Oxford Nanopore Hits ALL TIME Low!

Gracefully Declining¹ British Biotech Oxford Nanopore’s share price has reached an all time low as the executive team take home tens of millions a year in compensation.

Based on recent reports CEO Gordon Sanghera received 23.8MGBP in 2022, while Clive and Spike received 26.2MGBP and 23.8MGBP respectively.

Of course this is nothing new, Oxford Nanopore CEO pay appears to have been in excess of 4M USD since 2021. Spike has also been offloading his shares for some time.

Compensation in the millions isn’t unheard of, but up to 33M USD for a company doing this badly? That seems on the high side…

The Oxford Nanopore executive team may have accused me (and their customers!) of illegally using (or looking at) their products in the past. But I don’t bear a grudge!

So on what is no doubt a cold and wintery day in Oxford. Let’s spare a thought for Oxford Nanopore and it’s CEO who needs all that money to fund his football clubs and other charitable endeavours!

Advice For Oxford Nanopore

Yesterday I posted some excellent advice for Illumina. Suggesting they might want to withdraw most of their current sequencers from sale.

It seems unfair that I wouldn’t similarly give out free advice to “British Underdog” Oxford Nanopore.

So… here’s a short list of thoughts for you:

• Withdraw the MinION from sale.

  • I’d hate to see it go, and users love it! But let’s face it, it’s not making any money. The COGS is too high and the volume too low.

• Release a new sequencer which is basically the Fongle++

  • Figure out how to make a 100 channel Flongle-like sensor at low cost. I’ve put some notes together here. It should have a COGS in the single digit dollars. It shouldn’t be very good. You don’t want it to be very good.

  • Sell it, don’t lease it. Consumables can’t be lease items².

• Make your sequencers more expensive or at least higher margin.

  • If 10X can sell a Chromium Controller at 10x over the BOM you can too!

• Throw out most of the machine learning and accept your true error rate.

  • My guess is that Oxford Nanopore’s current base callers are overfitting to some degree. Models seem to be getting bigger and bigger chasing ever higher single read accuracy. Stop.

  • Simplifying your base callers will help make you instruments cheaper and increase margins. It’ll also help you avoid excuses like “But America won’t let us sell GPUs to China and that’s why revenues are down”.

  • The users who still need the actual, real advantages of nanopore sequencing (native RNA, very long reads) won’t care.

• Stop investing >$5M in blockchain companies.

  • It sounds like a great idea! But probably you can’t afford this right now. Focus on cost reduction.

• Get rid of the anti-takeover shares…

  • The fact that it would be very hard to “switch things up” at Oxford Nanopore and that the company can’t be acquired due to the use of anti-takeover shares has probably caused significant damage to the company. Let us put our faith in Adam Smith and let nature take its course.

I guess that last one will be happening sometime this year anyway!

Good Luck Nanoporers!

1. Some objected to the use of the word “failing” here. So I’ve updated this to indicate that their share price is in fact just declining gracefully and majestically much like… A beautiful diamond encrusted brooch tumbling down a grass covered hill on a summers day.

2. For those that don’t understand this point there’s a long and boring story here. But the short version is that Oxford Nanopore claim to lease their consumables and many instruments to users who never own them. This has caused… some issues.