Earnings Labs

Illumina, Inc. (ILMN)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Wed, May 4, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Illumina, Inc. Q1 2016 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rebecca Chambers. Please go ahead. Rebecca Chambers - Vice President-Investor Relations & Treasury: Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2016. 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, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Francis deSouza, President; and Marc Stapley, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer. Jay will focus on our Q1 results, Francis will provide the outlook for our business, and Marc will review our financial results and updated guidance. This call is being recorded and the audio portion will be archived in the Investors 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 on current information available and Illumina assumes no obligation to update these statements. To better understand the risks and uncertainties…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Tycho Peterson of JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Your line is now open.

Tycho W. Peterson - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Your line is now open

Hey, thanks. Sorry to hone in on the Europe issues, but I just would love to hear from you a little bit more about the steps you're taking to improve your forecasting ability. Obviously, you had issues in Europe in 3Q last year as well. So if you could just talk a little bit about how you intend to improve visibility there? And really what gives you the confidence that the problems are going to be fixed by 3Q since the back half estimates are essentially unchanged to get to the midpoint of the new guidance range. Francis A. deSouza - President & Director: Sure, Tycho. This is Francis. There are a number of things we are doing. We started by moving one of our strong leaders from the U.S., who ran Western region, Scott Thomas out to Europe. And he was out there at the beginning of this quarter and has already started rolling out a much more disciplined sales process. And that starts all the way from capturing the opportunities and tracking the opportunities as well as managing our visibility into the opportunities that are in various stages of the process. He is also instituted, a process that frankly we use in the U.S., around managing the pipeline for some of our lower-end instruments. And so that alone has started to give us better visibility into when deals are expected to close over the course of this quarter and allowed us to add urgency and also manage more for a weekly close process, rather than a close process that's so heavily tailored towards the end of the quarter. That does a few things; one, it gives us much better visibility into what we're working for the course of the quarter, it helps drive urgency into the team, and it helps make sure that we understand whether we have the pipe to get the deals we need. Additionally, Tycho, the execution challenges that we've talked about in Europe, much of that related to this deferral challenge that I talked about in the script, where we had a surprisingly large amount of revenue that was not recognizable, and part of the discipline we need in the team is to pull in the orders to make sure that we don't have a lot of systems that don't get shipped in time to be recognized as revenue, or there are small contractual issues at the end of the quarter that wind up having a revenue recognition question and therefore can't be counted. And that's all the discipline of making sure that those deals get closed earlier in the quarter, and Scott is going to make a big difference there as well, we believe.

Tycho W. Peterson - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Your line is now open

Okay. Marc A. Stapley - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Administrative Officer: Tycho, I would just add one point to your question about confidence in the outlook for the rest of the year. As I mentioned in the script, or Francis mentioned, we've got Europe in our outlook currently at the revised number that they've committed to and provided recently, which is a lot lower than it was previously. And so that gives us an opportunity to get these changes and improvements baked in, and start to get some positive impacts from them.

Tycho W. Peterson - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Your line is now open

