All right, I think we're gonna get started here. Welcome back to TD Cowen's 42nd annual healthcare conference. I'm Brendan Smith. I'm the tools DX analyst here. We're gonna have a little bit of a hybrid presentation and fireside chat format here with the Cytek team. It's my pleasure to introduce the CEO and co-founder, excuse me, CEO and Chairman of the Board, Wenbin Jiang from Cytek. To my left, or over my left shoulder, I should say, is the CFO of Cytek, William McCombe. Gonna hand it off to them to do some slides up front. In the meantime, if you guys have any questions, feel free to kind of flag me, or you can send them to my email at brendan.smith@tdsecurities.com. It is day three of the conference. Apologies. All right, Wenbin.
Well, thank you. Good morning. Standard safe harbor statement and no need to read. Cytek is a cell analysis company, a leading cell analysis company focusing on flow cytometers. Based on the last five years' growth rate, and in fact, Cytek was named as the one of the leading growth companies actually in the U.S., North America, and by Time Magazine. One of the products we launched last year, Muse Micro, was also named as the BioTech Breakthrough Award of 2025. In fact, last year we launched two products. One is Aurora Evo, and which also was one of the fastest-growing product for the company and driven our revenue growth in Q4 last year.
Just a brief summary of the Cytek's here and through the end of last year, we have 3,664 units being placed. That's actually first unit was placed in 2017, through the last 9 years, we totally deployed that amount of instruments. More than 3,500 publications, peer-reviewed publications, has cited the use of Cytek instrument to help their scientific discovery and studies. We have close to 3,000 customers. Those are the unique institutions, as clearly we have actually far more users. Based on Cytek Cloud, we have more than 24,000 users using the instrument, we have developed and deployed.
Our instrument has gone to 76 different countries, of course that also means the people we have deployed to serve for the customers across that many countries. Last year, our revenue $201.5 million, representing 1% of the revenue growth over the prior year of 2024. In fact, based on the recent report by ALDA Industry Association, 2025, the overall flow cytometry business market was down actually by 4%, while Cytek is up 1%, so we have overgrown the market by 5%. That also just means we have taken market share. Our cash, $261.5 million overall since we went public. Year-over-year, Cytek continued to actually generate positive cash flow.
The cash we have coming down, in fact, has been coming from the use of the cash to the merge acquisition. In total, we acquired three different businesses, large and small. We have also bought back our own stock shares over the time but in general, we use our positive cash flow to buy back our own stocks. We are a global companies overall and in the U.S., we are headquartered in San Diego, where we also do our R&D and manufacturing and for our high end of the instrument. Seattle is our R&D center and developing advanced technology and tools. We have our recurring recurring revenue manufacturing in San Diego.
We have Bethesda as our East Coast training center to serve all our customers. In Europe, we have a headquarter in Amsterdam. From there, we support all of our European customers, including service as well as logistics warehouse for those customers in that region. In China, we have two facilities, one in Shanghai for our R&D and also Wuxi, which is about less than 100 miles away actually from Shanghai for our instrument manufacturing. Early last year, actually late 2024, we developed another manufacturing facility in Singapore, and which one actually went to operation manufacture, deliver product in just less than 100 days when we started.
This actually really helped us to address our region for region manufacturing as well as to deal with all the complicated tariff situations. Singapore facility contributed tremendously with regard to maintaining Cytek's revenue growth last year over this challenging policy. We have our regional sales office in Tokyo to serve for our customers in Japan. Globally, our revenue, 47% in the U.S., a mere 28% APAC, and the rest of the world, 25%. Now, overall flow cytometry market, roughly U.S. is about 40% globally, EMEA, 30%, and APAC 30%, and rest of the world 30%. We are actually trending towards that direction.
Clearly, in order to truly meet this overall global market, we clearly want Europe and APAC to grow faster than the U.S., which has been the case over the last few years. Of course, last year, Europe, relatively speaking, was more challenged. We have continued to maintain the faster growth in the Asia and rest of the world regions. Our revenue by industry, 58% last year, was in pharma, biotech and CRO as well as the distributor, and 42% in the academic and the government sectors. Now, since 58, there's a distributor there, and as we know, like in Asia, Japan and China are actually completing the sales through distribution. Many of those distribution business are actually going to academic institutions, that's why.
Relatively speaking, if we truly want to have a clear understanding distributor and pharma, probably this will go up further a little bit, this will go down somewhat. This kind of global distribution diversification really helps Cytek to smooth out the kind of change in a single territory. Relatively speaking, Cytek is far more stable than many of the business of our size focusing only on one geographic location. We are global here. The question come down to, as we know, last year, life sciences has been challenged. Many companies citing and the kind of downward trend, especially with regarding to the situation when capital expenditures are challenged here. Cytek has continued to maintain the growth.
