NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Investment bank Evercore ISI today upgraded Illumina's shares to a Buy rating from Hold, and raised its price target on the company's shares to $190 in anticipation of NovaSeq interest. In a research note, Ross Muken, senior managing director and partner at Evercore, wrote that the firm anticipates that Illumina will sell between 750 and 1,300 NovaSeq instruments over the next several years.
The next few weeks will be "crucial" as NovaSeq shipments will start mid-quarter, and "our view is that this cycle will look much like prior ones, with early adopters assuming the risk of a new technology platform, ultimately ceding to smaller labs (core and translational) over time," Muken added.
The investment bank said that it anticipates that NovaSeq will ultimately expand Illumina's market, particularly given the "flexibility of applications," especially compared to the HiSeq X instrument, which can only do whole-genome sequencing.
Shares of Illumina were up more than 2 percent at $163.9 in Monday morning trading on the Nasdaq.