It is my pleasure to be hosting Cytek Biosciences. Joining us is Wenbin Jiang, a CEO, and Paul Goodson, head of IR. We'll start with a presentation from the team and then move on to Q&A.
Yeah, thank you for your attending. Let me first start with a brief introduction about Cytek. Cytek is a, of course, we are in the life science tool space. We have developed a technology which we call Full Spectral Profiling technologies to drive the application in the cell analysis space. Cytek business is based on what we call these four business pillars. Instrument is where our fundamental technology is based upon Full Spectral Profiling technology. Today, 70% of our business is on the capital instrument installations. Based on this technology, we have developed an application to drive recurring revenue based on the installed base of our instruments in the field.
Bioinformatics, as a third business pillar, is to help our users to use our technology and also the applications developed in the field to make it easy for our users and also help them to design panels and manage the data. And finally, clinical is to enable our customers to leverage the technology we have developed for the diagnostic applications. And as you can see, and clearly, our technology has been very well validated by the number of instruments already deployed in the field. By the end of Q3, we have more than 2,800 instruments already deployed across the world within more than 70 countries and more than 1,500 customers. And the publication, more than 2,100 based on the Full Spectral technology we have developed. We have a strong financial, and during the last four quarters, the trailing 12 months revenue, more than $200 million.
We are on adjusted EBITDA basis, profitable. During the last four quarters, about $21 million. On the cash flow side, we are positive. We continue to generate cash, which is very rare in the life science tool space these days. Overall, we have $278 million in cash. We have maintained that number during the last four quarters, despite us spending about $15 million in buying back our own stocks. That just reflects how well we have managed our cash generation for our business. We forecast guiding our revenue for the whole year this year between $203-$210 million. We are global. We are doing business across all continents. Looking at the distribution of our revenue source, right now, about 60% of our revenue comes from pharma biotech, CRO, hospitals, and also through distribution, 40% in the academic space.
Looking at overall distribution across geographic locations, close to 50%, 47% in North America, U.S., and a mere 33%, basically one third of our business in Europe. Then close to 20% in APAC, which includes China and the rest of what we call, yeah, actually not just APAC, including India as well in that territory. Take a look at the products supporting our four business pillars, which include instruments. There are two categories of instruments. One is Full Spectral Profiling technology, including analyzer and cell sorters. The brand is Aurora, Northern Lights. Aurora is for high-end of the cell analysis, Northern Lights for the entry to mid-level, as well as the clinical applications. We have our Northern Lights clinically approved for China and Europe. Then the cell sorter. Aurora is a tool to help drive the reagent applications and for panel preparations.
And then also we have an instrument for imaging for cell analysis based on imaging, which is Amnis. And Athena is a clinical instrument based on conventional flow cytometry technology. It's only used for the China market. So these are the instruments that carry about 70% of our business. Then the remaining business, reagents, software, and the services, about 30% of our revenue. And services, basically all of the instruments we have in the field. And depending on how often, how frequently they are being used, they carry maintenance, like insurance. And then we provide service maintenance. And that's about 25% of our business, then software reagents. Reagents is we actually focus on applications to drive our recurring revenue.
That means it's a large panel typically, and with specific application in mind, which include immunoprofiling as well as the leukemia MRD applications, including covering both LDT clinical as well as the life science type of studies, also for the drug discoveries. So this is the overall our revenue stream from these four areas supporting our four business pillars. Now, so the question is, why are customers coming to Cytek? What's unique about our technology? One important aspect of our technology is we really drive the high-dimensional cell analysis. That means we enable many parameters beyond what conventional technology can do. And because of this, we can reduce the number of tubes required to get to the understanding of the cells. For example, one of the applications like leukemia MRD, typically you need about 30 parameters or 40 parameters depending on the needs.
Then typically with conventional, you have to carry multiple tubes. That just reduces sensitivity and makes it expensive. With our technology, a single tube addresses all the needs for the user base. Then that actually also reduces the reagents because once you do the multiple tubes and there are certain correlations you need to do and you duplicate the reagents required. And also you need less samples for the analysis since you don't really need to split those samples across multiple tubes. All of those aspects that enable users to come to Cytek for our technologies. And also because of the unique design features and nature of our technology that enable standardization across different instruments in different labs, different continents. That's important, especially these days for the CRO drug discovery and for the clinical trial and where you would like all the data to be consistent across multiple labs.
