Earnings Labs

Illumina, Inc. (ILMN)

Q2 2015 Earnings Call· Tue, Jul 21, 2015

$126.62

+5.13%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-8.44%

1 Week

-8.30%

1 Month

-15.62%

vs S&P

-11.95%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Second Quarter 2015 Illumina, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Towards the end of this session, we will hold a question-and-answer session. And as a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to the Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury, Rebecca Chambers.

Rebecca Chambers - Senior Director-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our earnings call for the second quarter of fiscal year 2015. During the call today, we will review the financial results released after the close of the market and offer commentary on our commercial activity, after which we will host a question-and-answer session. If you have not had a chance to review the earnings release, it can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website at illumina.com. Participating for Illumina today will be Jay Flatley, Chief Executive Officer; Francis deSouza, President; and Marc Stapley, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Jay will provide a brief update on the state of our markets. Francis will comment on product performance and Marc will review our second quarter financial results, as well as provide updated guidance for 2015. This call is being recorded and the audio portion will be archived in the Investor section of our website. It is our intent that all forward-looking statements regarding our expected financial results and commercial activity made during today's call will be protected under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual events or results may differ materially from those projected or discussed. All forward-looking statements are based upon current information available and Illumina assumes no obligation to update these statements. To better understand the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ, we refer you to the documents that Illumina files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Illumina's most recent Forms 10-Q and 10-K. Before I turn the call over to Jay, I would like to let you know that we will participate in the Morgan Stanley Healthcare Conference in New York the week of September 14. For those of you…

Operator

Operator

Our first question comes from the line of Tycho Peterson with JPMorgan.

Tycho W. Peterson - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Thanks. Actually, Jay, I want to see if you can elaborate a little bit on your comments on the array market? I mean if we think about this, you've stepped up your R&D there, you've talked about bio bank contracts and you did do the Neogen agreement. So I'm just curious as to why you think that market is going to be down mid- to high-single digits? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I mean the comps are tough on the array market overall and a lot of it has to do with pricing, Tycho. Our unit volumes continue to increase in general in the array business, but pricing is becoming increasingly aggressive there. The bio banks to do the large-scale projects that they want to do are only enabled at pretty aggressive price points. So I think it's that combination that's causing us to predict the array business to be down overall. We had a good order quarter in arrays, but a lot of that is going to be in backlog and shipped out over the next two to four quarters.

Tycho W. Peterson - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Okay. And then if we think about kind of swing factors for the back half of the year and things that could drive upside on the revenue line, you've got population sequencing, NIPT. One the HiSeq 3000/HiSeq 4000 uptick, that's another thing that potentially could accelerate quite a bit. Maybe just talk a little bit about the dynamics of HiSeq 2500 customers because you have rapid run mode in the HiSeq 2500, but not the HiSeq 3000/HiSeq 4000, so what percent of those customers do you think pulled out? And I guess what are you telling customers on HiSeq 2500 in terms of phasing it out overall? Are you maintaining any commitment to servicing it for the next year? Or what are those discussions like? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, we have a long-term commitment to servicing any instrument that we put in the field and we typically will do that for five years to seven years after we stop shipping it. So even after we declare something no longer available for sale, we'll continue to support it for a long time, so there's no concern there. We did see, in the quarter, a great shift toward the HiSeq 4000, which is what we predicted would happen, the performance of that instrument, the price per base, the pattern, the flow cell roadmap are all important ingredients for people to move to the HiSeq 4000. You can almost think of it as a slightly de-rated X that's allowed to run all applications. So that was, we think, largely responsible for that shift. We do think over the next year to two that the people buying the HiSeq 2500s will gradually decrease and it'll, in some sense, obsolete itself. But the one feature that we have on the HiSeq 2500 that customers like a lot is that rapid run feature. So we're taking a look at whether, at some point in time we want to introduce that on the HiSeq 4000, but right now, we're not actively working on that feature.

