All righty. Good morning, everybody. This is Erik, CEO here at CELLINK. I am here with Gusten, our beloved CFO. First of all, we want to thank you so much for taking the time and joining this Q4 earnings call. We will be presenting, of course, the exciting numbers for our Q4 report that was released just about an hour ago. We will also go through a little bit of the company update, noteworthy updates from the quarter and also the year. Then we will open up for a couple of minutes of questions and answers. Thank you so much for joining us. I want to start off with, of course, thanking the team. Thank you for the hard work, because during the Q4, we managed to report about 51.5 million SEK in revenue.
That's a 61% growth from last year, of which 57% of that growth was actually organic. I'm very thankful for, of course, the commercial team and the manufacturing, logistics, everybody's been part of enabling this growth during this pandemic period. According to a lot of reports and according to the data out there, the Q4 or the summer period has been a challenging period of time for a lot of life sciences or biotech companies. We're looking at many of our peers in the industry, and we don't see similar growth opportunities or similar growth stories at this time. I'm very thankful and honored to have our team do such excellent work. Looking at the operating profits, of course, we have a negative SEK 14 million as a result. Much of this is, of course, according to plan and according to our growth strategy and our growth agenda.
During the quarter, we managed to pull off one of the largest acquisitions in our history. A truly defining moment for the CELLINK Life Sciences company as we're moving more towards a bioconvergence business where we're combining a lot of exciting bioengineering technologies to truly enable the creation of the future of medicine. These results, of course, also includes one-off expenses and expenditures associated with acquisition and some of the currency exchanges hit us a little bit negatively during this time period. Looking at the rolling 12 months, we have, of course, also net sales of consumables amounted to about SEK 19 million.
This is an exciting number to report on as well, of course, since we are a life sciences company with products and technologies that involve both the hardware side, but most importantly, the enabling reagents or consumables side that actually makes the research possible from our customer's perspective. I'm very excited to be able to report on this. This is, of course, an increase of 63% over the time period. Thank you for the hard work there. Just to recap a little bit for those of you who haven't heard our story and our journey and how we're positioning ourselves as a global player in the life sciences industry and as a leading bioconvergence company in the world. We're looking essentially at three major healthcare challenges today. There's an enormously high cost and lengthy process for developing new drugs.
These new drugs, if we look at numbers, if we look at the healthcare industry, it has actually taken longer now, and it is more costly to develop a new drug than it was about a decade ago. The fact is that nine out of 10 of those drugs, they fail during the clinical stage of the development. Similarly, we see the results from using animals in research, where it is proven according to a lot of recent publications in scientific journals that the animal models are actually negatively impacting the development and the research of new pharmaceutical compounds as we are testing drugs on models that are not similar. They are not a one-to-one representation of how the drug will perform in humans at later stages.
Lastly, of course, we're seeing a lot of push and movement in the personalized medicine aspect, and we're seeing how a lot of pharmaceutical companies are trying to reinvent themselves and position themselves more on developing treatments that are actually beneficial for patients and long-term health than just treating symptoms. With that being said, we want to go over a little bit a positioning that CELLINK is taking through many of the acquisitions that we've done the last 18-24 months, and essentially a combination of these exciting technologies that we've been able to package into the company now. As many of you know, CELLINK started as a bioprinting company, which is one part of the bioconvergence industry.
Which essentially works with biomaterials and 3D cell cultures to improve the way that we study biological interactions to now having the combination of, for instance, digitization of biological data, gene therapy, a lot of big data research, and of course, the development of personalized treatments. All of these challenges, of course, and all of these solutions fit well inside of our vision or our strategy forward, and we see how us positioning ourselves as the leading bioconvergence company now is really enabling us to grow and to position our technology and products in the most futuristic laboratories around the world. Just a brief one on what is bioconvergence. Well, bioconvergence is the combination of a few different bioengineering disciplines.
