Oxford Nanopore Customer Growth?

It all started with this rather simple task. I’ll just go and update the graphs from this post adding 2024. And we can see if the trend shown there has continued and Oxford Nanopore customer growth is slowing...

But it’s never that easy is it.

Turns out Oxford stopped reporting anything regarding the size of their customer base in 2024. They no longer talk about S1,2 and 3 customer groups. They don’t even report a total number of customers.

That’s a concern in itself. The total customer base is likely in decline. That’s because MinION growth is down¹ as this is where the bulk of the customers are (~7000).

That’s actually not too much of a concern in itself. The MinION doesn’t make Oxford significant amounts of money anyway. Lots of users… spending not very much money.

But what about other customer groups? In particular the “S3”s (>$250K) Traditionally this is where Illumina make most of their money.

So… Is Growth Still Slowing?

Without explicit statements to draw from I’m left scratching around for answers. Government spending gives a potential clue:

In both cases these are likely only a small fraction of total research spending, the ONT numbers peaking at ~$3M and the Illumina numbers at ~$60M. But the Illumina numbers more of less reflect that Illumina revenue was flat in 2024.

So… perhaps there’s a general decline in research, perhaps particular in a few larger projects disappearing. With applied and others then taking up the slack? Hmm…

Looking elsewhere, the only statement I could find regarding instrument deployments is “P2 devices in the field >1,900” from the 2024 annual report. You’d guess these were mostly “S2 users”² by the old classification.

If I had to guess… here’s what I’d guess…