Okay. That's helpful. And then just on the other side, on spending, I know you talked about maybe pulling back on some of the hiring. Can you just get us comfortable that – I mean, you're such an innovation-driven company that you're not necessarily going to be kind of pushing off stuff that could impact the pipeline and really, future growth. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Sure. I mean, that's an important tradeoff for us to analyze, and we're in the process of doing that right now. And, of course, the most important programs that are the largest revenue generators, the ones with the highest ROI, will continue to be fully staffed and fully funded. What we'll be looking for are other areas outside of the core product development activity. For example, we may re-staff some of our research at a bit slower rate, because we moved a lot of those people over into GRAIL, and much of that research work has an effect three years to five years from now. So those are the kinds of things we can slow down for some short number of quarters until we get back to the revenue growth rates that we believe we should be at. And clearly, we're going to do that in some of the other support organizations as well, without impacting customer support and the core product development activity. So we're pretty confident we can make a big impact without hitting the core. Francis A. deSouza - President & Director: Yeah. Another example of something we're doing there, Tycho, is look, we've already kicked off an initiative to drive more focus and prioritization. And one of the things that we'd identified was that look, there's this terrific strategic planning process that kicks off the project that we want to focus on for the future and leads to the new products we put out. One element that we hadn't focused on historically is to look at all the initiatives we have underway and see what we could stop doing. So we had already kicked off an effort to look at all the things we had going on and prune that portfolio, if you like. So that's an effort we already had underway. We're accelerating that to sort of complete over the course of this quarter, and expect to roll that out starting over the next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel of Cowen & Co. Your line is now open. Doug Schenkel - Cowen & Co. LLC: Good afternoon. I guess, first, just a – I guess a couple quick ones, and then maybe a slightly longer answer question after that. So the first one is, maybe as a follow-up to Tycho, regarding your guidance for the year, some seem to be focused on what seems to be some back-end loading of the guidance. Does your guidance reflect an assumption that demand gets better, or execution gets a lot better in the second half? Or is your guidance simply reflecting that comparisons get a lot more favorable in the second half, keeping in mind first half growth last year was around 30% and second half growth was 17%? It doesn't seem like you're baking in a whole lot more for the second half than the first half. It seems like it's more comps driven. Is that fair? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Hello. Marc A. Stapley - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Administrative Officer: Doug. Yes, can you hear me? It's Marc.

Operator

Operator

We're back guys. Sorry, we lost the call there for a minute. Doug Schenkel - Cowen & Co. LLC: Okay. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Doug, I lost you about two-thirds the way through your question, I think. Doug Schenkel - Cowen & Co. LLC: Yeah. It's really just your guidance for the year and the pacing doesn't seem to reflect a whole lot in the way of herculean assumptions for an improvement in the second half in terms of demand or execution. It seems on the surface to be more a function of just changes in year-over-year comparisons, first half to second half, is that fair? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, there's a couple of elements, comparisons are better or easier in the back half, for sure. We're not anticipating any radical changes in the European outlook, because we've actually factored in the disappointing European outlook into the guidance numbers that we've given, and obviously we'll be working to do better than those numbers and are working hard to achieve that. But the single biggest factor that gives us a lot of confidence in the back half is the backlog, the strength of the backlog, the incoming order rate that we had in Q1 and the pipeline that we see for business in the Americas and Asia-Pacific in the back half. So that's what really gives us confidence in the increasing revenue rates in the back half of the year. Francis A. deSouza - President & Director: Yeah. I'd say very strongly that the numbers we've put out for the rest of the year were driven from a bottoms-up look at what the regions were forecasting, based on what they had in the pipeline and had visibility into. And so…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Derik De Bruin of Bank of America. Your line is now, open.

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Derik De Bruin of Bank of America. Your line is now, open

Hi, good afternoon. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Hi, Derik.

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Derik De Bruin of Bank of America. Your line is now, open

Hey, just one short question which is stock option expense for the full year and then a longer question which is sort of following up on Doug's question I think, we've had a lot of incomings from investors questioning the outlook and just the numbers. But I think, in particular, we had a lot of questions on GRAIL and Helix and the fact that those are dilutive to earnings right now and when they would start to potentially be more accretive, I guess. The question been is like when are potentially we going to see some return on those investments and it's more of a question about valuation support for the stock, relative to some of the other names in the MedTech space, that are trading at similar types of top-line growth levels right now. So basically give us some clarity or some indication when do you think you're going to see some benefits from – be able to get some benefits from Helix and GRAIL? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: What was the stock comp question exactly?

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Derik De Bruin of Bank of America. Your line is now, open

What is the update for the full year, is there – what's the number for the full year. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: So, Marc, do you want to cover... Marc A. Stapley - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Administrative Officer: Yeah. Derik, let me talk to that one really quickly. I'm not giving that specific number at this point, but we're on a path here that isn't going to accelerate that substantially through the second half. There are going to be some upticks, part of which is related to Helix and GRAIL and part of which is related to core Illumina. But it's not going to be that vastly different from what you've seen so far. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: With respect to GRAIL and Helix, Derik, those are incredibly important, strategic bets for our company. We think they both represents, on their own, massive markets, as we've talked, about in cancer screening, gigantic opportunity, probably the single biggest market segment that we can imagine. We continue to believe that there is going to be a strong market for consumer genomics, but it's going to take some work to create the ecosystem to really unleash that, and that's the goal of Helix. And as a company, it is critically important that we take a long-term view and that $0.05 a share in a quarter, even $0.10 a share in a quarter, compared to the opportunities that these two ventures portend for us in the next five years, is insignificant. And so, we're not prepared today to talk about when these are going to turn profitable, and begin to contribute to the bottom-line, but GRAIL, as we mentioned, is a long-term bet and they're not going to be seeing product on the market for some time. Helix will be quicker and so once we get into 2017, we'll begin to get the earliest indications of revenue ramp, but I certainly wouldn't expect that to be a profitable enterprises in 2017.

Derik De Bruin - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Derik De Bruin of Bank of America. Your line is now, open

Great. I'll get back in the queue. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dan Arias of Citigroup. Your line is now open.

Daniel Arias - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Dan Arias of Citigroup. Your line is now open

Yeah. Hi, good afternoon, guys. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Hi, Dan.

Daniel Arias - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Dan Arias of Citigroup. Your line is now open

Jay or Francis, just to go back to Europe, as you've digested the issue a little bit, have you found that the shortfall on the HiSeq side was due more to installs that didn't materialize on the clinical or on the non-clinical side of things? And then if I could just ask a follow-up for Marc. Marc, what are you forecasting instrument revenues to be down year-over-year at this point? Thank you. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. There was nothing in the European numbers that was market specific. And so these were revenue recognition issues of various sorts as I highlighted in the script. None of those were particularly related to specific markets within the clinical sector or the research sector. Francis A. deSouza - President & Director: Right, they are two very different issues, right. If we look at Q1 HiSeq story and that was the HiSeq story across regions and we talked about the fact that a lot of that was the HiSeq shortfall (35:47) in the orders that came in that we weren't able to recognize as revenue. So that's really what the Q1 story was. Looking forward the issue is around the forecasted shortfall in Europe and there we believe a lot of it is around sales execution. And that's really what we are focused on, driving more discipline and generating the pipeline, getting visibility into the pipeline and urgency in working the deals through the process and that's across instruments and across markets in Europe.

Daniel Arias - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Dan Arias of Citigroup. Your line is now open

Okay. So, Francis, if I could just sort of crystallize from both your thoughts on the issue itself in Europe, is it your estimation that what took place in Europe was pretty much 100% personnel-related? Francis A. deSouza - President & Director: I think personnel and then the knock-on effect on the process we're running in Europe. I feel like, we have – and you're not going to put all this on one person and we have definitely good people on the team. What we are seeing is that we don't run as disciplined a process in Europe as we do in the other regions, and already we're starting to see in the last few weeks an improvement in the visibility of the pipeline through this quarter and we're seeing more urgency in our sales process. So that we believe were the biggest drivers in what we're seeing in Europe. Marc A. Stapley - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Administrative Officer: And Dan, on the instrument revenue, yeah, we are not bifurcating the guide for the year into the individual component pieces, but I gave some specific commentary, I mean clearly we've given commentary around Q1. I gave some specific commentary around Q2 there as well. So definitely a slower start for the year, driven by the high throughput and then as I mentioned we're seeing uptick towards the second half of the year, but not giving out specific commentary on breaking down the revenue growth by category at this point.

Daniel Arias - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Dan Arias of Citigroup. Your line is now open

Okay. Thanks, so much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jon Groberg of UBS. Your line is now open.

