Illumina@JPM - More Clinical!
Illumina revenue is basically flat and has been for a while, they seem to expect this to continue into 2025.
But the revenue breakdown has continued Illumina’s shift toward clinical, with 56% of their market being clinical application now!
This is in stark contrast to Oxford Nanopore who showed only 9% clinical yesterday. By bringing more of the sample prep on instrument with technologies like constellation, Illumina maybe able to gain even more ground here. And it feels like clinical applications are a focus for the company.
In terms of cost, they’re still showing a reduction in cost/Gb:
Interesting $3.4/Gb is higher than Ultima suggest Illumina are charging. This is probably because it reflect a mix of NovaSeq 6000 and X flow cells1. Ultima are pitching $1/Gb depending on instrument/flowcell this will be 2x to 3x cheaper than Illumina’s current offerings.
That race to the bottom has got to suck for all vendors… and I guess is part of why revenue has remained flat.
I suspect many clinical applications may have greater concerns that baseline sequencing cost. Or as their CEO put it “move more from cost per gigabase to the highest quality insight for the lowest end-to-end cost”. That seems like a strong strategy, and I would hope would work out better than engaging in a race to the bottom with Ultima and others.
One example they gave was Karius: