Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (NASDAQ:PACB) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kyle Mikson: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Congrats on the strong start out of the gate here, living up to the hype so far. I wanted to just ask two I guess a multi-part question. First on the guidance update. You literally raised the guide by the beat in the first quarter, yet Revio is ahead of expectations. And you said, I think, Christian, the 32 Revio was matched the total HiFi capacity in the field currently, pretty interesting data point. Maybe just provide a bit more detail on some of the assumptions for the remainder of the year at this point, both like company-specific and macro, and just to kind of frame that. I’m curious like how much conservatism you’re baking in. Maybe it’s too early. What would kind of let you beat this $185 million high end?

And then secondly, just you received over 32 Revio orders in the first quarter that compares to the 76 you put up after that huge ASHG coming out event. I guess how are you thinking about orders going forward? I mean, could a run rate be half this 32 number? Just kind of curious about that. And I guess importantly, would you end the year still at — like with a backlog of instruments? Thanks.

Christian Henry: Okay, Kyle, that’s a lot to unpack. So first of all — and by the way, thanks for joining us, Kyle. The guidance, you could see what we did was we still have a pretty broad range of guidance. And the reason why we have that broad range is really driven by still trying to understand how fast the Sequel II consumable decline affects us and how fast Revio ramps up. And so that’s still a question mark for us tactically in the course of 2023 and our revenue performance for the year. The good news is that we — right now we see a lot of excitement and we see a lot of Revio ramp up. So if you look kind of into the future of the company, it bodes extremely well for us to grow our consumables significantly over the next several years and grow our gross margins, like Susan was talking about before.

So we left the range pretty wide because of that. We did increase the guide modestly. We had a very nice quarter and a strong beat. And you’re right, we raised by that amount, roughly. And the thinking there is that we do see an incredible funnel continuing to build and we do see continued opportunity to do really, really well this year. But we’re also cognizant of there are a lot of macroeconomic factors lingering out there and we don’t have a crystal ball. And we figure we had great performance in the first quarter, we see very strong demand for the second quarter, which gave us some confidence to raise here. But it is the first part of the year and what we want to do is see how the year unfolds. And if there is opportunity to clarify the guidance on the high end further over the course of the year as we get deeper in, we will.

But it was — the first quarter was a great result. I’m really proud of the team. The demand curve continues to look strong. The order book continues to look really robust. And so we definitely see a lot of opportunity this year, but right now we’re just taking — we’re taking stock of the fact that we had a great Q1, and we’ll see how the rest of the next few quarters unfold. Let’s see, did I get all of that? The — so as I said before, we did have more than 32 orders in Q1. The reality is our objective is to be shipping much more than that on a — or getting orders for much more than that on a quarter-by-quarter basis. But the revenue — but the orders in any particular quarter are going to likely be variable dependent on a lot of different factors.