Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ:TWST) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ:TWST) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript February 2, 2024

Twist Bioscience Corporation isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Welcome to Twist Bioscience’s Fiscal 2024 First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. I would like to turn the conference over to Angela Bitting, Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs.

Angela Bitting: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. I’d like to thank all of you for joining us today for Twist Biosciences conference call to review our fiscal 2024 first quarter financial results and business progress. We issued our financial results release this morning, which is available at our website at www.twistbioscience.com. With me on today’s call are Dr. Emily Leproust, CEO and Co-Founder of Twist; and Adam Laponis, CFO of Twist. Emily will begin with a review of our recent progress on Twist businesses. Adam will report on our financial and operational performance. Emily will come back to discuss upcoming milestones and direction. We will then open the call for questions. We would ask that you limit your questions to only one and then re-queue as a courtesy to others on the call.

As a reminder, this call is being recorded. The audio portion will be archived in the Investors section of our website and will be available for two weeks. During today’s presentation, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the US federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or future financial or operating performance. Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize and actual results and financial periods are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks include those set forth in the press release we issued earlier today as well as those partially described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Forward-looking statements in this presentation are based on information available to us as of the date hereof and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. With that, I’ll now turn the call over to our CEO and Co-Founder, Dr. Emily Leproust.

Emily Leproust: Thank you, Angela, and good morning everyone. It is a very exciting time for Twist. Twist’s revenue, margin and market share increasing, new products introduced recently with more to come, and growing market for products, which enable a diversified customer base. Today as we report our financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2024, we will focus on three important items that drive our business; revenue growth, margin expansion, and financial discipline to track to our path to profitability. Our entire team at Twist is laser-focused on these initiatives, while simultaneously bringing exceptional products to our customers. We continue to deliver record revenue and consistent robust growth year-over-year.

We expanded market share in both SynBio and NGS with strong commercial and operational execution across our team. We are building a resilient and diversified business with a portfolio of solutions that stem from our innovative DNA synthesis platform. This allows us to pursue multiple market opportunities simultaneously, while mitigating risks. Several years ago, we established a plan to achieve profitability for the business. We continue to execute against the plan, we laid out for ourselves and we are firing on all cylinders. Diving into the specifics, revenue for first quarter increased significantly to $71.5 million, with orders growing to more than $77 million, and margin increasing to 40.5%. Moving to the product area. Revenue for SynBio increased to $26.8 million with strong orders of $29.2 million.

SynBio revenue grew 25% year-over-year, excluding in both periods, gap revenues from a key account that was affected by timing of the quarter and extended to return in the current quarter. In November, we began a limited launch of our Express Gene product, which is our clonal genes that developed faster in five to seven days. I’m pleased to report that as for Q1, 98% of Express Genes ordered have been delivered in the quoted timeframe. Delivering clonally perfect genes in this time line at scale is an exceptional feat. This performance is driven by our platform, our site in Oregon and our operations team that implements order successfully. We are the only Express offering that can deliver at scale. If you need one genes or thousands of genes we can deliver clonally perfect genes in as few as five days.

Importantly, our differentiated Express offering allows us to charge a premium price over our standard clonal genes in exchange for this speed. Customers can choose to other standards genes with a turnaround time of 10 days or Express genes with a turnaround time beginning at five days. The premium price for the Express offering varies daily and by the capacity available in our manufacturing facility in Wilsonville, Oregon. To date, we have tested premiums from 20% to as high as 200%. As a reminder, we use the same FX streamline for both Express and stellar genes. So all increased pricing applies directly to margin expansion, because the manufacturing line is the same, it also means that our capacity has increased whether we Celgene stand our or Express.

When we launched in November, as the small clonal gene volume qualified for Express service. This week we announced that all clonal genes at all prep scales, now qualify for Express service. With this extension, we began a full marketing launch around the Express portfolio largely using digital marketing tactics to keep the cost of customer acquisition low. We are pleased with the early days of the launch, particularly the balance of uptake between pharma, industrial chemical and academic customers. Early feedback indicates that this product resonates. We monitor orders daily and we are seeing the early stage of revenue. We consistently observe varying degrees of customer willingness to pay a premium and daily we gain valuable insight into pricing sensitivity, geographic nuances, industry-specific trends and account level patterns.