Jonathan Groberg - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · Jon Groberg of UBS. Your line is now open

Thanks a million. So, (37:57) just correct me if I'm wrong, Jay or Francis, but it feels a little bit it was like, two misses out of three quarters, that maybe you – just given the size of the company, you have a pretty segmented market in terms of the products that you're in, it feels to me like there is a transition happening, kind of away from being necessarily your products story and a little bit more a market development story, and I'm just wondering, do you feel like you have a little less control or visibility into your quarterly results and if you need to, but just more broadly, if you're thinking about, how you need to approach forecasting? Francis A. deSouza - President & Director: Yeah. I maybe wouldn't characterize it exactly like that, Jon, but I think your points are important ones. I've highlighted over the past year or 18 months that much of the market development that has to happen now in sequencing falls on Illumina, that we don't have a lot of other large companies who are spending marketing dollars developing markets and so that is key for us to do, more than it ever has been. And the big markets we're opening up now have each their own unique set of issues, whether it's reimbursement or regulatory or in the case of GRAIL, clinical trial work. And so it does take some time to open up those new markets. Having said that, there is no question that Illumina is so driven by product innovation and in all of our businesses, we analytically see, a cycle that's related to product cycles and that, whenever we launch new platforms, we get a surge of new orders for those instruments and then the following year, the…

Jonathan Groberg - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · Jon Groberg of UBS. Your line is now open

And that's helpful. And then, just as a quick follow-up, I think you were minus 5% in Asia Pac where you said you're guiding to mid-teens, I know you had a solid book-to-bill, is there anything else that the kind of – gives you the confidence in that acceleration in Asia Pac for the rest of the year? Thanks. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah, that's exactly right. So, we did see, as expected a decline in Asia in Q1, but as we look at the forecast for the rest of the year, we do believe we have the opportunities and pipeline to support a mid-teens growth in the year. The things that are driving those are one, there is activity around the Chinese PMI that is causing purchasing to happen. We saw that already start and we expect that to play out. We're continuing to see incremental improvement in Japan for example. And while that is slow and steady, it's slow and steady in the right direction and we're seeing that show up in our pipeline as well. Marc A. Stapley - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Administrative Officer: And Jon, obviously Japan was a challenge quarter-after-quarter for us last year and so that's reflected in the (42:39-43:49). Rebecca Chambers - Vice President-Investor Relations & Treasury: Operator, we're ready for the next question.

Operator

Operator

And the next question comes from the line of Ross Muken of Evercore. Your line is now open.

Ross Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Ross Muken of Evercore. Your line is now open

Good afternoon, guys. So, can you just go back to that capacity utilization slide and sort of help us understand exactly sort of what we're looking at and how we should sort of interpret the peaks and dips in terms of how you relate that or if it's at all relatable to how you think about your instrument forecasts or managing at least sort of that (43:22)? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. Marc, you want to walk through that or you want me to or... Marc A. Stapley - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Administrative Officer: I just want to, yeah, Ross, guess what, I missed the first part. You were saying in relation to the utilization slide?

Ross Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Ross Muken of Evercore. Your line is now open

Yeah, I'm just trying to exactly understand how we should interpret sort of the various levels of capacity utilization across the base, and then, how we should think about certain points. Typically, if you think about capacity utilization, it sort of signals capital purchasing depending on what level it is. So how do we interpret what levels for you to signal that you should see an increase in instrumentation demand versus maybe a moderation at a certain level and how you sort of attempt to manage it. I'm just trying to exactly interpret what we are supposed to gain from those. Marc A. Stapley - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Administrative Officer: Yeah. So I think a couple of things. Firstly, the capacity calculation itself, which is based on the actual mix of types of kit that our customers buy and run. Clearly, that's increasing quarter-over-quarter as a result of both the installed base, a little bit of the change in mix and that's coming up with higher throughput instruments, which I will come back to, when I look at the capacity utilization chart. If you think about the percentages, what you probably – what you don't want to see is a very low percentage of utilization. That would reflect a lot of spare capacity in the market, which would have a read-through, I think, to future instrument purchases. You're obviously not going to see utilizations based on our trajectory of past history and our trajectory of much over 50% on an ongoing basis due to the decentralization of market. Only in a centralized market would you see it much, much higher than this. So, if you look at the data, what you're seeing is – well, you see a couple of inflection points where the utilization…

