Cytek Biosciences, Inc. (CTKB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello all, and welcome. My name is [indiscernible], and I'm an associate at JPMorgan. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Jiang of Cytek.

Good morning. Thanks to JPMorgan for inviting us to present to you the Cytek Biosciences. As usual, the safe harbor statement, I'm not going to read through. So Cytek is a cell analysis company. We built our business based on our foundational 4 business pillars, which include instrument, applications, bioinformatics and clinical. I'm going to get into the details of all those points in the following presentation. To start with, I'm going to give you a summary of our performance, Cytek. In 2016, we launched our first product, Athena, which is a conventional flow cytometer. A year later, we launched Cytek Aurora, our flagship product, based on the Full Spectrum Profiling technology, which is a cell analyzer. And a year later, we launched the Northern Lights, which helped to serve the entry-level applications in the cell analysis. Then in 2020, we launched our first reagent, cFluor reagents, to enable us to expand the applications of high-dimensional cell analysis based on our Full Spectrum Profiling technology. And then 2021, we launched our cell sorter, which is fully comparable to the analyzer we have previously launched. And then the same year, we acquired Tonbo Biosciences for its reagent business, combining the Tonbo reagents and Cytek's internally developed cFluor reagents that enable us to serve our user base better to enable us to capture the reagent recurring business. And then early last year, we acquired the Amnis and Guava product line from DiaSorin, which enable us to expand our customer base as well as to enable Cytek to get into the imaging flow cytometry space. So overall, towards the end of Q3 '23, we have already deployed around 2,000 flow cytometers based on Cytek's Full Spectrum Profiling technology. Our customers published more than 1,400 papers incorporating the Cytek's technology. All of those is a strong validation of the technology we pioneered a few years ago. In overall, with all of our products, we have already reached more than 1,500 customers across more than 70 countries. Towards the end of Q3, our trading full year -- I'm sorry, our trading 4th quarter actually revenue was $183 million, and that was not million dollar adjusted EBITDA. And our total net cash at that time was $288 million. This Monday, we preannounced our full year '23 revenue, which is close to the high end of the guidance we provided during our Q3 earnings release. That's between $188 million to $192 million, which implies our Q4 revenue was close to $57 million. We are very pleased with the performance we achieved during Q4. So Cytek products centered around the platform, including instruments, reagents, software and services. Our instruments include our Aurora, Northern Lights, Cytek Orion, which is a cocktail mixer we have just recently announced, cell sorter, which is fully compatible to our cell analyzer, the Cytek Aurora, and our sample order as well as the conventional flow cytometer, Athena and Amnis and Guava analyzers. Our reagents, including our cFluor, internally developed reagents as well as the Tonbo reagents, services to help support our customer base, our instruments already deployed in the field. Software include the data acquisition and data analysis covering both of our full special technology as well as the imaging flow cytometry, which is AI-based. Among this portfolio, reagents, services and part of the SaaS-based software are recurring revenue, which today, actually, probably is about close to 25% of our total revenue. We have a global presence across more than -- across 4 continents. And in addition to the 1,500 customers, we have already penetrated into more than 150 pharma-biotech companies. And globally, we have around 700 employees. Our revenue, 40% is in the academic space, 60% is towards pharma, biotech, CRO hospital as well as the distributors. Globally, and we have presence in North America as our headquarter in Fremont, our manufacturing site in San Diego and Seattle. We have also our East Coast training center in Bethesda. In Europe, our headquarter is in Amsterdam to serve our customers in the EMEA region, and we have also presence in the APAC region, including our Tokyo office. In China, we have both of our manufacturing site in Wuxi and our R&D center in Shanghai. Overall, today, about 55% of our revenue is in the U.S., 25% in EMEA, 15% in APAC, and the rest of the world, about 4%. So Cytek technology has enabled many applications in the life sciences space. Our Full Spectrum Profiling technology today are supporting applications such as oncology, vaccine, viral infections, immunology and therapies, inflammatory disease, autoimmunity and drug development. So why customers choose Cytek? The reason is our technology has really provided a deeper cell and assessment capabilities and to serve for understanding patients' immune status. And our technology maximizes the value of the lab samples. It also provides opportunity to fully standardize the tools across multiple labs across multiple countries. And we have provided also a very powerful instrument at much lower cost than what's available elsewhere. So Cytek tools have been supporting many applications in the life science labs as well as in pharma biotech industries. And one of the example of applications in the life science saving therapy -- for the life science saving therapies, including such as local therapies, T-cell isolation, T-cell activation, T-cell engineering and transduction, MRD, lot release, prior to infusion, cancer cure assay, modified T-cell expansion. In all of those examples, we have tools supporting these type of