All right. They're giving us the signal to roll. All right. I'm Dave Westenberg, the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics Analyst. With me today is Cytek, including the CEO, Wenbin Jiang, and Bill McCombe. And we'll just start to kick it off here. I was pretty happy with the Q3. You beat, you reiterated guidance. Do you think you might have hit a return to normal growth and maybe, let's say, a bottom in the market, a bottoming in the overall flow cytometry market?
Sure. Thanks, Dave. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I think, yes, I think the short answer to your question is yes. We have 85% of the business is growing double-digit, and so that's comprised of the service business, reagents, and the instrument business everywhere except Europe. We think that the forces that have been causing contraction in Europe are finally abating, and we think Asia-Pac will continue to grow strongly. The forces behind the growth drivers there continue to be strong, and the US appears to be stabilizing, so you add that all up, and we were able to produce positive revenue growth in Q3. And we were hopeful that those factors that I talked about will continue.
Yep. Wenbin, I want to maybe ask you on the technology, because I do think the founding in this company is kind of interesting. Can you talk about coming at the approach of flow cytometry from somebody outside of life sciences, more of an engineering kind of optics and background?
That's a great question. Flow cytometry is, in fact, a photonics device, which has been driving the advancement of the telecommunications, including today's infrastructure for the AI implementation, so they are basically the same fundamentals, so what Cytek has done is to leverage what has been already very well developed in the other industry, pull them into the flow cytometry industry, which has been there for 30, 40 years without much progress, and because of this, that's what we have really changed the whole landscape of the industry, and today, everybody will agree that what Cytek has done has truly advanced the cell analysis, and this is the future of the industry, and we do see, and even our competitors are following our trend and moving toward our direction. When we first started, we had to convince customers why they have to come to Cytek for Cytek's technology.
But today, this is no longer the question anymore. So we compete with conventional flow cytometry technology before. And now, nobody is going to stay with the older technology. That means we do compete. Newcomers coming. And now we actually compete with other companies on the same spectral technology. But since we are a leader, and we have been there for, by now, almost eight years, deployed more than 3,000 instruments in the field. And so we are clearly leading. And with all the issues being addressed over the time, and when customers want to make a choice and want to make a buy, clearly we are the one in their mind first.
Gotcha. I want to switch gears to NIH and the funding landscape in 2026. It probably wasn't as bad as a lot of investors expected when we saw the September budget. So just how are we thinking about everything from levels to just willingness to spend among recipients of NIH funding?
Look, I think the willingness to spend is there. I saw an interesting chart a couple of days ago, which showed that the spending relative to prior years was down more in the beginning of the year and then caught up towards the back end of the year, and that's what we saw this year, so it looked worse in Q1 and Q2 relative to where we ended up by Q3. There's been a lot of debate about the level of NIH funding in Congress between the administration and members of the House and Senate, so look, we know what you know. We read the newspapers as it were, but our sense is that, firstly, our academic customers, the universities that we sell to, they have a range of funding.
As we said, I think at the beginning of last year, only about a third of our U.S. academic and government sales were directly or indirectly funded by the NIH. So two-thirds of academic and government is funded from other sources. And we're hopeful that the outlook won't be as bad as was predicted at the beginning of this year. But I think flat would be a victory.
Yep.
But look, as I talked about before, that's one small piece of our business. And we have strong growth drivers in place in Asia-Pacific, in the biopharma industry, in service and reagents. And the growth from all of those sectors, including recently U.S. biopharma, the growth in all those sectors is offsetting whatever headwinds that we might encounter.
Maybe we can talk about what you're seeing in the pharma market in terms of willingness to spend. And as we see interest rates hopefully go down, I mean, we've been hoping for that for a number of years now, but how that could change relative demand for the instrument?
Yeah. Pharma biotech sales tend to go in waves. One of our issues in Europe is that in 2023 and 2024, our pharma biotech instrument sales were up 47% and 48% respectively. So coming into 2025, having spent a lot of money in those two years, the pharma customers in Europe had a bit of a pause. On the other hand, in the U.S., in the third quarter, they were very strong. We had 12% growth in biopharma globally, including 10% in the U.S. So we had a strong quarter. So, I think you'll see waves of spending. But the underlying secular trend is positive. Our technology of the, as Wenbin said, of the full spectrum technologies, ours is the one that has the longest history. It's the most stable. The new Aurora Evo that we introduced has a very high throughput rate. It's very valuable to the pharma customers.
So we're seeing very good adoption of that product. And so we're generally optimistic about that customer base going forward.
Gotcha. Well, maybe we can talk about Aurora Evo. Kind of what are the features of that instrument? What are the competitive advantages versus competitors like BD and Agilent? And what do we expect for revenue contribution? I guess that would be a combination of both of you.
Sure. Do you want to?
I think Evo first is, after years of serving for our customers, we start to realize the needs of the pharmaceutical companies, which is a very significant part of our business. So Evo is actually designed to take into account their needs. And so we have incorporated features like nanoparticle detections and automated shutdown turn-off, those features, and actually building loaders, as well as all those harmonizations, which are required by the pharma since they are normally global and they always would like to see all the data from across their labs in the world will perform identically. And so as well as actually the faster speed and incorporate into the features. And the remote turn-on, turn-off, which enables users before they come to the office or to the lab, and the instrument is ready for them already.
So those are kind of features already there, which wasn't initially have on our original Aurora instrument. And I think those features are really what's needed. And as Bill earlier mentioned, very well received since it was launched in June at the CYTO meeting.
Yeah, those features are high. The high throughput enables them to do high throughput screening faster. The automated startup shutdowns means you don't need to have a tech standing there for half an hour while the system boots up, or you don't need to have that person there to shut it down, so that increases their productivity and saves them money, so those have been very well received, and look, I think it will be we still sell the older model Aurora, which we call the Aurora, and we have the Aurora Evo, but I would think over time, the Aurora Evo will be a large majority of our sales, and it comes with a price premium, which is nice too, so we don't publicly break down the breakdown between the two, but the Evo will be a large majority as we go into 2026, we believe.
Yeah. Can you talk about some of the strategy to drive new adoption and then also potential upgrade among current Aurora users? And can you talk about if there is any differences in terms of consumable buying, specifically among your consumables versus another vendor's consumables among users?
I think a second question was regarding consumables. In terms of the consumption, Aurora Evo, they are all similar. But as you can see, our reagent growth has been very nice and year- over- year, double-digit, close to 20%. I think this trend, we think, is going to continue. As we have said, we have 3,000 instruments in the field, assuming on average $50,000 consumption on each instrument and a potential of $150 million opportunities for Cytek. Now we have a very broad portfolio of catalog reagents available for our users. We have also Cytek Cloud with more than 20,000 users designing panels using the algorithm on our system. Thinking about this, and let's say, assuming if every user used only $10,000 reagents, that's, again, $200 million opportunity. We see the great future opportunity for Cytek to drive our reagent revenue growth going forward.
Now, regarding to the other question, I don't know.
Yeah, look, in terms of driving the Evo adoption, we have a global direct sales force. We will continue to push the product and its advantages. And we believe that we offer the best combination of state-of-the-art technology, performance, and price in the industry. And that has enabled us to grow faster. Even though in this difficult period when the market's been down consistently, we've been able to either grow a little faster or not be down as much as the industry as a whole. And that's, I think, proof of our performance-price combination.
Yeah. Another thing is the first Aurora was shipped 80 years ago and ready for upgrade. We do offer a special program for them to switch to Evo. And we already start to see the interest on that aspect.
That's all very helpful. Now, Bill, can we talk about, I mean, I know comps have been an easy or have been part of the problem in EMEA, but are there any other challenges you're seeing in EMEA? And what are the expected timelines to return to growth in EMEA?
Sure. So the issue with EMEA in 2025 is that you have to break it down into the two sectors. In the biopharma sector, actually, you got to break it down into three. Services and reagents have continued to perform pretty well. In the instrument world, among the biopharma customers, we had huge growth in 2023 and 2024. So when that happens, we often see a bit of a slowdown in the subsequent years. So we encountered that in biopharma in EMEA in 2025. And then on the government side, governments in Europe have had a lot of pressure on spending this year, driven by the need to increase their defense spending. And their tendency is not to deficit spend. When they need to increase their defense spending, they cut other areas. And research grants is an example of that.
So there's been a lot of downward pressure on government funding for universities and research institutes. And in Europe, government funding is almost 100% of the funding for university and research institutes. So that's had quite an impact there. So we had a bit of a double whammy from those two factors in instruments. Look, I think, as I mentioned before, the biopharma spending goes in waves. They took a pause in 2025. Hopefully, that rate of decline will stop. And on the government side, I'm hoping that we're, if not at bottom, very close to it because we're down at levels that are only about 50% of where we were at the peak. So one would assume there's a minimum level of spending that the market would bear. So we think certainly the rate of decline is going to be less.
I think in Q4 we'll still be down in EMEA versus last year, but the rate of decline will be slower, and then the good news for 2026 is that the comps will be a lot easier, so look, we showed a slide in our third quarter presentation that showed you that the business excluding EMEA instruments has been growing at 11% in the third quarter, so double-digit growth in our whole business excluding EMEA instruments, and EMEA instruments is only 15% of the total pie, so as it gets smaller, the impact on overall sales of a contraction there gets less and less. That's the way the math works when you have a problem business like that.
But notwithstanding, even though it's only 15%, I still think that the causes that have been driving the negative revenue comparison will ameliorate and be less pronounced in both the fourth quarter and next year.
Actually, the EMEA reagent growth is the fastest across all of our territories. This just shows, and for those users who actually have our instrument, are using our tools broadly and extensively, so that's, again, the positive side. We think this trend is going to continue.
We're continuing to invest in our service network in EMEA and our sales team there. We expect it's an important market. We've got a strong presence there, and we expect it will bounce back eventually. But we're going to make sure that we're the number one provider in terms of both product and service and reagent in that region. So we view this as a cyclical issue, not a secular problem.
Maybe we can move on to kind of your comments about growing consumables and growing services. How are we thinking about in 2026? I'm not asking for guidance here. I'm basically just asking about thinking about revenue generated per instrument from reagents and services, and if you're seeing an upswing in kind of that trend, and you expect to see that in the future.
Sure. So our revenue per instrument from our installed base has grown or has been revenue per instruments been pretty stable. In other words, our service revenue stream has grown fairly consistently with our growth in the installed base. We don't see any changes in service pricing or in the attach rate that would cause that relationship to change going forward. So we expect consistent growth in service, consistent with the growth in the installed base. Reagents, as we talked about, have been growing faster, and we feel like we've been picking up share there because of better execution. We invested recently in our own in-house warehouse and distribution operation for reagents in Europe in order to provide faster delivery, so we're optimistic about growth there. We had a very good quarter in Q3.
We had a big design-in, we call design-in win, where we design a panel and the customer agrees to buy a lot of it. So I feel pretty good about reagent growth. And we're going to invest in marketing and sales for reagents to continue to drive that.
Yeah. BTIG recently has a report showing in Q3, the overall reagent growth was 1% and we have close to 20%, so clearly, we are growing faster than the market.
Maybe you can talk about when we started picking up your stock, we did these checks, and it definitely came up to we came to the conclusion that full spectral flow cytometry is the wave of the future, and not having it is essentially you can't compromise on that, well, the consequence is you have seen kind of some competitive launches with competitors doing full spectral flow. How do you stay ahead of the competition in 2026 and beyond with some of your enhancements and capabilities on your platforms?
A few things. First, we know competitors are coming. And actually, not just yesterday or tomorrow. A year or two years ago, we already seen them. But over that period of time, we really haven't seen any change regarding to our win-loss ratio, just showing we continue to take market share. And now, as earlier I mentioned, we always compete against other flow cytometers. Previously, with the conventional, now since competitors do not really promote conventional anymore, and we compete against them on the full spectral. But it just means now we are in a much larger available market for Cytek. And in that market, previously, we were a small player. Now we are a bigger player. And we dominated. And we have a better name recognition. And our performance is also much better. We continue to improve. Earlier I mentioned we launched Aurora Evo.
We'll continue to outpace the competitor and the market regarding to performance, as well as the cost of ownership, all of those aspects to ensure when users make a decision, Cytek will be the one for them.
You also need to offer full solutions. So you need to be best in class at product, at service, at things like the Cytek Cloud and the Panel Builder and the other features that we offer that are part of the Cytek package, and so it's the competitiveness of the whole package that really drives the outcome for competitors, so we're investing in all those aspects in addition to the product.
All right. Can you maybe talk about the market reception and adoption rate of Cytek Guava Muse? What is the strategic role of that platform in terms of market reach and expanded, sorry, in emerging markets, academics, those with tighter budgets?
Guava Muse actually is a kind of super low-cost flow cytometer for the basic entry users. It provides up to five parameters. It's a kind of basic tools to enable users who just want to do some preliminary studies or live dead cell kind of analysis or to analyze the general population before trying to sort the cells. Or in the typical bioprocessing space, and they just want to use it to do the QC. Guava Muse actually is different from the conventional typical other flow cytometer with regard to having lots of actual built-in manual. It's making it very, very easy for users. It's small as well and can operate by a battery, actually. Then you can move around very conveniently. It's really designed for convenience, for volume production support for QC, for bioprocessing, basically.
All right. That's about all the time we have. Thank you. Thank you so much for participating.
Thanks, Dave.
Thank you.