Illumina's Roche Reaction

Illumina have a lot going on right now. A new spatial instrument, cutting employee stock grants, and more layoffs and… sartorial issues¹?

To those affected by layoffs, I hope you are doing ok. Feel free to reach out on the Discord and chat.

There’s obviously a lot of talk about, but today I wanted to talk about Illumina’s reaction to Roche. There are two things I’m looking for in a reaction to Roche:

1. An immediate reaction to the short term implications of the stated performance.

2. Long term strategy implications.

Illumina didn’t address any of this head on, but it came up in questioning Steve Barnard essentially dismissed Roche as low quality and complex:

if a technology launches a Q20, it has to make up to Q30 or Q40 in library prep and exotic time-consuming library prep. And you're going to see this in the Roche offering. It's three boxes. They didn't take much time to talk about that, unlike Constellation, which the C-level can actually perform.

and Jacob then saying they’ve got the MiSeq i100 which is a chip so it’s the same and we’re just as good:

Remember also the MiSeq i100 has a CMOS readout, and we can do sequencing in four hours on the MiSeq i100 today. That's another direction we can take. If we want to say if speed is important, we can use the CMOS readout for that, and we can of course... It's a chip. We know how to make chips,

The MiSeq i100 is pretty boring in my opinion, and is unlikely in itself to drive much business though it is a good fit for certain applications and is quite fast!

So, they didn’t really clearly answer my question so I’ll answer them for myself: