Earnings Labs

Burning Rock Biotech Limited (BNR)

Q4 2023 Earnings Call· Fri, Mar 29, 2024

$16.63

-12.75%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Burning Rock Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended and as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminologies such as will, expects, anticipates, future, intends, plans, beliefs, estimates, target, confident and similar statements. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about Burning Rock's beliefs and expectations are forward-looking statements. Such statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions, and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond Burning Rock's control. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such statements. Burning Rock does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under applicable law. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Yusheng Han. Please go ahead.

Yusheng Han

Analyst

Thanks, Gena. This is Yusheng Han, the CEO and Founder of Burning Rock. And today, you also have our CFO, Leo Li; and CTO, Joe Zhang online. So very glad to share the annual financial report with our investors. So let's turn to Page 3 that explains that how we started and how we evolved. We started from therapy selection from 2014 and then with the development of NGS technology, we expanded our market to early detection to MRD [indiscernible] to biopharma services. And in -- let's turn to Page 4. So with the macro environment changes in the past 3 years, we have makeup strategy dedicated to the efficiency gain driving towards profitability. And our -- we want to deliver in the early next -- last year, we want to deliver the result on driving sales efficiencies, improving gross margin, reducing G&A expenses and also reducing R&D expenses and the target is making the company profitable first. And in terms of the driving sales efficiency, we're going to -- we plan to increase the sales productivity per head. And also with the capital market cooling down, we benefit from a more rational industry competition. And the second is the improving gross margin. So the first thing we do is we have a scale of our sales. So we'll leverage on that. And also, we delivered our margin improvement project, including cutting reliance on sales and marketing expenses and also cutting the cost of goods by partnering with the suppliers. The third is reducing G&A expenses. We cut the overhead and lowering fixed cost base. And the fourth thing is reducing R&D expenses as our major clinical programs, such as multi cancer, early detection complete and the burning wage is cooling down. And in terms of new investment, we are…

Jinxiang Li

Analyst

Sure. Thank you, Yusheng, for taking us through the initiatives we've taken through and what has that translated into the P&L lines. On Page 8, we are trying to supplement that by starting from our operating profit and break that down into what is the commercial aspect versus the investments in R&D and also what's cash and noncash. So on Page 8, we start with our reported operating profit of a negative RMB 166 million. We first add back our R&D expenses of RMB 73 million. So this is to separate what's already at commercial stage versus what's in the investment. So first, we take out R&D expenses. Then we take out noncash items. The 3 major items are share-based compensation, depreciation and amortization of our fixed assets. And lastly, the provision of receivables and contract assets. So these 3, we actually expect to decrease going forward. But here, just for illustrative purposes, we take out these 3 noncash items and get to where we are on the commercial business, excluding R&D expenses and noncash provisions. And on that measure, we are at a positive RMB 4 million for the fourth quarter of 2023. So on that basis, excluding R&D and excluding noncash costs, we are at profitability already in the fourth quarter 2023, and we expect this to further improve as we head into 2024. Page 9 talks about our cash position. So this is a slide that we have been going through on each of our quarterly calls. At the end of the year 2023, we ended with a cash balance of RMB 615 million. In the year, we had cash outflow of about RMB 265 million, this is a significant reduction compared to the cash outflow of RMB 532 million in the year of 2022. So a…

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.