For instance, the combination of drug discovery, 3D cell culturing, and single-cell genomics, both genomics and proteomics enables researchers to better understand how cells behave in a wide range of environments. For instance, if you want to understand how a liver cell behaves outside of the body, well, first of all, you have to recreate that liver environment, and that can be done using 3D bioprinting. Then you also have to study that liver, and that's of course done through the drug discovery process. Then at a singular or single-cell level, you want to do some sequencing to really understand the genetic composition of this engineered liver to understand how the drug is affecting or impacting that liver's metabolism and how it's metabolizing the drugs. All of these different disciplines, they come together forming a combined company in the field of bioconvergence.
Bioconvergence is a recently open field. It started about four or five years ago, and we see a lot of companies are trying to work to position themselves towards this discipline where CELLINK is now taking a leader position. Of course, as a vision and mission for us is to create the future of medicine by providing technologies, products, and services to create, understand, and master biology. All of this is, of course, in the name of building this bioconvergence company that uses different type of disciplines. Look a little bit about the technology and how that has evolved positively since the acquisitions and since the last development and R&D efforts that we've done in-house. We have positioned ourselves very strongly to enable the optimization of cell line development workflows.
We have the CYTENA products, which were acquired in about a year ago, that have very strongly positioned themselves to enable both better and more efficient cell line development work for scientists. We're proud to report, of course, that many of these devices and these products are used by the top, I would say, most of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies around the world. It's a very exciting industry. Cell line development has truly taken off the last couple of years. I think one thing that is important to note is, of course, one of our peers in this industry, a company called Berkeley Lights. They did a recent IPO, a few months ago.
They've seen some strong growth in the field, and we definitely see ourselves as being the preferred choice by pharmaceutical companies and to continue to be the preferred choice in cell line development when it comes to our products and technologies. Similarly, of course, we see ourselves positioned as single-cell genomics workflows and being able to enable faster, better, and more cost-effective genomic sample preparation. Sample preparation for genomics is essential. It's the essence of how to ensure that you're testing your cells properly and you're doing your sequencing correctly. For that, we have two amazing products that are very well-positioned. These are in-house developed in Germany, specifically designed to be able to do single-cell sorting, but also then do miniaturization of different reagents for a much better NGS library preparation, and to perform all of your sequencing and data analysis.
Of course, similarly on even the opportunity to work with microbes and in a microbial environment with the wide range of this product portfolio. Lastly, of course, we've gone from the single-cell and looking at the details of how we can understand the single-cell environment and the genetics of a cell and how that's affected of a new compound or molecule all the way up to the tissue.
From the tissue level, we have our legacy bioprinting platforms and bio-inks that are performing very well in conjunction with both acquired but also in-house developed products and technologies where we now finally have a full workflow for pharmaceutical companies and bioengineering researchers, where you're essentially going all the way from growing the cells or even taking the cells from a specific patient to really hone in on this personalized medicine aspect, grow and expand those cells using the CELLCYTE X platform, print these cells, whether you're printing cancer tumor models or you're printing liver tissue models, and then dispense the different compounds using our revolutionary I.DOT technology. Then, of course, after that, you have the downstream analysis, whether that's sequencing or if it's confocal microscopy, or if it's back to live cell imaging over a period of time.
That's all enabling this entire workflow and making us very well and actually from a leadership perspective, positioned to own the market.
If you look a little bit at the market that we are approaching here with the technologies that we have in our product portfolio today, the immediate market is centered around the single-cell analysis, as well as the 3D cell culturing through the bioprinting technologies, as well as the cell line development or CLD applications. We, as a company of today, riding a few structural mega trends in the life science industry. The major ones here is going from the 2D cell culturing up to the 3D cell culturing here, and the conversion from a more simple tissue models, more complex to get better data for your research. By being active in these fields, we see that there's a strong underlying growth, anything from about 12% growth in the cell line development area, up to about 35% in the 3D cell culturing or bioprinting area.
