Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ:TWST) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Emily Leproust: Great question so, yes. We’ve been developing some internal candidates, those were R&D investments. We’re not stringing away the investment that we’ve done what we are doing is slowing further investments into those assets. And so, we are focusing now on monetizing those assets and as we monetize them as the accretive side. We’ll decide then are we allocate the capital, but that could be the trigger to further develop other assets. But at this point, it’s prudent for us to send the biopharma business such that it can be adjusted EBITDA breakeven at $40 million revenue instead of $18 million. And so there’ll be less R&D efforts on our own assets, but we are not stopping the monetization effort of the asset that’s – we’ve been doing.

And I wouldn’t say that that there is no interest, but we don’t have – we only have limited capabilities on outsourcing antibodies. We’ve done at least we’ve NF1, we had out-licensing last year, but we have limited time and resources inside the company to do it. And so, we don’t want to get the R&D development ahead of the monetization scheme. And so, that’s what we’re doing.

Luke Sergott: Okay. Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question coming from the line of Puneet Souda with SVB Securities. Your line is now open.

Puneet Souda: Yes hi, Emily and Jim. Thanks for taking the questions. So first one really is, why is this guide cut the last one, just given the situation in the macro the biotech funding and the Dx moderations which I think everyone on this call is aware of. Those things are not necessarily immediately improving in the market. We have seen guide reductions from a number of companies multiple times? So at this point in time, sort of – workforce reductions are also happening and diagnostic companies and they’re cutting spend. So your reduction of 25% is one of the most meaningful in this space. So given all, that dynamic, I mean, just help us understand what gives you confidence in the guide overall for ’23 and for FY ’24, there was a $350 million guide before with 49% gross margin. Can you just update us on that FY ’24 guide too? Thank you.

James Thorburn: All right, Puneet. I can start and Emily can polish off what I say. In terms of what gives us confidence, we highlighted our orders. We’re strong in this last quarter. We continue to on the NGS side. Continuing to build our portfolio, continue to build our customer base. On SynBio side, Factory of Future commercialization in this last quarter has done extremely well as Emily just highlighted on the call. Our turnaround times are excellent. Number of customers continues to increase. So in terms of the guide outlook for NGS and SynBio, we are looking at the reduction – just purely due to digesting the reduction in headcount and that is very meaningful. It’s meaningful, because we’ve invested significantly in Factory of the Future that’s going well.

And we are seeing opportunities in terms of upside in the same time, because there is such a meaningful reduction headcount. We’re going to be prudent in terms of right look. In terms of biopharma this purely internal execution issues with the absorption of Abveris and execution in terms of being able to integrate commercial organization. We could not do that for the last year. We’re launching the integrated offering. We feel good in terms of a number of active projects. We’re 95 last quarter. We’re seeing strong interest from our customer base. And at the same time, because of the meaningful reductions we want to be prudent in terms of our outlook. In terms where we’re going next year as we continue as we see the margin increase from Q3 to Q4, as we continue to leverage the Factory of the Future.

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