about
spk18: the balance and the amount. Thank you, with that, we do conclude today's presentation. Thank you for your participation today, and you may now disconnect.
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