All of these structural changes are fueling our growth here moving forward. As we grow as a company and growing into the market of the bioconvergence, we are approaching a larger and larger available market in the bioprocessing and cell culture market, which is about SEK 28 billion today and growing quite rapidly as well. As a reference, the complete biotechnology market today is growing about 1% year on year, and that's about SEK 800 billion market. We are approaching a smaller portion of this market, about the SEK 7 billion here today, but it's a very rapidly growing niche of the market. If looking a little bit at our customers today, we have had a customer base which has been dominated from the universities and research organization side. We're very strong here, and especially in the bioprinting as well as single-cell genomics side of our workflows.
The majority of our customers in universities and research organizations, they're working with single-cell genomics or proteomics or bioprinting applications for different tissue engineering applications. Since the acquisition of Scienion, we have a little bit more customer in diagnostics, where we have applications enabling anything from biosensors to different sorts of testing, for instance, for COVID applications. Pharma is a segment which we've been committed to grow over the last few years. This is where we're growing the fastest in all categories, from bioprinting to single-cell genomics to CLD applications. The customer group which we predict being the largest customer group moving forward as well. If looking at the geographical distribution of our sales over the past 12 months, North America is clearly our largest market. It represents about 40% of our sales on a 12-month basis. If you're looking in the Q4 report, it's even slightly above 50%.
We've had very strong growth in North America, and we've been lagging a little bit in Europe and Asia and the rest of the world over the past few quarters here. Second biggest market is, of course, Europe, followed by Asia. As a reference, the North American market has been a direct market for us since we started the business. Meanwhile, Europe has converted into direct sales about a year ago or slightly above a year, and we're seeing some good results on the development there. We still have some work to do to really reach the level that we've reached in North America and the market presence that we see there today. Slightly just a quick recap on the acquisition of Scienion that we did here in the end of the quarter.
We announced that transaction in the end of August, and we had closing here post the end of the quarter. We have that in the 1st or 2nd of September here. The transaction transforms our business into really becoming a leader in the single-cell handling and precision dispensing. The single-cell handling is through the daughter company, Cellenion, which is very strong in the single-cell genomic workflow, isolating cells for genomic applications. Scienion, the mother end that we acquired, is very, very strong in precision dispensing and a natural part to scale up manufacturing of different applications that we are in today. This is a step moving us from early stages research to high throughput research, as well as all the way up to manufacturing of the applications that we're today offering. Scienion has been growing quite rapidly over the last few years.
It's 34% CAGR over the past three years, and they reached about a 23% EBITDA level in 2019. Up until the transaction here, we saw that the growth has been lagging due to the COVID situation we have here. We're still expecting the business to grow, but not at all at the growth rate we've seen historically. Of course, we hope that when COVID is slowing down, we see continued growth in this business. In terms of the synergies and the focus here, we see clear synergies between CELLINK and Cellenion, where we're focusing on the single-cell isolation workflows in CLD as well as genomic applications. Meanwhile, the precision dispensing, of course, is clear synergies with the I.DOT technology from DISPENDIX, as well as the scale-up from bioprinting up to large-scale manufacturing today.
Combined, we see that we've had about a historical 57% CAGR over the past three years. This gives a rough idea of the strong underlying growth in the market that we are today. Just to recap a little bit on the numbers on this transaction. If we're looking at a 12 months rolling basis here for the group up until 2019, we had about EUR 35.6 million of net sales in the group. The largest portion of that is, of course, Scienion. As CELLINK is growing slightly faster than Scienion, it will increase the size or portion of the business which is represented by CELLINK out of this. Today, our business is focused on laboratory solutions as well as industrial solutions, where Scienion is dominating the industrial solutions of the scaleup workflow here.
If you look a little bit on the metrics on Q4 here, we see on the left-hand side the growth quarter-on-quarter since September, November 2017 up until today. As you see, it's one of our strongest growth quarters in history. It's also very nice to see that we've been able to grow during the summer months, which traditionally for us has been a challenge due to the market, how our customer are working in the summer. Especially in academic, we see that it's very hard to process orders and close deals during the summer months, especially in Europe and somewhat also in the U.S., where we see that universities are closing down in vacation period and so on.