Tycho W. Peterson - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Okay. Thanks. I'll hop back in the queue.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel from Cowen & Co. Doug A. Schenkel - Cowen & Co. LLC: Hey, good afternoon, guys. So I think the first thing I want to do is just try to align order and placement commentary with the Q2 revenue model. Were there any timing dynamics that impacted the pacing of placements such as, but not limited to, funding? Really I guess what I'm getting at is were there some issues where customers wanted instruments but maybe weren't able to pay for them based on the timing of, say, when NIH funding becomes more available? And I guess related to that, the 20 to 30 instrument order rate guidance that you provided on a quarterly basis, I think that's new. You talked about shipment timing lumpiness. Would you be willing to say if you were in the 20 to 30 placement range this quarter? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I'd say we were in that ballpark during the quarter, Doug. And we think that's going to be the rough range. Some quarters will be a bit higher, some might be a bit lower and that's why we've made the lumpy comment in the script. In terms of customer buying patterns, customers always want to buy more sequencers if they had infinite money and so it is the case that people who don't have money would want to get a sequencer earlier if they could. But that's not a unique thing to the second quarter. I think what we saw in the second quarter was very strong orders but some labs are not ready to take delivery, and that was true in fact in some X's where we received orders for complete X systems, X Tens in…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Derik De Bruin from Bank of America. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: You there, Derik?

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Hi, good afternoon. Sorry about that. Hey, just a couple of quick ones. So can you give a specific backlog dollar number? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: We didn't.

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Okay, you said 1.1 though? Is that what I heard? Marc A. Stapley - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: That was book-to-bill, book-to-bill.

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Okay, book-to-bill. Got you. Okay, book-to-bill. Got you. Right. So have you seen any issues in terms of any changes in the Chinese market, ordering and some of the economic stuff going on right now impact how you're sort of looking at that market, going forward? And then I have one quick call after that. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: No, I don't think we've seen – we haven't seen any real changes in the Chinese market over the last couple of quarters. The research funding was better in the Chinese market maybe 18 months ago than it has been over the past year. That's been masked a bit in China, particularly in 2014 because we had such a large number of X placements that we didn't expect in China. So our performance is quite good in 2014 in China. This year it won't be quite that good because we'll have X shipments into China.

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Great, that's helpful. And then just one quick one, on the JAMA paper that you just did on the aneuploidy detection in pregnant women and finding that, I guess besides looking at chromosome aneuploidy, what are you looking at in terms of either point mutations or small indels or something like that, I mean is your liquid biopsy technology capable of addressing those types of changes in assay nodes? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Oh, sure. I mean the question on liquid biopsy is what is the right assay method or combination of assay methods that we know.

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Correct, yeah. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Aneuploidy will pick up some types of cancers. Nobody quite knows yet the fundamentals of the biology, so we don't know exactly which ones would be picked up by that method versus permutations versus fusions versus methylation. So there's many things we're exploring there, and I think lots of companies are working on this to determine what the best methods might be. And I suspect the market is going to wind up as a whole host of different tests that will be complementary to each other.

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jon Groberg from UBS.

Jonathan Groberg - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · Jon Groberg from UBS

Great. Thanks a million. So Jay, if you or someone were just saying from the outside, their first kind of look at this might be revenue relative to at least Street expectations to kind of in, the gap there has been narrowing, you have tough comps in the second half, no real new instrument launched to speak of. Can you maybe just talk – I know you talked a lot about your order growth and how excited you were. But could you maybe I don't know, just talk about your comfort and the visibility that you have in the second half and that you have with the guidance that you've outlined for the rest of the year? And then as a follow-up to Mark, can you maybe explain a little bit – you mentioned inventory was up because of the ERP that was going to go live. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the receivables as well? Thanks. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, Jon. I think our visibility is about as good as it has been historically. I won't think we have a lot more or a lot less than we've typically had. I think one key factor we're dealing with is the weakness in the Japanese market. So in Japan even though it was weak, Q1 was an okay Japan quarter and Q2 was always the worse Japan quarter, so certainly that was a factor in the revenue in Q2. And we caught up on the backlog of HiSeq X shipments. So now we're really in very much a steady state in terms of where we are in terms of balance between orders and shipments and I think that steady state gives us pretty good confidence going into the back half of…

Jonathan Groberg - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · Jon Groberg from UBS

Okay. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Dan Arias.

Daniel Arias - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Good afternoon, guys. Thanks. On the NextSeq system, Jay, I think back in, I believe, January you talked about the road show that you guys went on after that product was launched and I believe at the time you said you had generated something in the neighborhood of 2,500 or so leads. Any way you can talk to how much of that you've worked your way through or converted just in order to try and get an updated view of the placement funnel there? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I don't have that number at my fingertips in terms of the size of the pipeline now. We did that road show shortly after launch in the early part of 2014. And we've seen benefit of that because the NextSeqs are marching up every quarter. I think the v2 chemistry has helped a lot. So any customers who felt there was a slight difference in quality from NextSeq to HiSeq, that's now totally neutralized with the v2 kits on the NextSeq. So we're really bullish on NextSeq, I think particularly in the NIPT market as we launch the VeriSeq NIPT broadly as we penetrate China with that platform. As larger panels come into the market where you need more throughput to run the panels, I think NextSeq is going to be really, really important product for us.