Moving forward this allows the sales team, the potential to proactively secure contract pricing for key accounts in excess short-term such as volume commitments, and fixed premiums which enables expanding margin as well as creativity for manufacturing. As of January 30, we have received confirmed interest from several pharma companies, reflecting a positive trajectory. Up until we turned on our marketing machine last week, our focus was on existing customers. Today, we are targeting new customers. We use other providers and we plan to use our differentiated Express product portfolio to take share from incumbent suppliers, were slow targeting customers who currently make their own DNA because they need it quickly. We called a little group of potential customers DNA makers and we know that to convert DNA makers to DNA buyers it will take time to change behavior.

We assume that we have the product, the channel and the operational capacity to drive a generational change where ordering genes rather than making genes becomes the standard operating procedures across the globe. Moving to NGS, our revenue increased to $39.4 million of revenue for the quarter included several large customers reorders, primary domestic customers running clinical trials and ramping commercial volumes. For these larger customers, we invested time and energy into the relationship and we are now including into their workflow. While the sales cycle for NGS is quite long, we are now seeing the benefit of this long-term investment of our time, as their test advanced the clinical and commercial stages. As a reminder, the existing customers including those pursuing or selling liquid biopsy and the minimal residual disease assays choose Twist for our target enrichment solution meeting their testing workflow as we save our customers about half of their downstream sequencing costs and each center run by customers, using some Twist DNA.

So the larger the volume, the more they buy from Twist. In a constrained macroeconomic environment, our offering provides margin extension for our customers. And in some cases, our workflow makes a substantive difference in our customers’ business viability. Over the last two quarters, we have seen customer streamlining test, selecting the test within their portfolio that includes the Twist workflow to sell downstream sequencing cost and improve their overall costs. In addition to larger customers in advanced stages of development and commercial scale-up, we see NGS workflow competence as an increasing percentage of our NGS revenue. For example, the customers who order the custom target enrichment panel previously, may now also order a library prepped vessels these local media and EMIs and more from Twist as their supplier expanding our share of wallet within existing accounts.

Our customers appreciate choosing another supplier and benefit from our exceptional and responsive customer service and supply chain teams allowing them to focus on expanding their business. We focus on enabling the workflow between the sample and the sequencer, will continue next week during the AGBT conference when we will introduce several products bringing truly differentiated solutions for key workflows within specific applications. Moving forward, we expect revenue growth in NGS to come from increasing commercial adoption of our customers’ assets workflow expansion in existing customer accounts and the acquisition of smaller accounts as well as the attrition of the research market through RNASeq. Moving to biopharma, revenue increased to $5.2 million with orders coming in at $4.9 million.

We were fully staffed on our commercial team as of November, and we do see green shoots for this business including 41 new program starts in the quarter. We noted the process of ramping up sales representatives to full capacity typically takes about six months and we are cautiously optimistic that revenue from biopharma services will increase steadily in the back half of the year. In addition, to providing antibody discovery services for our partners, this area of our business builds of our silicon platform, which enables the ability to create antibody discovery libraries, if we can then pair with our in vivo and AI, ML capabilities. There is a strategic fit here as we saw pharma and biotech customers through both of them by offering and biopharma solutions, providing a full and complete about dairy spectrum of offering to our customers and partners.

For Data Storage, we’ve completed the end-to-end demonstration of the Gigabyte Century Archive workflow. This was an internal demonstrations designed to refine and validate our workflow and we succeeded. We are encouraged by our engineering advancements and we remain on track to deliver on early-access Terabyte Century Archive Solutions in 2025. We continue to believe that the market for Data Storage provides a large opportunity and we see this area of our business as a valuable asset with optionality at multiple points of development. In early January, we welcomed Adam Laponis to the team, as our CFO. Adam brings a wide range of experience in finance and operations from large and smaller companies and is ideally positioned to support our next phase of growth.

With that introduction, I’ll turn it over to Adam to discuss our financials.

Adam Laponis: Thank you, Emily. Revenue for the first quarter increased to $71.5 million, growth of 32% year-over-year and approximately 7% sequentially. Orders increased to $77.5 million and gross margin was 40.5% for the first quarter of fiscal 2024. We served a total of 2,140 customers during the first quarter and ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of approximately $311.1 million. When we talk about cash moving forward, we will be talking about cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. Taking a deeper dive into revenue, SynBio revenue increased to $26.8 million, growth of 24% year-over-year, with orders increasing to $29.2 million. Synthetic genes revenue, a primary growth driver for Synbio, increased to $19.7 million, growth of 22% year-over-year.

We shipped approximately 171,000 genes during the quarter. Within the Synbio umbrella, Oligo Pools revenue increased to $4.2 million and libraries revenue increased to $2.9 million, year-over-year growth of 13% and 60% respectively. Growth in Synbio across all product lines was driven primarily by healthcare customers. NGS revenue for the first quarter grew to approximately $39.4 million compared to $24.4 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2023, an increase of 62% year-over-year. For the quarter revenue from our top 10 customers accounted for approximately 44% of revenue. Orders increased to $43.3 million, setting the stage for further NGS growth. We served 538 NGS customers in the quarter with 135 having adopted our products. For biopharma revenue increased to $5.2 million, with orders coming in at $4.9 million.

We had 69 active programs as of the end of December 2023 and we started 41 new programs during the quarter. The total number of completed programs as of December 31 was 843, with 69 including milestones and or royalties. Looking at revenue for Netherlands. Healthcare revenue rose to $40.9 million for the first quarter of 2024, compared to $30 million for the same period in fiscal 2023, reflecting the increased uptake of our products by pharma, biotech and diagnostic companies. Industrial Chemical revenue rose to $16.3 million in the first quarter, up from $15.3 million in the same period of fiscal 2023, steady growth year-over-year. Academic revenue was $13.8 million for the first quarter of 2024, up from $10 million in fiscal 2023, with growth coming from both Synbio and NGS customers.

Looking geographically, Americas revenue increased to approximately $44 million in the first quarter, compared to $33.6 million in the same period in fiscal 2023, growth of 31% year-over-year. EMEA revenue rose to $21.2 million in the first quarter versus $16.3 million in the same period of 2023, growth of 30% year-over-year. APAC revenue increased to $6.3 million in the first quarter compared to $4.3 million in the same period for fiscal 2023, growth of 48% year-over-year. Our gross margin for the first quarter increased to 40.5%, driven by large NGS orders in the quarter, higher mix of NGS and some pricing lift for SynBio from Express Genes. In total, operating expenses for the first quarter were $118.5 million compared with $98.9 million in the same period for 2023.

Breaking that down, cost of revenues increased to $42.5 million in the first quarter of 2024 compared with $29.4 million in the same period of fiscal 2023, primarily due to higher product volume and personnel costs as well as increased depreciation and amortization effect. R&D decreased to $23.1 million compared with $31.2 million in fiscal 2023, primarily due to the reduction in headcount as well as bottom line [ph]. SG&A was $52.8 million for the first quarter compared with 42.3 million. The increase was driven largely by the increase in stock-based compensation as the cost for Q1 FY 2023 included a significant reversal of stock-based compensation, resulting from employee stock forfeitures related to the out various acquisitions, offset by pre-commercialization costs included in the Q1 fiscal 2023 but not in Q1 fiscal 2024 as we have launched the Oregon manufacturing site.

Operating expenses included approximately $8 million for data storage. Stock-based compensation for the quarter was approximately $11 million. Depreciation and amortization were $8.2 million for the quarter compared with $5.3 million for the same period of 2023. Net loss attributable to stockholders was $43 million or $0.75 per share for the first quarter of 2024 compared to a net loss of $41.8 million or $0.74 per share for the same period of fiscal 2023. Turning to guidance. We are updating specific metrics that we intend to use moving forward. For fiscal 2024, we now expect total revenue to increase by $3 million across the range to approximately $288 million to $293 million, anticipated growth of 18% to 20% year-over-year. SynBio revenue of $114 million to $117 million, an increase of $1 million across the entire range and year-over-year growth anticipated to be 16% to 19%; NGS revenue of $150 million to $152 million, an increase of $3 million in the range and anticipated growth of 21% to 23% year-over-year; Biopharma revenue of approximately $24 million, a decrease of $1 million from the prior guidance and growth of approximately 3% year-over-year.

We are increasing our expected gross margin of approximately 40% to 41% for the year. Loss from operations guidance before taxes of approximately $189 million to $194 million compared to prior guidance of $180 million to $188 million as we invest in G&A capabilities to continue to scale our business. CapEx is projected to decrease by $5 million to approximately $15 million for fiscal 2024. No change in our projected ending cash of approximately $245 million at the end of fiscal 2024. For the second quarter of fiscal 2024, we expect overall revenue of approximately $70 million to $71 million. SynBio revenue increasing to approximately $28.5 million with the full launch of Express Genes portfolio; NGS revenue of $37 million to $38 million, as we see larger accounts reordering in the second half of the year, on track with our increased annual guidance; Biopharma revenue of $4.5 million; gross margin at 39% primarily due to mix shift.

In summary, we continue to maintain financial discipline throughout the organization and make progress on our path to profitability. I joined Twist about a month ago. I couldn’t be more excited about where we are going. This is a talented and determined mission driven team that understands the value we bring to our customers. Our focus on driving revenue growth, margin expansion, and maintaining financial discipline will continue as we leverage our capabilities, supply chain management, manufacturing excellence, and of course, delighting our customers. With that, I’ll turn the call back to Emily.

Emily Leproust: Thank you, Adam. When closing [ph] to our fiscal year, we continue to see momentum in our SynBio and NGS groups with a diversified customer base, a reverse flow portfolio that provides significant differentiation from competitors, growing market opportunities, and committed employees. We are executing on the plan we laid out to drive to profitability for the business. Coming back to the three initiatives at Twist. First, we expect to grow revenue through Express Genes in SynBio and grow revenue in NGS with customers expansion as well as new product introductions. Keep your eye out for launches next week during the AGBT Conference. For biopharma solutions, we will focus on increasing the number of active programs and program staff as well as signing new and repeat customers.

Second, to expand our margin, we plan to continue dynamic pricing for Express Genes in SynBio. As we increase the number of GeneChip our margin increases given the factory is fully functional and staffed. We will also focus on leveraging our increased volume with our supply chain to drive efficiencies at scale. On the corporate side, in addition to driving revenue growth and increasing contribution margin for our products, we identified key initiatives that we expect to pursue over the course of the next 18 months that we believe will have a meaningful impact on COGS selling. This includes in-sourcing opportunities, products and packaging, alternative workflows, and many more. We are excited about the opportunities to increase our gross margin further.

And third, we remain diligent in our commitment to financial discipline, renewing our commitment to end fiscal 2024 with $245 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. Overall, we are executing on an aggressive objective to become a profitable company. We continue to execute effectively on our path to profitability and look forward to keeping you apprised of our progress. With that, let’s open the call for questions. Operator?

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Matt Sykes with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Matt Sykes: Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on the quarter. Could you talk about the volume and mix of Express Genes in the quarter just given the mid-November launch in limited marketing for a period during the quarter. How do you see Express Genes contribute to margin expansion for the full year?

Emily Leproust: Thank you, Matt. Maybe I will start. So, there’s really two stages. The first stage is the mid-November launch till the last week. And then the second phase is now. So, in the first phase, the volume was basically fully focused on existing customers and we’ve seen really good picture by — as we’ve both biopharma and [indiscernible]. So, that’s quite exciting to see that on both of our target markets have been testing the products and experiencing the great performance of the product and reordering. So that was the mix then. It’s a bit too soon to say, but the second phase, as you know the second phase the goal is to continue having existing customers to use the product, which delivers great value for them and improve gross margin costs.

But the big drive for us now is to bring net new customers on to come onto the platform and deliver revenue growth and margin growth. So, Q2 — sorry Q3 will be the first clean quarter where we’ll have the full marketing launch for the entire quarter. We are already and in Q2. And so therefore Q3 will be the first clean quarter where we’ll have the full quarter expense of expecting. And what we expect is as the year progresses, we’ll have more penetration into those new — net new customers and then we’ll start to see the benefit of Express Genes on gross margin.

Matt Sykes: Got it. And then just two quick follow-ups. Could you just talk about this. I know you’re focused on existing customers, but could you just talk about the split in the quarter of gene buyers versus gene makers for express genes? And then just, do you think that digital marketing will be enough to drive growth? Or do you plan on augmenting that with additional marketing efforts over the course of the year? Thank you.

Emily Leproust: Yeah. So I think we basically, have one when we do when we can have of trying to convert finance might make you. So I will say that right now for all intents and purposes some of the volume so far has been DNA buyers. And so it’s very early innings. So the engine makers, we now have added to them. And in terms of digital marketing, it’s a — it is our strategy to reach smaller customers so Tier 3, Tier 4 captive customers. And however, in addition to that, we have our sales team that that has been engaged for now years. We top accounts that are still working on converting big accounts to Orbitz bridging. And as I’ve mentioned in my remarks, we’ve had some initial success in getting them is this a level of interest to convert to expansions both of big accounts as well. So it’s going to be down. It’s all hands on deck and we want to see growth in both and the Tier 3, Tier 2 customers as well as Tier 3, Tier 4.