If you look back at Q4 last year, we saw a very small growth quarter-on-quarter from Q3 to Q4, which was explained by this, that the summer months are slower. However, this year, we have a few different products that we see very strong underlying demand for. Especially in this summer, we've seen strong demand for our I.DOT systems in sample preparation as well as our single-cell isolation systems. Meanwhile, some of our other systems has been more affected by closed down laboratories and so on. If we're looking on the right-hand side here, we're looking at the consumable sales on a 12 months rolling basis. It's grown about 60% year-on-year on this rolling basis, till where we are today.
In Q4, we started to see more of the effect of the closed downs on the laboratories, where a lot of laboratories has been closed down completely, or they've cut down their activities, meaning that they'll use less reagents and consumables during this period of time. We will see this as a seasonal thing for most years, but especially this year when we see complete shutdowns of laboratories. In the report, we are referencing a market report here, doing analysis on the COVID aspects of it, and they see that the reagents sales or purchases in our industry is down about 65% from levels last year. With that as a reference, we see that we have stronger demand for our reagents, which is pleasing.
However, we are affected by that our customers can't really reach their systems or use them in the way that they would like to use these systems. In terms of profitability or EBITDA, we continue to show negative EBITDA margin, and this is according to plan, where we've invested significant resources into the expansion during these last couple of months. We've also prepared the business for, of course, another scenario than what's played out this year in terms of COVID, where we've expanded the organization for further growth, and that's somewhat hampered by the COVID situation we see today. To recap a little bit about our strategy, we are a very R&D focused company. We invest heavily into our own R&D projects, developing new products. One example that we press released yesterday, where we launched a new product called the C.WASH.
We have a few of these projects in pipeline where we invest to build these workflows for our customers to really come as a solution provider. On top of our strong or large R&D investments, we're also investing into our commercial organization, is expanding them and educating them on the systems and solutions that we're providing for our customers. Finally, we are an M&A driven company, especially now with the bioconvergence profile and strategy that we're moving forward with. We want to offer complete solutions for our customers. We've done this historically through three transactions. DISPENDIX was the first one in December 2018, CYTENA last year in August. Scienion added on this year in August, September here. When we look at businesses, we're looking at strategic fit first and foremost to see that this adds value for our customer base.
Second to that, we're also looking at businesses with a functioning business model, preferably with a reagent business aspect that we see that you place the instruments where we have a reagent component that adds value to the customer and thereby increases the pull-through business for us and in the long term, this will increase the profitability of the business as the installed base are increasing. With that, we'd like to open up for some questions. I know that we're using new platform here today, so hopefully this will work well. I had Ulrik Trattner from Carnegie has reported that he wants to ask questions. You can unmute yourself through star six, and you'll be able to ask the question. I know also there's a slight delay in this sense, so we might have to wait for response here.
Yeah.
Great. Thank you very much, Gusten and Erik. Good morning to you guys. Hope you hear me.
Yes, we hear you well.
Perfect. Thank you. 67% organic growth in the quarter seems still like a solid number. Just to be clear, do you adjust the organic growth for FX right now?
Sorry, say that again.
If you adjust your organic growth for local currency rates?
Oh, okay.
Adjusted for M&A?
Yes. It's only adjusted for M&A in terms of local currency rate. If we would report organic growth in local currencies, we would see a higher growth rate in the quarter since we had unfavorable development in currencies. The effect of this, I think, is in the report. Otherwise, it's somewhere around SEK 5 million higher organic growth in local currencies.
Yeah. This diff of around SEK 4 or 5 million, and you also highlight that you had a hygiene contract also in Q4, as you had in Q3. Could you give some more clarity on perhaps how much this hygiene contract contributed into Q4? Could it be that it is somewhere in the similar range of that SEK 4 million-SEK 5 million as it were with the previous contract?
Yeah. We had a contract in Q3 that we delivered on, and in Q4, we've delivered on other contracts in a similar size. Yes.
Okay, great. You also highlight in the report the delays of purchasing, both from capital equipment of around 40% and on the consumable part of 35%. It seems like what you reported in Q3 is that delays in capital equipment is up while the delays in consumable is down. What sort of short term, where do you see these numbers trending, going into your reported Q4 and going into next year? Do you see sort of a gradual rebound in mono labs in terms of their purchasing power for your type of equipment?
I think what we're seeing is that there's this strong underlying demand for the products, and we have some products that are used in diagnostics and even for COVID applications. For instance, the I.DOT technology, we see a strong demand for sample preparation today, and this is why we see stronger growth in the instrument sales in relation to our reagent sales during the fourth quarter. I anticipate that we will see this effect by as long as our customers can't be in the laboratories, and universities are closed down, instrument sales will grow faster in relation to reagent sales, where we will see hampered growth rate until it's up to full speed again.
Yeah, as you mentioned, the dispensing system and then the mainly related I.DOT, I would assume to the COVID-19 application, is ticking up quite nicely. Is there any other instrument that is driving the growth? I know that you highlight CYTENA's single-cell printers, that goes directly into commercial labs, which obviously would be hurt by this COVID-19 situation. Do you still see growth from all instruments in your portfolio currently?
We see growth on all instruments. When we're highlighting a few products here, that's the ones that have been growing faster than other instruments.
Okay, great. Just on some geographical differences. I note that you highlight Europe and Asia as more problematic markets compared to the rest of your reported markets. Only note that Europe, and correct me if I'm wrong, is down year-over-year in terms of sales. Is this specifically problematic, and does this have any sort of relations to you transitioning over to direct sales in Europe, or could you just shed some more light on how Europe is developing right now?
I think from a financial perspective, what we're seeing is that the U.S. has been performing very well during this period, and we've succeeded a lot better, especially in the sample preparation workflows, where we've been able to install both in the single-cell applications as well as in the sample prep through the I.DOT. Meanwhile, in Europe, I think it's down due to the market development, and we haven't succeeded as well with getting the liquid handling in here. If you compare the European sales versus the U.S. sales, we are a lot more heavy on bioprinting in Europe in relation to liquid handling. Therefore, we've been able to show more growth in the U.S. than European and Asian market at this stage.
Wouldn't you be surprised, obviously, there are some differences from where you have sort of focused your direct sales efforts historically, U.S. compared to Europe, but majority of the companies or all companies that you have acquired have been located in Germany and Europe. Why do you see that dispensing and cell line development have gained so much more access or acceptability in U.S. versus Europe?
I think it has to do a lot with, from two perspectives. First one is, since we have a very well-functioning and a legacy-based sales force in the U.S. that we've had with us essentially since the start of the business, and the U.S. has been our "home market," it's always a lot easier to plug in new products. I think the first thing we do is that we plug these products into the U.S. markets, that we can get a very rapid expansion of products that have previously not been available on the American market.
With that being said, if you look at, for instance, at DISPENDIX had units of the single-digit in the U.S. at the time of the acquisition, if even any. The first thing that we could do with a very competent liquid handling commercial organization is plug in that product in, test the waters, see what's selling it to the customers, and then we can transition that strategy back to Europe. Since when we brought the dispensing product on board at CELLINK, we were still working with distributors. It wasn't until six months later when we started going over to direct sales. That's a time period that the American market has had essentially an advantage in terms of time to be able to work the market, brand awareness, and bring the product successfully to customers. I think it's a timing question.
It's not a matter of if it's going to succeed or not. I think the dispensing liquid handling products that we have are going to be very successful in Europe. It's just a matter of now we're putting the right people in place. We are copying the direct sales efforts and strategy that we've had in the U.S. that has worked in the U.S., and we're implementing that in Europe.
Okay, great. As you mentioned, the direct sales sort of model being implemented in Europe, and that has been ongoing for now two quarters. Would you say that it's fully operational right now? How much of the costs right now that we're seeing the cost expansion is related to the expansion into direct sales in Europe?