Daniel Arias - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Maybe just as a follow-up on the X systems, I'm sure it's a combination of both, but maybe in general I'm curious whether you're finding that with the discussions that you're having on buying an X Five versus an X Ten, is it more a function of capital and funding right now, or is it more based on throughput and capacity? Thanks. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: I'd say it's a combination. So the X Fives that we're selling are to customers who will likely become X Ten customers at some point in time, but they want to walk before they run, if you will, and they're willing to pay a little bit extra on the price per genome for a while until they really understand what their pipeline looks like. So it's a combination of overall capital cost and whether they think they're ever going to get to an X Ten or not. To be clear here, we're also seeing the HiSeq 4000 I think as a very important addition right along that spectrum, and so it's the case that some people who might have wanted to buy an X One or X Two had we offered that are now really happy with the HiSeq 4000 product line that allows them to run all the different applications that we have in the portfolio.

Daniel Arias - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Thanks very much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Amanda Murphy with William Blair. Amanda L. Murphy - William Blair & Co. LLC: Hi. Good afternoon. So I just had a two-part question on the HiSeq. The first part is, I think pre-4000, pre the launch of the HiSeq 3000, HiSeq 4000 you were shipping roughly 70, 80 platforms a quarter. So I'm curious, is that still the case and is that what you expect going forward just given that potentially the HiSeq 2500 to HiSeq 4000 conversion may not be exactly one-to-one given the throughput differences? And then the second part is there was also a discussion originally around the 1000 or so platforms that couldn't access the v4 chemistry of the 2000s and 2500s, maybe upgrading to the HiSeq 3000 or HiSeq 4000. So I'm curious if you're seeing any evidence of that, either this quarter in shipments or in the backlog. Thanks. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: So I'd say the number you cited for the total for all the HiSeqs, 2500s up through the 4000, is in the range and we're hoping the HiSeq 4000 gives us a lift there over the next few quarters. So we're doing really well in combination. The mix shifted very dramatically this quarter away from the HiSeq 2500 and toward the HiSeq 4000. In terms of people doing upgrades, we don't have a lot of great data on that yet. We're certainly seeing some HiSeq 2500 customers who buy HiSeq 4000s turning off their HiSeq 2500s. And so we'll be – the way we report our reagent pull-through takes into account a certain fraction of the HiSeq 2500s that get turned off in the field. And so that's how we do the accounting there and at some point, maybe we'll…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Isaac Ro with Goldman Sachs. Isaac Ro - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Thank you. Jay, just hoping you could comment on maybe, broadly speaking, where you think we are in the adoption curve for X Ten? Just assume – and part of that question, I guess wondering if your guidance assumes that any new population sequencing studies get initiated in the second half of this year? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I'd say we're in the stable part of the X Ten lifetime right now, so that's why we gave the, sort of the quarterly ranges we should expect for your modeling purposes. I do think any large-scale population sequencing projects could be incremental to those numbers, so throughout the rest of this year, we don't have built in any large purchases for singular population sequencing projects. And that's because it's hard to know when any of those will close and they tend to be relatively long-term sales cycles for us. So that would be upside if perhaps somebody bought 20 or 30 for doing a large-scale project. Isaac Ro - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Sure. That makes sense. Thank you. And then just a follow-up, maybe a longer-term question on liquid biopsy, appreciate your comments on the maternal cancer study that was published. I'm just wondering, as you think about like the size of some of these markets and what it costs to develop an IVD that's got the sensitivity and specificity that you need to have, is maternal cancer the type of product that you think is worth going after? Or is it just really an example, kind of proof of concept, and maybe there are other markets where liquid biopsy would be more…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Ross Muken with Evercore.