This is where we actually prevail across all the technologies in the cell analysis space. Now, analyzing the more than 2,000 publications based on our technology, we can see and our tools are widely used to support applications in many different aspects. Primarily in these areas like oncology, vaccine development, viral infection, disease studies, immunology, inflammation, and autoimmunity. In fact, this is just one aspect on the cell side. We have also seen applications in other biology areas such as marine biology and also in the environmental sciences. They use our tools to study pollution. This is a tool widely used and that carried many applications which differentiate our tool from many other life science tools these days.
So bioinformatics, as I mentioned, and this is a platform launched actually two years ago to really help our users to design panels and analyze data, manage data. That makes our technology easier for them. In fact, this has been very well received. It's already become part of the workflow of our customer base. And so we now have accumulated more than 12,000 users signing on this platform. And that's more than five users per installed base. And continue to grow very rapidly. This just shows how our technology, our tools are prevailing, are helping our users and very well utilized in the space. That also shows why we are continuing to grow, why the whole industry seems kind of stagnated. So this is how we are trying to drive for shareholder value. And here we focus on cost and capital efficiency for whatever we invest.
And we drive our operational excellence. And as you can see, our gross margin and continue to aim for 60%, which, especially considering 70% of our business is in capital instruments. And that's actually probably one of the best in the field. This is how we drive our operational excellence. And we maximize our free cash flow. As you can see, we continue to generate cash over the last few quarters. And so then we also emphasize on execution speed, especially for R&D. We make sure and whatever we spend, we focus and we need to make sure. And that can really drive, help our future growth, help to drive new products to be launched and to support our business growth. And of course, one of the important aspects for the Cytek is we focus on profitable growth, not just growth, and it has to be profitable.
Acquisition is another area we continue to focus throughout the life cycle of the company. We acquired three, actually four businesses. The first business was many years ago, 2015. We acquired a service company to drive our customer base. Right after we went public, we acquired a reagent company, Tonbo, to help grow recurring revenue to leveraging our installed base. Last year, early last year, we acquired the imaging-based technology, Amnis, which in fact has been doing very well. In fact, today, if you take a look at the whole flow cytometry space, two technologies are prevailing in the industry. One is Full Spectral Profiling technology we have pioneered. Another one is the imaging flow cytometry. We have both. Recently, actually, we acquired another service business in the U.K. to help drive support our service business in Europe.
That summarizes the company's business. Welcome for the questions.
Thank you for that. We can start with the first question on, let's talk about the FSP technology. Walk us through some takeaways that you had from attending recent conferences.
You want to answer that question?
We've had a great reaction to our FSP technology in the marketplace. And I think it is an aspect of the company that is taking time to roll out to investors. And we are seeing some traction there as well. So I expect that to continue, and we're going to continue talking about it.
Yeah, from certain aspects, you can see and through the FSP, we have created a market segment which we call the high-dimensional cell analysis. We continue to excel in that space. And through what we have developed, we have in fact changed the whole landscape of the flow cytometry cell analysis. And I think nobody is questioning today whether the future of the flow cytometry is Full Spectral based. And in fact, everyone's getting into this space. And the whole industry we are looking at today is about a $4-5 billion market and is moving towards that direction. That basically gives us a full accessible market area for our business, for our technology.
Expanding the addressable market. Thank you for that.
That's a point that really can be emphasized, I think, because we are disrupting the entire flow cytometry industry with this new technology. And there are so many advantages to this. And if you reach out and talk to our customers, and this is a good opportunity for me to give a plug to our user group meeting that's going to take place on December 5th here in Boston. So I would invite anyone who wants to attend and talk to our scientists and talk to our customers about that. It would be a great opportunity to learn more about the technology.
Absolutely. You have shown strong international performance, but the U.S. has lagged. How are you addressing differences in the end market dynamics, and how do you expect them to shift in 2025?
I think first, you take a look at overall, since we are global, we do business across multiple continents. And while the U.S., relatively speaking, is lagging in terms of growth compared to the business in Asia, APAC, and Europe, which are growing actually at 30%-50%, depending on which quarter we are talking about. But looking at our business spreading between pharma and academic, earlier I mentioned 60% of our business is in pharma. Typically, pharma, in fact, when they purchase instruments, they actually purchase across globe, across the world. Pharmaceutical companies are global. And this is actually one of the phenomena or momentum we are seeing is these days pharma are getting into Cytek to enable the standardization across all of their labs in the world. And the reason why they start to buy instruments, Cytek technology, Cytek tool across all of their labs globally.
And normally they have labs in Europe, in Asia, in the U.S. And one of the requirements, of course, is harmonization, which is what we can do with our technology. The second part is academic. And now academic is really dependent on funding. And clearly we have seen during the last few quarters, U.S. academic funding is kind of challenged comparing to other continents, Europe, Asia. And I think that's probably partially also related to Asia in previously. And on the academic side is less invested. And they are just trying to play catch up. And that's probably why we are seeing the strong growth in Europe and Asia right now. Now China is a different part. And we have China in our APAC business revenue. And so overall we are seeing 30%. But it really depends on quarter. Some quarter China grows faster than the rest of the APAC.
Sometimes the rest of APAC grows faster than China. And the most recent two quarters, clearly, our growth is actually from countries outside of China. And so mostly, for example, like Australia, New Zealand is very strong. Japan is strong. India, in fact, we made a great inroad. And we have grown quite a bit over there as well. Now, China, and last two quarters, relatively speaking, is flat. Not really down. It's flat. That's much better than some other companies reporting the reduction of the business. But relatively speaking, we have been holding up quite well across all the countries in the APAC region.
Thank you for that, and many of the other tools peers are talking about the China stimulus. Are you seeing signs of that?
Yes, and we do have seen our customers starting to talk to Cytek and working with us, trying to develop contracts and to enable them to get funding to support their research, but normally this is a long process, and we don't think it's going to help us for the Q4, but probably sometime next year, maybe later part of next year.
Got it. And you touched on this a little bit. You called out the total installed base of 2,800 instruments, including the instruments from Luminex acquisition, with Northern Lights being the strongest driver, at least on 2Q. Are Northern Lights still driving growth? And can you speak to which areas will be the biggest install base growth catalyst through 2025?
I think actually the high growth area we are seeing continues to be both Aurora and the Northern Lights, and they continue to, especially depending on the application, and the focus of the area of application are different between Aurora and the Northern Lights. Aurora are supporting pharma from just drug discovery to translational, as well as what I have mentioned about the harmonization requirement. This actually is based on Aurora. That's why we have seen strong growth of Aurora in the pharmaceutical companies in that segment. While Northern Lights is for in two areas. One is the individual labs, individual PI, and so that enables them to do more with tools that's actually really designed compatible with the entry-level type of tool they have been using, but really drive them, enable them to do the high-dimensional cell analysis, so we have seen continued growth on the Northern Lights side.
And then another area of growth with Northern Lights, because this is a clinical instrument, we do see applications in the clinical side to support Europe and China for the Northern Lights. And cell sorter has been consistent. And that's what we are seeing. And relatively speaking, cell sorter primarily supports academic research. And we know U.S. academic is kind of, relatively speaking, is challenged. But we do, even under that kind of environment, we do see consistent kind of growth over there for our cell sorter.
Perfect. With one minute left, a finisher. Three years from now, what will investors wish they realized about Cytek today?
You know, we can predict the stock market, and so that's dependent on the whole macro environment. However, from Cytek's perspective, and as you can see, we continue to invest a substantial amount into R&D. Actually, 20% of our revenue is in R&D, and through that, we continue to drive the technology forward to make sure we stay ahead of our competitions. We also ensure, and not only with what we have today, we make it more and more advanced to continue to maintain our leadership position. We're also trying to expand beyond what we are doing and to continue to grow our revenue. As you can see, profitable growth, as we feel, and from long-term, profitable growth will enable the shareholder value growth, and so.
Making you a good acquisition target, for sure. Thank you for that. Thank you for coming. Thank you for joining us.