It's a good question. Of course, it's always expensive to establish a direct sales force. It involves hiring competent people, hiring managers, setting up offices, affiliate companies, et cetera. What I can say is that working with distributors, it is quite expensive as well from a failure perspective. In a period of time, especially under a pandemic, for instance, we've seen many of the distributors that we've previously worked with or that we've thought about working with in the past have either shut doors or they've gone into some kind of hibernation. I can't even imagine how it would be for us if we would have to follow their strategy or had to place our strategy, our growth agenda in the hands of someone else and expect them to just hibernate for the next two, three quarters due to the situations around the world.
I think from that perspective, it has costed us a little bit to set up a direct sales force. It's a great investment for the future because now we own our future. We own our European strategy and our agenda, and we can continue to plug in new products. Gusten mentioned the C.WASH. It's a fantastic product. We see tremendous growth being able to be done with that product itself. It's opening up new market opportunities, so it's not competing with any other products that we have. We're essentially adding on a lot of different growth opportunities, and it's as simple as plugging them into a functional commercial sales force.
Another example there, so for instance, if we were to still work with distributors in Europe at this time, perhaps it would be some cost-saving initiatives from that perspective, and it would help us a little bit with the costs. However, from the other side is when we launch new products, such as the C.WASH, most likely the distributors that we work with have not carried similar products or don't have the in-house expertise to do it. They might even turn those products down, which means that we would be in a goose chase trying to find the right distributor to plug our new products into. I think from my perspective, I'm very confident that the growth agenda and the strategy that we have for Europe is going to pay off, and it's the right strategy for the company.
Okay, great. I just have two more questions, and then I will stop hijacking the Q&A session. You obviously have a very strong balance sheet. Could you just sort of give us the broad picture how you would like to deploy this in terms of target area? The last three acquisitions have been in dispensing. Is this the area where you still see the largest opportunities near term? What type of size would you look at on future acquisitions, especially since Scienion has been your largest acquisition to date?
As you say, we have quite strong balance sheet in relation to our business size, and this will help us moving forward with our M&A agenda here. What we're looking at today, it's entrepreneurial-driven companies where we see entrepreneurs that want to become part of a bigger workflow and really utilize the full potential of the technology. We like to work in transactions directly with entrepreneurs. The businesses that we're looking in, of course, we have good network in Germany, we are looking at businesses there as well as in the U.S. and some other regions. In terms of size, I think that the companies that we acquired shows basically the range of most of the companies that we're looking at today from the single-digit millions up to EUR 25 million of revenues or so. That range is today's sweet spot for us.
It's an early stage for companies with advanced technologies where we see we can add a lot of value. That's the majority of the company we're looking at today. In terms of what kind of companies we're looking at today, a few of them are in the sample prep area, which means that they work very well with either the Cellenion products or together with the I.DOT products, for instance. A few of them are more in the cell culturing field, where we see that we have some technologies and specialty reagents that we can add to the product offering to offer better solutions for our customers.
Looking at in terms of the size of these transactions that you can anticipate is, they are in the range of the transactions we've done in the multiples where we are, and that's what I think is the best guidance of where we're looking at today.
Just the last question is more related to Cellenion, the subsidiary of Scienion. Obviously there are some intriguing opportunities in gene diagnostics. Two questions related to that. Do you see the need to team up with test kits provider for next-generation sequencing in order to get some deep adoption for this type of technology in NGS? Also what we're seeing, I would assume that the main competitor for you guys in this field would be 10x Genomics. What we're seeing in the comments from 10x Genomics is that they see, among their end customers, a high attraction for single-cell ATAC. Is that something that you're pursuing as well?
Yeah. Good question. In terms of the sequencing, I think we want to stay very agile and versatile in terms of being able to provide the best sample prep workflows for the different NGS or sequencing platforms. We have customers working with the Cellenion products today, who are doing next-generation sequencing, and they're very happy with the platform itself and see how it's really improving their data collection and also the quality of the data. I think, from a 10x Genomics perspective, we see them definitely as a peer, in the industry and specifically with the Cellenion and I.DOT platforms that we have. That combination is enabling a much cleaner workflow, in terms of sample preparation for specific single-cell sequencing.
One thing that's important to mention, though, which is very important when it comes to the clinical aspect of next-generation sequencing and doing single-cell genomics, is that many laboratories around the world, they simply don't have access to that many cells to run the 10x Genomics platform. The 10x Genomics platform requires a lot of cells. If you're taking a biopsy from a patient from a cancer tumor, you might not have enough cells to even run the platform. At that point, you're talking about almost a rare cell, a single-cell genomics workflow. That's specifically what the Cellenion system is perfect for. You don't have to work with millions of cells. You can work with thousands of cells, and you can ensure that you're getting all the data you need from all of those thousand cells.
One of the competitive advantages with the Cellenion system is that you can control all of your cells. You never lose any of them. If you lose them, there is a sample collection so that you can reuse them. It's really an ideal system for a wide range of applications, and I think something that we'll see in the next coming months and quarters, it's a kind of a little bit of a teaser, some of the work that has been already started at the Cellenion side is single-cell proteomics. There was a webinar earlier this year from Cellenion where they presented some very exciting work on single-cell proteomics, and it's essentially a very rapidly growing field that will be able to answer a lot of very important questions in the field of biology for the next coming years.
Great. Thank you very much, guys. I will just go back into the queue.
All right. Thank you, Ulrik. I think the next person in line is Rickard Anderkrans.
Good morning, Erik and Gusten. Thank you for taking my questions. You covered a lot of ground there, but I was just wondering if you could help me understand a bit of a top-level question here, how we should think about pent-up demand. Obviously, COVID-19 going on is hampering some of your initiatives and efforts, and I was just curious to hear your perspective on how we should think about the pent-up demand going forward, and hopefully as we see things moving in the right direction in that arena, hopefully moving into spring and beyond.
Yeah. What we're seeing is that there's strong underlying demand for all the products in the portfolio today. The way we're measuring this is basically one of the main metrics here are quote requests, which we will look at how many requests we get for quotations for the different systems. This is growing faster than the sales and is giving us a hint that the underlying demand of the product is a lot higher than what goes through purchasing at this stage. We see this across the border, all across the world, where we come quite far in the processes with customers, but closing the deals takes a lot longer time. Sometimes it's just purchasing stops from, or not even that the purchasing is working at this stage.
In terms of the ramp-up of demand and sales, it is of course dependent on when restrictions in relation to COVID decreases. We don't see as much as the economy to affect the demand for the product since it's very counter-cyclical, but it's dependent on that our customers get back into the laboratories. We also see some of the systems might increase their demand due to the COVID situation, where we are offering products that improves the testing for especially COVID. One example of this is Cellenion, who works with quite a few customers right now to produce test kits for COVID, actually.
Mm-hmm. Great. Thanks. That's very helpful. Just looking at yesterday's announcement of C.WASH here, obviously you covered it a bit on the call, but it would be interesting if you could talk about when we can expect meaningful contributions here and perhaps if you could talk a bit about your licensing agreement and your partner there, OZ Biosciences, and the reach of that company and so forth.
I can start off with just when we expect to see results from it. I would say probably in the next one or two quarters, we'll start to see some kind of revenues from the product. The product is currently in an early access program, so it enables customers to get access to the product, do some tests, help us develop a lot of good application notes and protocols, and then it will go into a full-blown commercial stage. In the next two, three quarters, you'll start seeing some kind of numbers on the product.
In terms of the licensing deal there, OZ Biosciences has patents on an IP on the solution for this product. What we have there is an exclusive worldwide license to produce and sell these systems. We're very strong IP position there, and in return, of course, we're paying a license fee.
Great, thanks. Could you talk a bit more in detail about on the COVID-19 impact we should expect on Cellenion's business? Obviously a lot of moving parts, but just to get a feel of how things are moving as Cellenion will hit the numbers, if you will, going forward here.
I think if looking for the first half year of Scienion, they were quite impacted, especially for Cellenion, which is the single-cell part of the business, which were expected to grow. They've been driving a lot of the growth in the last few years here. With a very strong customer base in academics, they haven't grown. They've struggled a lot with the growth potential this year. This has been one of the major driver of growth for the last few years. This year they haven't been growing at all. In terms of the Scienion business, what we see there is more of a shift of demand, where some of our normal customers in that business are delaying their purchases. It takes longer to close the deals.
Instead, we see more and more COVID-related opportunities coming up, and what I see in the market today is that the testing market for COVID applications is going to be a big market opportunity for a long time to come. Even if we see vaccines during next year, testing will not stop in the long period of time, and this is really where we see some growth potential for Scienion over the next few years, where we have a very advanced solution to make these test kits, basically. Looking at Scienion business, we don't see that they will have, moving forward, that much of a negative impact from this COVID as they've had in the beginning of the year.
All right. Interesting. Just final on Scienion here, if I understood things correctly, an important synergy with Scienion is its solid connection into industrial players such as pharma companies. How should we think about the lead times for potential cross-selling there, and do you expect near-term traction in that sense, or just in terms of the timing of potential synergies here?
What we're seeing in the short time here for Scienion's products is that there's a lot of cross-selling opportunities with I.DOT platform, where you can both integrate I.DOT in these applications as well as start, for instance, with I.DOT system instead of going with a certain system. There's a lot of synergies between those two different dosing or precision dispensing technologies. That's the short term. When the long term is being able to integrate different dispensing solutions in the Scienion platform. You can go to large-scale, high throughput manufacturing of bioprinted tissues and so on, and that's going to take a longer time. We will see short wins in the next few quarters here.
Great. Just two quick questions here before I leave and get back in queue. First of all, the TAM for the bioconvergence opportunity is assessed at roughly $200 billion. What's relevant there for CELLINK in terms of your product? You had a slide on it. Was it the segments in the corner in the left-hand side, or how should we think about the.
Yes.
The current product in terms of that bioconvergence opportunity?
Yeah. The first square basically there is what we're focusing on with the current product offering. The SEK 7 billion market opportunity is the majority of the market that we're approaching today with the products in the portfolio.
Great. Thanks. Just a final one. EBITDA margin has been negative now for the last three years. How does this compare to your three-year financial targets, and when can we expect improvements in profitability? You mentioned some one-offs obviously here relating to recent activities on the acquisition side, but it would be interesting to hear on profitability as well.
I can start. From a pre-R&D side, we're showing a positive EBITDA. We're close to, or we're nearing ourselves towards the right numbers, and of course, we have one-off costs that are weighing down on the business. The question is, of course, as a management team and as a company, should we avoid making acquisitions that are strategically putting us years ahead and continuing to fuel our growth agenda for the sake of showing a break-even result? I don't even think that we're having those conversations internally. It's a matter of we are thinking about how can we build this business to be a multibillion-dollar company. To do that, we have to focus on building that by doing acquisitions that will get us to the right product portfolio for our customers.
We have to do in-house development, and we have to do just continuous strategic steps to continue to grow. From a positive EBITDA standpoint, from my perspective at least, we're still a four-year-old company. If you compare us to peers and if you look at our peers in the market, one of the good peers to look at is 10x Genomics or Berkeley Lights. I think those are two very good comparisons, and I'll leave the analysis to someone else to do.
Sure.
It's a good peer to look at.
I couldn't agree more with Erik there. I think that just looking at the two last quarters, both of those quarters would've been positive if we didn't list in the quarter in Q3 there, and it would've been positive if we didn't make the acquisition in Q4, for instance. We are on that kind of borderline there. Yes, it's our financial target. It's not our focus right now since we see a lot more growth opportunities here.
Sure. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks. That's all for me today, guys. Thank you very much for taking the time.
Thank you. Thanks for the good questions.
All right. With that, we will close down this earnings call for this time. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time and listening in.
Thank you.