Ross Jordan Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

Good afternoon, guys. So I'm going to stick just on the topic of instrumentation or just sort of pushes and pulls. So we've sort of hovered around $150 million or so a quarter for, I don't know, four or five quarters now. You sort of intimated that X Five, X Ten will be in that sort of 20 to 30 placement units a quarter range. As we think about what's going to break us out of this band to resume obviously at a huge step up from sort of the $100 million or so, or $85 million to $100 million range you've been doing for some time. If we think about the next phase of the step up, is it really predicated on a new platform launch or is it, to your comments before, maybe something that develops in POP Sequencing that's sort of outside you're privy today to be able to model or is it come from one of the other smaller platforms? I'm just trying to get a sense for where you see the biggest ability to see that trajectory change. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Ross, I think it's going to come from all the new application areas that we're working on in the market development. And POPSEQ is really only one of those. Average risk is another and the whole VeriSeq NIPT platform we think will enable that. And that's starting to penetrate the market in Europe. It will be a significant contributor in China here over the next year or two in terms of NextSeq placements. I think what's going on in the consumer market is we have some impact in sequencing. I think over time the whole consumer space will begin to migrate away from arrays and toward sequencing because of the additional power you get from knowing all the bases rather than just the targeted bases. What we're doing in forensics and HLA, we're in the very early phases of adoption in those markets, and those markets are going to be reasonably widely distributed, meaning there's lots of places that will run those applications and therefore I think will support instrument placements as well. So if you look at the existing lineup of hardware, I think the upward momentum in instruments will be driven by market development across new applications.

Ross Jordan Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

And maybe looking at operating leverage, so you've been growing, it's on my math, on an organic basis OpEx in the 20%s and 30%s, sorry, on SG&A. That started to slow and you've got some really good leverage in 4Q and 1Q, and it continued to slow this quarter. How should we think about that line because it looks like R&D has been more constant sort of 20%, how should we think about the investments you need in the commercial organization, and how much leverage you can show there, and how we should think about that relative to the top line momentum? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, on a non-GAAP basis, our R&D and SG&A went up as a percentage of revenue this quarter from last quarter, so we do have a lot of open reqs. We have a lot of important things to be working on and so we're going to continue to add head count in key areas in commercial and in the R&D and research groups. So we're not at the point right now where we're predicting additional expense leverage, and we think that's the right position for the company to take. Again, non-GAAP we're at the 37% plus operating margin and we're pretty pleased with that.

Ross Jordan Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

Great. Thanks... Marc A. Stapley - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Ross, we added – I mentioned in my remarks, we added 350 net heads to punctuate Jay's point a little bit. And you'll see a full quarter effect of those additions in Q3 plus the new additions, the open reqs that Jay mentioned starting to filter.

Ross Jordan Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

Perfect.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Dan Leonard with Leerink.

Dan L. Leonard - Leerink Partners LLC

Analyst · Leerink

Thank you. Can you comment on interest from new customers in the HiSeq 4000? I believe you gave commentary on the benchtop market, but I don't think there was commentary on the high-throughput market. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I mean, clearly we have new customers in the HiSeq part of the market as well, Dan, but it's much less as a percentage than we have on the desktop instrument version just because of the capital cost. And most of the people who have been in the Sequencing market already own some version of a HiSeq, so they wouldn't be a new customer to us.

Dan L. Leonard - Leerink Partners LLC

Analyst · Leerink

Okay. And my follow-up, Jay, I'm trying to better understand the sequential decline in consumables revenue. I hear you that arrays were weak, but just given the relative proportion of arrays versus sequencing and all the commentary on sequencing, I would've thought sequencing consumables would have been enough to sequentially offset array weakness. Can you help me understand what I'm missing? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Marc A. Stapley - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. Dan, I can cover that. Obviously, Q1 was very strong sequencing consumable growth. Q2 continued to grow but it was obviously offset by the array business decline, which pulled the overall growth number down. But as I mentioned on the call, we've seen, boy, we've seen eight quarters now of sequencing growth, sequencing consumable growth in excess of 30%. So we're very pleased with the Q2 result. I mentioned that both HiSeq X and NextSeq were slightly above their ranges, and the other instrument were within their ranges. So we're very comfortable with that outcome.

