New Year JPM Thoughts

It’s January, and that means JPM is coming up. For me the most interesting presentations will be those from Illumina, Oxford Nanopore and PacBio.

Aside from perhaps PacBio, I expect few surprises. But let’s speculate a little anyway.

Illumina

I think we shall see a continuation of the trend from their Q3 report, in their preliminary full year results. That is, clinical is up. They are overall down, but will report overall flat or a little bit up excluding China.

I’d guess no new sequencing instruments, perhaps some application focused products…

Oxford Nanopore

I would guess we shall hear very little to cause excitement before the new CEO comes on board in March. I would imagine full year results will be inline with H1. That would indicate that H1 results were largely a one-line boost due to financial restructuring, and price increases. If H2 is showing a significant increase on H1, that might suggest that there is some solid growth.

But given previous statements suggesting instrument placements are down, this seems unlikely to me.

I feel relatively bullish about a new CEO turning things around for Oxford, but we will have to wait some time for that to play out.

PacBio

I’m not sure what to expect from PacBio.

Last year at JPM they showed a huge amount of technical work in development. They appear to have had a few wins in population sequencing projects recently and I suspect we shall see a slight decline reflecting that shown in Q3 and Q2.

Unfortunately that doesn’t align well with reaching profitability by 2027.

There have been consistent rumors (hopes?) of acquisition. Today I was ponder if Softbank would/should leverage their existing investment to acquire the company… Softbank has also invested heavily in the recent Japanese semiconductor expansion. Perhaps there are synergies there.

But I suspect not.

More to follow!