NEW YORK – Twist Bioscience reported on Friday morning that its first quarter revenues in fiscal year 2022 increased 49 percent year over year, driven by synthetic biology sales.
For the three months ended Dec. 31, 2021, Twist reported $42.0 million in revenues, up from $28.2 million during the same quarter a year ago and beating the average analyst estimate of $38.3 million.
"We've started the year strong reporting record orders and revenue, with SynBio particularly robust in the first quarter," Twist CEO and Cofounder Emily Leproust said in a statement. "We continue to introduce new products to enable exciting applications like liquid biopsy and minimal residual disease, expanding our customer base and our market opportunities in NGS."
Next-generation sequencing revenues, including genotyping and liquid biopsy panels, were $19.2 million, up from $15.6 million during the year-ago quarter. On a conference call with investors following the releasee of the results, Leproust said NGS revenues were impacted by the holidays, and some customer labs were impacted by the spread of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. CFO Jim Thorburn added that the top 20 customers accounted for approximately 44 percent of NGS revenues.
Synbio revenues, which include genes, libraries, and oligo pools, totaled $18 million in Q1, up from $13.9 million a year ago. Revenue from genes was $15.5 million, and the company shipped approximately 125,000 genes during the quarter.
Biopharma revenues were $4.8 million, up from $1 million a year ago.
By end market, healthcare revenues were $21 million, industrial chemicals revenues $12.5 million, academic lab revenues $7.9 million, and agriculture revenues approximately $600,000.
In total, the company shipped products to about 1,800 customers during the quarter, compared to about 1,500 during the year-ago quarter.For Q1, the company reported a net loss of $45.6 million, or $.91 per share, compared to $32.9 million, or $.72 per share, in Q1 of FY 2021, beating the average analyst estimate of a net loss of $1.06 per share. The weighted average number of shares used to compute net loss per share was 49.9 million in Q1, compared to approximately 46 million a year ago.
Twist's Q1 R&D expenses rose 62 percent to $22.6 million from $14.0 million in the year-ago quarter. SG&A expenses rose 77 percent to $51.1 million from $28.8 million a year ago, driven by investment in Twist's commercial organization.
As of Dec. 31, 2021, the company had $191.6 million in cash and cash equivalents, and $110.2 million in short-term investments.
Twist increased its fiscal year 2022 revenue guidance to a range of $189 million to $198 million. This includes SynBio revenue in the range of $70 million to $72 million, NGS revenue in the range of $94 million to $96 million, and biopharma revenue in the range of $25 million to $30 million.
In Friday trading on the Nasdaq, Twist shares were down 2 percent at $59.50.