SOPHiA GENETICS SA (NASDAQ:SOPH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Massaro: It’s a great use case of your multimodality. So definitely look forward to the next dataset, readout. My last question is for Ross. Great to see the gross margins come in above 70%. 2I think you’ve already exceeded your 2025 goal. To what extent is that a level that you think you can maintain here in 2023? Or do you see now perhaps potentially higher gross margins as a long term goal? Finally, on the contribution between volume and price and mix, how should we think about the levers to hit your 30% revenue growth this year?

Jurgi Camblong: Thank you for highlighting that because this doesn’t come with a lot of discipline and a lot of work. And before I let Ross give you some more color on what you asked, I would like to highlight that this is not by chance, right? We’ve been super disciplined on headcounts, we’re being super disciplined on indirect expenses, systems, professional services, public company costs. We have been working as well on major cloud savings, not only by better negotiating, but by improving as well our code, so that the code would be running more efficiently in the cloud, and this would cost us less. And then, we have been focusing as well on projects, maybe not doing some projects that were interesting, but really focusing on higher impact projects with a higher ROI.

Ross Muken: Mark, first, on the gross margin side, I would say, certainly, relative to our performance in the quarter, I’m very proud of the team. We had fantastic execution. We did benefit in the period €“ I did call out a credit related to our compute and cloud spend that was recognized in the quarter. So it did add a couple points to the gross margin line. That being said, even excluding that benefit, the performance was really strong. So, obviously, we’re very focused on being able to drive best-in-class margins, and that remains a focus. And, obviously, I would say the work we’ve done on the cloud side continues to be a huge focus. Now, going forward in terms of how to think about sequential margins, I’m not going to give specific guidance, but I think you can certainly look at that call-out in terms of the benefit in the period and then adjust as you think about your cadence into Q1 and the rest of the year.

But, certainly, our goal is to be able to sustain margin certainly north of 70%. We, obviously, thought of it at the time without knowing all of the drivers by 2025. Certainly, we hope to get there sooner on an annual basis as, recall, for this year, we ended at 68%. I would say in terms of going forward business mix and also a bit of our strategy will sort of dictate the pace, but we’re trying to have, I would say, more consistent expansion on the gross profit or gross margin line. And we’ve benefited from price in this environment, et cetera, as well, but certainly some of it will also depend on mix and also our decisions driving volume in some of our newer areas. And so, I would say stay tuned. Our goal is certainly to be able to deliver for this metric in terms of 70% in the near to medium term versus maybe 2025.

But, certainly, our ambition is to also drive best-in-class overall margins for the business and also hit on our revenue growth targets. And so, maybe just quickly on revenue, you saw us on an ex-COVID basis, volume growth has been at the high teens. I think in that range, maybe a touch higher makes sense as you think about the clinical business for next year. Pricing, we did take another price increase in the beginning of the year that will add low-single digits. And then, we also have the continued expansion of our ASPs, which, this year, I would say, despite currency, were obviously quite good. Again, in terms of the drivers, the underlying levers to us are quite visible. And the one piece we obviously couldn’t solve for this year was FX.