Dan L. Leonard - Leerink Partners LLC

Analyst · Leerink

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Bill Quirk with Piper Jaffray. William R. Quirk - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): Great. Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Hi, Bill. William R. Quirk - Piper Jaffray & Co (Broker): I want to thank you for the comment around the clinical and the translational instrument trend. It looks like that ticked up here nicely in the quarter. Can you help us think about maybe the bigger picture here? And what I'm trying to balance is we had this very rapid adoption curve going on in the clinic, and frequently around oncology as well as some other applications. But at the same time it looks to us like there's a little bit of inconsistent reimbursement trends in the States. And so I'd kind of love to hear some longer term thoughts there. And then also we're seeing some really nice, encouraging interest over in Europe as well, and any color there would be great. Thanks. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Okay. Reimbursement is classically a challenge for customers in the lab business, but part of the work we're doing in the onco panels is to deal expressly with that problem, and why we're working so hard to get IVD products approved so that we can have standardization around the products which makes the reimbursement easier because you have the clinical evidence and you have an FDA approved product. So our whole focus is to push these products toward IVDs that we think we think will accelerate the overall reimbursement. With respect to Europe, I'd say we had a good quarter in Europe. It was not as good as the Americas, the Americas really, really had a great second quarter. So we're super strong…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Steve Beuchaw with Morgan Stanley. Steve C. Beuchaw - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. I'll start on the X. I'll reiterate the thanks for the 20 to 30 guidance. That certainly gives us more clarity there. Just as a follow-up to Isaac's question, I wonder, given how specific HLI has been about their plans to ramp up capacity this year, have you incorporated any HLI capacity expansion into that 20 to 30? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, we've incorporated an overall forecast that kind of averages our probabilities across all the customers we know of. If the kinds of comments that have come out of HLI actually come to fruition, that's going to be an upside to the number if that happens in 2015. Steve C. Beuchaw - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Okay. And then on NIPT, you made a comment here in the Q&A about thinking about moving to average risk. I think the last time you commented on that process you had a view that in the U.S. that move might be more likely for late 2016. Am I sensing that maybe you're a little bit more optimistic about the timing there given some perhaps more open-minded language from ACOG here recently? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well, I guess our view hasn't changed on when we think ACOG or the guidelines will change with respect to average risk. But we are seeing the test being increasingly used in average risk patients, largely on a self-pay basis. And I think in Europe that will happen, particularly with the launch of the VeriSeq NIPT, I think labs have a more efficient way to do NIPT testing which will make the self-pay market more assessable. And so I think you'll see the leakage rate into average risk increase. Francis A. deSouza - President & Director: And specifically, we view the ACOG commentary as a positive step in that direction because they removed their recommendation that you don't use NIPT for average risk screening, and so we feel incrementally we're seeing steps towards that timeframe. Steve C. Beuchaw - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Got it. Very clear. Thanks everyone.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Zarak Khurshid from Wedbush Securities.

Zarak Khurshid - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Zarak Khurshid from Wedbush Securities

Hi there, everybody. Thanks for taking the questions. How important or meaningful was Berry following the Chinese FDA approval in driving your NextSeq backlog and NextSeq sales in the quarter? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: We did get some orders from Berry, it wasn't a gigantic single order placement, I think they'll be spread out over time. So we did get some units from them but nothing that in and of itself moved the needle in a big way.

Zarak Khurshid - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Zarak Khurshid from Wedbush Securities

Sounds good, Jay. And then a follow-up on NeoPrep, how are things shaping up with the pipeline there? Any thoughts on attachment rates to HiSeq currently and as we think out into the future? Thanks, guys. Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. The incoming order rate is pretty good on NeoPrep. We're just – we've been anxiously awaiting the time when we felt we could fully ship this product and we're now there. As we mentioned in the script, we worked really hard on this and it's complex to get this product super robust because we do tens of thousands of operations in a single run. And if you look at the statistics on this, if any one of those operations fail, a sample doesn't work. And so it's required some really great engineering to get this to where we've gotten it now and we're feeling really comfortable about it with the first kit, we're close to releasing the second kit, and then we've got a line-up of kits behind that. So we've made really fundamental improvements to the technology and we understand it really, really well. So I think you're going to begin to see the shipment rate increase and the shipments in Q2 were really pretty insignificant because we were still dealing with a handful of test customers to make sure we got them very happy with the platform and the results, success rate results on the instrument.

Zarak Khurshid - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Zarak Khurshid from Wedbush Securities

Wonderful. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Elliott with Baird. Jeff T. Elliott - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Yeah, thanks for the question. First one from me, Jay, on SeqLab, do you have any color you could share on where that offering could bring customer utilization on the X Ten, really in light of your comment about the concentration of utilization amongst the handful of customers. And then as a follow-up, do you have any plans right now to expand the X Ten to other sample types or beyond whole genome sequencing? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I'll make a comment on that and maybe Francis can add some comments about the product itself. Our hope certainly is that having SeqLab in place allows us to accelerate pretty substantially the rate of customers coming up the curve on a HiSeq X Ten. As we've plotted the consumable rates, you heard us say in the script that it's very biased, the consumables are very biased toward a few customers at the high end. And then it's – we've used the word bimodal but really if you look at the plot it just trickles down in a relatively linear fashion to customers at the low end, particularly geographies who are not using it as much as they should. And so our goal is to just move all those customers up and I think having a software architecture around the boxes that simplifies all the lab management challenges that customer have, is going to push that up. We're not ready to sort of quote a rate on how fast that will go or what it'll do, but given the fact that we're already running above our guidance in terms of consumables on the…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Dane Leone with BTIG.