needs. This basically is where our instrument business pillars are serving. Of course, this is just a few examples. And flow cytometer, the tools we have provided can sell for many other applications out there. One of the applications is with regarding to our cell image stream. And as some of you may know, FDA recently approved the first gene therapy to treat patients with sickle cell disease based on the CRISPR technology. And our tools, the imaging stream has been used to validate the efficacy of the patient treatment. This is just one example more towards the clinical side. So our reagent strategy have been trying to leveraging the business pillar in the application space to allow us to capture the recurring revenue opportunities. Here, not only we are serving for the top and high end of the research applications, we are focusing today for our reagent strategy towards pharma, biotech and translational. Here, we are focusing on the internally developed cFluor reagents, Tonbo reagents, to develop panel application kits to capture the volume recurring opportunities. Then through those type of interactions with pharma biotech, that will enable us to capture the translation more gradually into the clinical space. So through those activities, so we provide our user base with a full solution covering from bio discoveries to translational, to clinical, across the whole areas of workflow. This will enable us to not only just to sell individual reagents, but the full solutions covering what we have. Then our third business product is the bioinformatics. Here, we launched Cytek Cloud a year ago. Cytek Cloud is to provide our user base with data analysis, panel construction optimization, data management, data optimizations. Through all those activities, we help our users to stay with Cytek, to come to Cytek for our full solutions. We are continuing to build up our Cytek Cloud to add more capabilities to enable our users to be able to further place orders for the reagents, which have been optimized on Cytek Cloud. So this will enable us to continue to grow our recurring business, recurring revenue. This is a platform we have so far accumulated more than 4,000 user base -- user actually on this platform. And it's continued to grow, and we are very pleased with the platform we have so far developed. Lastly, our clinical side. Why customers coming to Cytek for our clinical solutions? FSP technology really enables comprehensive clinical applications at lower cost. We enable a single tube applications that helps to improve the sensitivity of the diagnostics. One of the applications that's supported due to our technology is MRD, and that really helps to improve the sensitivity, to go beyond what conventional flow cytometry can serve. Through our technology, we are eliminating redundant reagents and that will really help to reduce the daily operation cost. We enable the identified of real populations due to the high dimensional capabilities the tool can offer. And we offer to optimize the use of smaller amount of patient specimens. This is extremely important for in cases, for example, earlier mentioned, like MRD. And that also our technology opens up opportunities for new diagnostic applications. So what's our goal for the 2024? Here, we are focusing on committing -- we are focusing on our commitment to serve our shareholder -- improve our shareholder values here through our cost and capital efficiency, our operational excellence, and help focus on maximize the cash flow. One of the areas of focus for the company this year is really to pay attention to profitable growth, which is very important. We are transitioning the company from trying to grow at any cost to profitable growth. That means we want to make sure the company stay being profitable. Net income profitable across -- actually, on an annual basis. Which is a challenge in this day and to many companies, but Cytek is committed to stay being profitable. And another area of our focus is we want to focus on our execution speed, our execution efficiency. And for any projects we develop, we want to make sure we spend our dollars smartly. And lastly, we are going to continue to focus on finding opportunities for merger and acquisitions. Over the years, we acquired Tonbo, acquired our soaring flow cytometry business. We'll continue to look at -- look for opportunities to help expand our capability, to find opportunities that match Cytek's cell analysis capability, match our global presence, match our commercial efforts, commercial capabilities. However, one of the areas of focus -- attention for any acquisition is we want to make sure whatever business we pick up, we will be able to make it profitable within the next following few quarters. That should be accretive to our profitability. This certainly -- it places a high bar these days for many available opportunities out there. However, we are committed. This is what we are trying to achieve. I think now we will open up for questions.

Great. Well, thank you very much. I'll start with a few questions. Firstly, you have impressive operating margins when compared to the industry. How do you achieve this?

So actually, this is a great chart. How we can maintain the high profitability and high gross margin for our business? Here, what's important is our operational excellence. This is what we have been focusing on every day. We want to make sure whatever we do, and we want to stay being efficient and stay being -- and that also, the next chart is regarding to profitable growth. And in many cases -- and for any spending, for any projects, we -- trying to build up -- we want to make sure this actually is going to build value for our shareholders. This is what we have been achieved, we have been doing and what we have achieved. We will continue to stay that way for the year.