NEW YORK – Twist Bioscience said on Thursday after the close of the market that it has launched a portfolio of regulated products in Europe while reporting 25 percent revenue growth for its fiscal second quarter.
"This is a first foray into the regulated market, and we look forward to continued evolution in markets beyond Europe," CEO and Cofounder Emily Leproust told investors on a conference call following the release of the firm's fiscal second quarter results. "We believe our extensively regulated products will inform any future product developments driven by the US Food and Drug Administration's move to regulate laboratory-developed tests in the US."
During the Q&A portion of the call, Leproust said that "going through the exercise of launching those products helped us build a muscle inside the company that we'll be able to use and leverage in the US with the new regulation."
Twist also launched early access for an ultra-high-throughput library prep kit. "We believe this is the highly differentiated product we need to conduct tests converting customers using microarray to NGS panels plus sequencing with applications in ag-bio and genotyping," she said.
This is a large market opportunity, but will take some time to yield dividends as it requires customers to use sequencers rather than microarray readers, she noted.
For the three months ended March 31, Twist's revenues were a record $75.3 million, up from $60.2 million a year ago, driven by next-generation sequencing revenues. The quarter beat the consensus Wall Street estimate of $70.7 million.
"We're encouraged by the reception of Express Genes, with more than 700 accounts, including 100 net new accounts ordering this differentiated product since launch," Leproust said in a statement. "We see consistent strength in NGS, where our tools are used across fields, and during the quarter we announced several differentiated products spanning research areas and geographies."
Approximately 15 percent of clonal genes revenue came from express genes, Leproust said. NGS revenues were $40.8 million, up from $29.0 million a year ago, with the top 10 customers accounting for approximately 36 percent of revenues. Synthetic biology revenues were $29.8 million, up from $24.2 million a year ago, and biopharma revenues were $4.7 million, down from $7.0 million a year ago.
Healthcare revenues rose to $40.9 million for the second quarter of 2024 compared to $33.8 million in the prior-year period. Industrial chemical revenues rose to $20.3 million, up from $14.4 million a year ago. Academic revenues were $13.7 million, up from $11.1 million a year ago.
Americas revenues increased 32 percent year over year to $45.9 million in the quarter compared to $34.9 million a year ago. Europe, the Middle East, and Africa revenues rose 19 percent year over year to $22.3 million from $18.8 million. Asia-Pacific revenues increased 11 percent year over year to $7.2 million from $6.5 million, and within that geography, China revenue was $1.4 million.
Twist is raising its fiscal year 2024 total revenue guidance to a range of $300 million to $304 million compared to previous guidance of $288 million to $293 million, indicating year-over-year growth of 22 to 24 percent.
Twist now expects synbio revenues in the range of $118 million to $120 million; NGS revenues in the range of $162 million to $164 million; and biopharma revenues of approximately $20 million compared to previous guidance of $24 million.
Twist said total orders for the quarter were $93.2 million versus $64.2 million for the year-ago quarter. It shipped products to 2,253 customers in fiscal Q2, up from around 2,100 in the year-ago quarter, while the number of genes shipped to customers increased from 152,000 to 193,000.
Twist's net loss attributable to shareholders was $45.5 million, or $.79 per share, compared to a loss of $59.2 million, or $1.04 per share, for fiscal Q2 2023, beating the consensus Wall Street estimate of a $.82 loss per share.
The firm's R&D costs fell to $24.1 million from $27.4 million a year ago, driven by headcount reduction, while its SG&A expenses rose slightly to $55.6 million from $54.0 million.
Twist finished the quarter with $243.3 million in cash and cash equivalents and $50 million in short-term investments.
For the fiscal third quarter, Twist expects total revenues of approximately $77 million, with synbio revenues of $31 million, NGS revenues of approximately $41 million, and biopharma revenues of approximately $5 million. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Twist expects total revenues in the range of $77 million to $80 million.
In Friday morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of Twist were up 23 percent at $39.99.