NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Pacific Biosciences posted revenues of $10.6 million in the second quarter, including its first product revenues from the sale of its PacBio RS third-generation sequencing platform, the company reported after the close of the market on Thursday.
Revenues for the three months ended June 30 compared to $629,000 from a year ago, and include $10.1 million in product revenues, reflecting the commercial delivery of 16 PacBio RS systems, as well as initial commercial shipments of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm's SMRT cell and reagent consumables, PacBio said.
Susan Barnes, PacBio's CFO, said on a conference call after the earnings release that of the 16 systems, 11 were beta systems that were fully upgraded to commercial specifications. Ben Gong, the company vice president of finance, added that PacBio ended the second quarter with a backlog of 35 systems, translating to revenues of $22 million, which it plans to realize by the end of the year.
On the consumables front, PacBio will make available its consumables upgrade, code-named C2, in the fourth quarter, CEO Hugh Martin said, adding that the company has had "multiple demonstrations of the utility of the new C2 consumables as a big application driver."
The firm's service and other revenue totaled $192,000, compared to none a year ago, and grant revenues were $290,000, down 54 percent from $629,000 a year ago.
The $10.6 million in revenues easily beat analyst forecasts for $4.1 million.
The company also beat Wall Street loss-per-share estimates of $.62. Net loss for the quarter was $22.5 million, or $.42 per share, a 31 percent improvement from a loss of $32.7 million, or $51.20 per share a year ago. The firm was privately held during the second quarter of 2010.
PacBio went public in October, and in the year-ago period used 639,007 shares in computing its loss per share, compared to more than 53 million shares used in the Q2 2011 period.
The firm's R&D costs slid 28 percent year over year to $19.5 million from $27.1 million, though SG&A costs rose 77 percent to about $11 million from $6.2 million a year ago.
Barnes said that the SG&A spike was due to increasing compensation and other costs associated with "the required build-up in the areas of service, sales, and shared services to support commercialization" of the PacBio RS system, as well as the costs of operating as a public company.
PacBio ended the quarter with $216.6 million in cash and investments.
On the call, Gong reiterated full-year 2011 revenue guidance of $35 million. Net loss for the year is expected to be around $121 million, translating to a net loss per share of $2.25. The company had earlier given guidance of a net loss per share of $2.50.