Ross Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Ross Muken of Evercore. Your line is now open

Right. And I guess regionally, would Europe look any different, I'm sure you've probably cut the data at some point. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, Europe would be lower on the averages, the trend line probably isn't too much different, but we clearly see highest utilization in the U.S. Europe tends to be significantly lower on average utilization across almost all the platforms.

Ross Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Ross Muken of Evercore. Your line is now open

That's helpful. Jay, you started off talking about the various reasons for sort of the HiSeq miss, and you have that nice little pie chart which sort of breaks down the components. I guess, as you stated, typically in a quarter, maybe one or two will happen, but not as many. I mean, as you think about the complexity of your business and what you can sort of manage versus what is just market-oriented and the like – and I guess, what period in the company's history, or what prior experience in all the years you've been doing this, would you sort harken back to and say oh, this reminds me of X, and because of Y, we feel confident. I'm just trying to figure out it – what this most looks like, in terms of any of the few sort of periods of challenge that the company has had. I mean, there hasn't been very many. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, and I think from a sort of magnitude of the challenge, Q3 2011 was the other big one for us, driven by very different factors, that was a collection. It was one of those, again, rare quarters where you had the convergence of a whole bunch of factors all at once, which I think we had this quarter as well. The specific factors that were different than the ones we had in Q1, but it was one of those of sort of convergence effects that sometimes happens, and that's what happened to us in Q1. So I'd say that's the closest analogy, in terms of lots of things going in the wrong direction in one quarter.

Ross Muken - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Ross Muken of Evercore. Your line is now open

Got it. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Amanda Murphy from William Blair. Your line is now open. Amanda L. Murphy - William Blair & Co. LLC: Hi, good afternoon. So I just had a follow-up to your answer to Jon's question earlier about sort of the R&D pipeline, and I appreciate your comment about enabling markets and smaller S curves but I'm wondering, if you think about technical – or advancements that could further move the market forward, I was just curious if you can give us some high-level perspective there. So, obviously, you mentioned the innovation at the lower kind of CapEx portion of the market, but is there anything in the works? Obviously, ordered arrays is quite meaningful in terms of the improvement in performance, is there anything like that in the works that you could talk to obviously, with respect to your R&D pipeline (49:21) obviously? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I mean, we can't give you specifics on that of course, but if you think about it, ordered arrays have only been implemented on the very highest end of our product line, HiSeq X and the HiSeq 3,000, HiSeq 4,000. So, we could put ordered arrays on other products in the product line, when and if that becomes important for a throughput and cost reason and is the highest return R&D program for us to invest in. And so, that technology can be applied to the other instruments, we've not done that yet, because we don't think it's the most important factor in increasing the overall revenue from those segments. But we have a broad product line now, and over time, various portions of that product line will age out and they will be replaced by brand new…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Bill Quirk of Piper Jaffray. Your line is now open. Alexander D. Nowak - Piper Jaffray & Co. (Broker): Great. Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. This is actually Alex Nowak filling in for Bill today. So going back to the first quarter, just trying to understand what happened following the preannouncement that changed the commentary from saying that the Q1 shortfall is predominantly due to customer outsourcing to now being a myriad of different issues that you really had no control over. Just trying to understand, what was the change there? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: So if you go back and look at the exact script, we didn't say primarily outsourcing, we did cite the example of outsourcing as one factor that we knew about at the preannouncement date. You can imagine, in those two weeks before the preannouncement, we were scrambling hard to try to get as much data together as we could and have a preannouncement that was timely. We didn't want to wait another week to do a preannouncement to have more data, and so we've learned a lot in the last two weeks when all of the analytics from the Q1 have really come in and we've been able to digest them, talk to the regions, get the new forecast, understand all of the background detail. And so we've been able to go order by order and look at every one of the circumstances and break it into the pie chart that you see in the deck that we provided. And so there were a lot of different issues, and no singular thing to (54:28) dominate. And so I think what happened is because we mentioned that one comment, people jumped on…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Dan Leonard of Leerink. Your line is now open.