Matt Sykes: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Steven Mah with Cowen. Your line is open.

Steven Mah: Great. Thanks for taking the questions, and congrats on the quarter. Maybe just a follow-up to Matt’s questions, on the gross margin in the quarter, it’s much higher than we had modeled that. Was there any impact at all from express trains in the quarter or was it driven entirely by the scale up of the factory the future? Or if not, what kind of what drove the gross margin be? And then could you also then provide your thoughts around the full year guide of 40% to 41% given you’re already at 40.5% in Q1? Thanks.

Emily Leproust: Do you want to take that question Adam? those physicians are happy to.

Adam Laponis: Sure. Happy to. So now Stephen, I mean I’m very encouraged by the record quarter we had in both the growth and the revenue front as well as the progress we saw in gross margin expansion. I’m also encouraged by the alignment we have across the executive team to focus on gross margin expansion is a key priority, not just a business priority, but even our pay-for-performance goals. So in terms of where we were in Q1. Really the biggest driver for the gross margin expansion was the some of the large orders we had in NGS particularly, I guess calendar year end when we saw a big step-up in those orders and we’re seeing that. And if you look at our guidance you can see that we’re going to see that pull back a bit in Q2, and that drove some of the expansion of the most of the expansion in the in the Q1 numbers.

You’d also asked about kind of how we’re thinking about the full year guide. And I’m like I am confident that this is performance, and we raised the guidance on both the revenue and the gross margin side. But I also recognize, I’ve been in the role now for less than a month. I don’t want to get over my skis with overly aggressive guidance. So yes, there’s some conservatism in there, but we have included the effects that we’re seeing already today on the expansion from two of synbio and express genes as well as the factory of the future now being fully operational.

Steven Mah: Okay. Great. That’s helpful. And sorry, if I can just sneak one more in. I know you haven’t done the full launch of the Express Genes yet, but you know could you tell us what the average premium you guys are getting? I know Emily threw out a range 20% to 200%, but I’m just wondering if you could give us a sense of the average you’re getting right now? Thank you.

Emily Leproust: So we are not — I mean we are not able to give a on a range. As a reminder, the day pricing is strongly based on the capacity and in the fab, but at the time of the day. And so we get a lot of benefits beyond that. And the one thing that you can you can check is that that pricing daily is public, so it’s on the website and so anybody can look at what is the pricing right now again based on the capacity.

Steven Mah: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Vijay Kumar: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question and congratulations on a nice print here. Maybe up my first one here is on the guidance. You guys built revenues by $3 million, the annual was raised by $2 million and it looks like more of that came from NGS, but also SynBio was raised. I’m just curious, the bit which is carried through and why, despite comps getting easier, perhaps we should see a more robust growth in 2Q and back half?

Adam Laponis: Vijay, great, great question, and I’m happy to give a bit more color on it. In terms of where we are right now, we had a great quarter. So I think I mentioned that in previous question, so we do expect that NGS pullback, particularly in Q2. And I think when you look at the early phases of the SynBio and Express Genes, it is going positively, but it’s really early days. And again, me being brand new in the job, I don’t want to get ahead of my skis on that in the full year guide. We’ll keep you posted on progress as the year continues on both fronts. But yes, I feel pretty good that the full year guidance raised both on the top and the margin side.

Vijay Kumar: Okay. Fantastic. And then my follow-up is on the gross margin guidance here. When I look at the sequential ramp, what is the primary driver from the Q1 to the Q2 step down of 39%? And I think the annual guidance implies your back half leased again, step back to 41% from 2Q. Is there anything specific that’s going on in 2Q? Maybe just walk us through the cadence?

Adam Laponis: No, no, it’s a great question. So it’s really more of a fact in Q1. We got a pretty substantial sequential lift from the higher NGS mix. We are actually expecting that to pull back slightly in Q2, as the mix shifts more towards SynBio. And so we’ll see that. But I think as the year progresses and we see more the customers switching to the full quarter of Express Genes and the NGS business continue to expand, we feel pretty confident in the back half guide as well.

Vijay Kumar: Fantastic. Thanks, guys.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Luke Sergott with Barclays. Your line is open.