Dane Leone - BTIG LLC

Analyst · Dane Leone with BTIG

Hi. Thank you for taking the questions. So I just wanted to kind of revisit the consumable question, Q-on-Q because it seems to be a topic of concern. Could you maybe clarify some of the projects that you have going on with the HiSeq X customers to help them ramp up? And how you kind of see that playing out? We've spoken to people in industry and saying, yeah, getting samples can be difficult and it's going to take time. Just maybe any color there in terms of how you see that higher utilization, higher capacity genome center really ramping up over the next couple quarters? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Well I'd say on the X Ten – X Fives and X Tens, the classical high throughput sequencing labs are the ones that are at the high end of the user group that we have today. So they already knew how to do sequencing. They had plenty of samples. Many of them had samples in the freezer that they just couldn't fully sequence before because of price points. So those customers tend to already be at the high end of our curve. The ones we're working on are the ones that don't have the limb systems in place, don't have the analytics in place to analyze the data, and so some of them will turn on their X system and all of a sudden they've got 5,000 genomes, but they don't know how to analyze the genomes, and so they slow down a little bit until they figure that out. So SeqLab helps that a lot. In some places, we can help with samples; in some places, we can't. We just have to let them deal with their sample acquisition challenges. Some of that has to do sometimes with consent. Some of it has to do with whether they're trying to access clinical pipelines and regulatory issues around access to clinical pipelines and samples. But in some cases, we can help customers get access to projects if they're doing things more in the service business and we do do that pretty routinely. And then you have at the very low end of our utilization curve, those customers where the purchase is almost more of a vanity buy, and we try to not do many of those. In fact, we push back on quite a number of customers who've said, we want to be in this game and there was really no clear thing they were going to do with the X, and so we haven't sold to them. But there's still a few at the low end that are not utilizing the system as we expect they should.

Dane Leone - BTIG LLC

Analyst · Dane Leone with BTIG

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Tim Evans from Wells Fargo Securities.

Tim C. Evans - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst · Tim Evans from Wells Fargo Securities

Thank you. It seems like there might be a little bit of a disconnect if we frame things in terms of your TAM which you've laid out. Arguably, the commentary around some of these markets has been that uptake has been maybe faster than we've expected, and yet your revenue growth for the year has been – your expectations haven't really gone up in tandem. Can you comment about whether you still feel comfortable around some of the key assumptions that went into building some of the bigger pieces of that TAM model? Jay T. Flatley - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I think we feel quite comfortable with that, and in fact, there's things that have happened since we talked about the TAM that not only make us comfortable with the numbers we gave, but probably would cause us, if we were to revise them today, to do that in the upward direction. In our markets, in general, the way the markets develop is that you see a gradual adoption rate, which extends over some relative period of time, a year or a couple of years, depending upon the market segment, and then the market hits an inflection point, and that inflection point can be driven by factors such as reimbursement, by the publication of clinical studies. In the case of NIPT, it became a marketplace that exploded because the clinical data came out and replaced an invasive test. And so in oncology, we're going to see that inflection point happen. Is it going to happen a year from now or two years from now, it's hard to predict. But there will be an inflection point in the oncology market where that market will explode. And that would be around perhaps the time when in-practice guidelines it becomes standard of care to sequence every tumor when it's biopsied, and that will cause the market to grow very, very quickly. In the POPSEQ market you'll see that inflection point once you begin to see the existing POPSEQ projects begin to demonstrate the fact that sequencing whole human genomes actually has an impact on the quality of care and the economics of health care. And once you start seeing that, that market will explode as well in our view. In the consumer market I think there's factors around that as well that we could go into about what's going to kick the consumer market into high gear. But I think there's some potential things that might happen here over the next year or two that could do that as well.

Tim C. Evans - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst · Tim Evans from Wells Fargo Securities

That's very helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

I will now turn the call over to Rebecca Chambers for closing remarks.

Rebecca Chambers - Senior Director-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, operator. As a reminder, a replay of this call will be available as a webcast in the Investor section of our website, as well as through the dial-in instructions contained in today's earnings release. Thank you for joining us today. This concludes our call and we look forward to our next update following the close of the third fiscal quarter.