Dan L. Leonard - Leerink Partners LLC

Analyst · Dan Leonard of Leerink. Your line is now open

Thank you. This overlaps a little bit with the last question, but Jay or Francis, I was hoping you could characterize the incremental X customers, I think you grew to 31 in the quarter. And then also the funnel, in terms of are these (56:46) customers that have samples, have projects or are they buying Xs in anticipation of some missionary sales, some different kind of business model? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Sure. So one of the things we talked about is, we did have the four Xs that came in in Q1. We did see some interest from the – wanting to participate in the Chinese PMI that is driving some of the X interest. We haven't gone public with the customers that have come online in Q1. So I can say that there is definitely demand generated from the Chinese PMI, but we can't talk about specific customers associated with that. Rebecca Chambers - Vice President-Investor Relations & Treasury: Yeah. The only one that's public is GENEWIZ.

Dan L. Leonard - Leerink Partners LLC

Analyst · Dan Leonard of Leerink. Your line is now open

Well, I know, at least early in the HiSeq X program, you were careful to deliver instruments to folks that had samples and had projects. Is that still the case or are you more (57:42) shipping orders as they come? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: No, that's still a factor. We still use the access to samples as a criteria for the purchase. And what we've really seen in probably the past year is more of the X customers are metering out their instrument deliveries, we're in the very early phases of X, people converting their entire large existing programs over to the X, if you're abroad or an NHI (58:10). What we see now is, someone will place an X order and say, okay, I want two units for now and then a quarter or two quarters from now, I'll take another three and so we're not – that's one way that we deal with sample access problem and they do as well.

Dan L. Leonard - Leerink Partners LLC

Analyst · Dan Leonard of Leerink. Your line is now open

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Steve Beuchaw of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Steve C. Beuchaw - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Hi. Good afternoon. Just a couple of clarifications. Marc, I wonder given the $700 million order figure that you provided, if you could give us just a little bit more context around it. Could you give us any sense for maybe what the backlog growth was exiting Q1 or maybe how the growth in orders compares to what you saw in 2015, just so we can again put it in a little bit more context? And then Jay, I wanted to follow up on a couple of comments you made in the prepared remarks around clinical. First on NIPT, I was a little surprised given that we're here in May of 2016, that you talked about some reimbursement decisions around NIPT getting delayed out to 2017, maybe I'm just overly optimistic there, but I wondered if there might be some hope for the second half of 2016, curious what is it that you're seeing there. And then, just to round it out on clinical, on the clinical cancer side, I just want to make sure I understand the narrative, is it stable reimbursement, new products, drives (59:32) reacceleration, is that the way to think about it. Thanks. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Hey, Marc do you want to start? Marc A. Stapley - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Administrative Officer: Yeah. So I'll start with the orders conservation. Steve, obviously a large part of the orders that we booked in the first quarter were shipped in the first quarter, as you would normally expect. But we built significant backlog, and I quote out specifically…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Dane Leone of BTIG. Your line is now open.

