Agilent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:A) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Dan Leonard: I appreciate all that perspective. And just a follow-up. I was hoping you could elaborate on your decision to shut down Res Bio. I was surprised by that, given that you acquired the company only a couple of years ago?

Mike McMullen: Yes, sure Dan. Happy to do so. So obviously, a very difficult decision, then I’ll have Sam jump in on this conversation, but our fundamental belief was that our differentiation will be all around what we called the kitted strategy to have a distributed on market companion diagnostics for our pharma partners, and that market really hasn’t developed as we had anticipated. Sam?

Sam Raha: Yes, Mike. Building on what you said, while NGS and cancer diagnostics is here and we serve that market in a number of ways, right, for just to be clear, too. We absolutely continue to serve cancer research translational research and diagnostic, test developer customers. But our core to our thesis, our differentiation is really the ability to develop and distribute these kitted tests in the market, the pharma market and the testing market just as evolve that way. And we also looked at our recent analysis and concluded that even with more additional investment, this is going to be a business that’s going to be undergoing significant losses for some foreseeable future, so. It was a difficult, as Mike said, that the right decision to make this move now. But again to be clear, we continue to serve cancer research and diagnostics in a number of ways.

Mike McMullen: Yes. I think – Sam, when we’ve talked about this in the past. So, we think we’re still going be able to participate in what we believe the strong growth of liquid biopsy market. But to really providing a lot of the – if you will, ingredients for the test developers for themselves.

Sam Raha: Here and Mike. I’m going to take this opportunity to also just to say beyond our core SureSelect Target Enrichment portfolio which is used broadly for liquid biopsy testing today. Early next year, we’ll be launching solutions from Avida BioMed, an acquisition that we announced earlier this year, which we think is really going to be a differentiated way to look at methylation, as well as classic mutation analysis.

Robert McMahon: Yes. Maybe just one add, Dan, is obviously a difficult decision for us, but I also think it also looks – it shows the discipline that we have in terms of our portfolio rationalization, and we felt we had better returns in other places to invest in so.

Dan Leonard: Understood. Thanks for the time.

Mike McMullen: You’re welcome.

Operator: We’ll go next now to Brandon Couillard at Jefferies.

Brandon Couillard: Hi, guys. Good afternoon.

Mike McMullen: Good afternoon, Brandon.

Brandon Couillard: Mike would you just find packing mass spec versus LC trends in the quarter? And then based on your revised guide, what is the four-year CAGR from 2019 for LSAG instruments exiting the year? How does that compare to historical average over the cycle?

Mike McMullen: Hi Brandon, I’m going to start with the response to your question. I’ll let Bob dig through his notes to find the actual number. But first of all, I just started to say, is that we believe what we’re dealing with here in our core instrument portfolio, inclusive of LC and LCMS continues to be a macro market story. Our market shares are holding up really well. We’re seeing in our one loss data. We’re seeing it in the external reports from order. And I think when we look at our performance in those core platforms versus our peers, we’re reporting some numbers and kind of adjust for the timing of when we report. I think we’re putting up similar kind of numbers. And Jacob, I know you looked at this thing pretty closely and I’m trying to buy some time for Bob to check down the…

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