Dane Leone - BTIG LLC

Analyst · Dane Leone of BTIG. Your line is now open

Hi, thank you. I just had a quick one on how MiniSeq and MiSeq performed. Could you kind of give us color because historically, you commented that there would be some degree of cannibalization in sales, can you just kind of give us a basket idea of collectively how MiniSeq and MiSeq kind of performed as a group this quarter versus maybe last year, which would have only been MiSeq, and kind of how you expect that ramp and MiniSeq specifically to continue over the course of this year? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: If you recall we had projected nominally a 20% to 25% cannibalization rate of MiSeq. We're seeing a rate so far at least that's less than that, and part of it is an interesting phenomenon where the low price point of the MiniSeq opens the door to a new customer, and then as we begin to engage with that customer we use it as an up-selling opportunity to sell them a MiSeq rather than a MiniSeq. And so we're seeing that phenomenon working well for our sales people because they love to sell $100,000 instrument rather than $50,000 one, if they have the option to do so. Having said that, the MiniSeq product did well in its first quarter. We've got a great pipeline there, and we're continuing to be optimistic about MiniSeq. And the data we have today at least indicates a lower cannibalization rate of MiSeq than we would have expected previously.

Dane Leone - BTIG LLC

Analyst · Dane Leone of BTIG. Your line is now open

Okay. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our final question comes from the line of Jack Meehan of Barclays. Your line is now open.

Jack Meehan - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst · Barclays. Your line is now open

Thanks. Thanks for squeezing me in. Just a follow up one on MiniSeq. Do you have sense at this point for what we should be building in as a range for quarterly replacements? And I know there is the long tail of labs that would like to do sequencing. Have you found this customer class is more responsive to an instrument sale approach versus reagent rental? Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: (01:05:48) too early for us to have any data on that Jack. So we're continuing to look at this, and the number of customers that actually crossed the finish line, got it installed, and actually running these at any volume is still a relatively small number. So it's too early for us to put an estimate out there. In general, what we've used across the product line is about half of the purchase price, I think in this product, or probably less than that. So I've modeled something less, significantly less than half... Rebecca Chambers - Vice President-Investor Relations & Treasury: 12 to 15 (01:06:18). Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah, yes, exactly. So we'll be looking probably three or four quarters out before we actually start quoting what the actual range is running.

Jack Meehan - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst · Barclays. Your line is now open

Got it. That's helpful. And then, just one for modeling out. I know here in May, you're not ready to be talking about 2017, let alone 2018 or 2019, but I think one of the moving pieces of the income statement across the Street is the R&D line item, just given some of the expenses you're planning for both GRAIL and Helix. Can you just give us a framework for what we should be building in, in terms of long-term expenditures in R&D is closer to revenue growth, or do you think some of these new products we should be building in something more than that? Thank you. Jay T. Flatley - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I think, clearly, GRAIL and Helix in many ways are incremental to what we're doing before, and we should be thinking about them as such. These are very important strategic bets that we think are the most important market opportunities for us to be working on. But the base level of R&D and the growth rates you've seen over the past couple of quarters will begin to moderate based on the absolute number, will begin to moderate based on the the absolute (01:07:29) asset growth rate will moderate in the R&D lines because of the actions we're taking to slowdown hiring, and that's important to more closely match what's happening in R&D with the recast revenue growth rate. And so we'll be analyzing this over the next quarter and probably give you a little bit more update next quarter, not guidance for 2017 or 2018, but probably a little more qualitative statement about what you can think about R&D and sales and marketing. Francis A. deSouza - President & Director: Yeah. One of these we have studied, and if you take out GRAIL and Helix over any three-year time horizon, there is enough leverage in our operating model organically. So we continue to believe that. Rebecca Chambers - Vice President-Investor Relations & Treasury: Thanks, Jack.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And I would like to now turn the call back to Rebecca Chambers for closing remarks. Rebecca Chambers - Vice President-Investor Relations & Treasury: Thank you operator. As a reminder, a replay of this call will be available as a webcast in the Investors section of our website, as well as through the dial-in instructions contained in today's earnings release. Thank you all for joining us today. This concludes our call and we look forward to our next update following the close of the second fiscal quarter.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.