Part of the reason, clearly, is because flow cytometry is a basic life science tools being used across in many different kind of application, like cell and gene therapy, cell line development, immuno-oncology, immuno-profiling, drug discovery, and all kinds of areas. If we truly take a look, if we can treat flow cytometry like in analogy to a multimeter in the daily life. So long as you want to continue to the research to do the experiment, to do the scientific discovery, you need a flow cytometer. That's a reason why and even in today's challenging market, we have continued to maintain the growth. In addition, Cytek is a well-recognized brand, a leader in the space.
Clearly, once customer make a decision to buy, Cytek is always one of the first names in their mind to go to. Also flow cytometry by itself is a large market. It has been there for so many years, 30, 40 years over there. Based on the market report, last year was about $5 billion, and it's going to grow to $9.2 billion, and by 2032, and a CAGR of 8.8%. We are growing faster than the market. I just mentioned last year was down by 4%, in fact, right?
Overall, and this is the kind of growth and we may foresee, and if last year growing negative, that means in the next few years, it is going to grow faster than what's shown here. We have consistently outperformed the market, as evidenced by the growth we had in 2025. Now if you look at all the products we have in this market, we actually have a very broad portfolio of both instrument as well as reagents consumable to serve for this market. That goes across like Aurora Evo and Cell Sorter. Those are the four high-end of the research market application where we have the dominant market share right now today.
The entry mid-level application like Northern Lights, Guava, Muse Micro, and we have a unique Amnis ImageStream, which is doing the image in base of flow cytometer. This actually continue to be the best imaging flow cytometer, provide the best resolution and for the cell analysis in the space. This is a very large portfolio across the whole application space. Reagents. Our own reagents, cFluor, Tonbo Reagents, as well as the partners reagents. Right now, we have the largest catalog on Cytek Cloud, which we can use to serve for our customers. Cytek Cloud has been very well recognized, used by our user base, 24,000 users. Many of our customers, especially pharma, has built Cytek Cloud into their standard workflow.
So this is to them, this is a must-need platform today. Then, of course, services and area which grow around with the installed base and one of the fastest-growing business for Cytek right now. Cytek's businesses are actually supported by those four key pillars. Instruments, right now, 66% of our revenue. This is going to continue to drive, and we are investing to keep our leadership positions, make the instrument more intelligent and better perform, more reliable and more cost-effective to maintain our leadership positions here. Application, where is going to help to drive our reagent business and our reagent has been growing very fast, more than 20% growth year-over-year right now, we, as I just mentioned.
Largest catalog we have right now over there through Cytek's as well as our partners on Cytek Cloud. This will continue to drive our business. It will continue to maintain the growth, we believe. Bioinformatics Cytek Cloud which help to enable our users to stay around Cytek technology to provide a full solution for our customers. Last year we grow to 24,000, that's 50% growth over prior year. This user base has been growing nicely and really help to pull all our customer toward Cytek technology, Cytek products. Clinical is another business pillars here. We have our instrument cleared in China as well as Europe IVDR. It's driving our business growth right now.
In Europe, we develop a partnership with one of the premier clinical companies there to drive our clinical adoption over there. 2026, what's going to continue to drive our business? First, service. As we continue to de-deploy more and more instrument, this business revenue is going to continue to grow together with the number of instruments in the field as well as the utilization and of our instrument. Last year, more than 20% growth. We feel we are going to maintain this growth rate in this space. With more and more people coming to Cytek, this will be a very important part of our business. Reagents is another area. Last year we had more than 20% of the revenue growth.
Together, service and reagents are the recurring revenue and now 34%. A year ago was 29%. We feel this is going to continue to grow and trending toward 40% over the next couple of years. As we said, market is going to continue to grow and we are going to grow with the market. We have continued to release, launch new products. Last year, we launched Aurora Evo, driving our revenue growth in Q4 for the Aurora Analyzer. We launched Muse Micro, which received BioTech Breakthrough Awards, which is also being very well received by our customers. There's a replacement cycle over there, not only on Cytek's own instrument, also conventional instrument.
As cited by our peers as well, and a larger pool of flow cytometers are waiting to be replaced. During that process, Cytek continued to outperform. We mentioned about last year, Aurora CS unit placement has grown by more than 20%. Actually full year, 22% by Q4 and reached 26% on the unit growth. Actually, looking at the last four or five years has continuously grown year-over-year. Part of that is to support the in-store, the replacement tools out there. During that process, we have clearly taken market share. Cytek Cloud is going to continue to serve our customers, driving customer toward our instrumentation, help to drive our revenue growth and from reagents as well as instrument, new instrument purchase.
Clinical clearly is another area, and we expect to continue to expand in Europe and China. Those are the kind of growth momentums, for the 2026. I guess, okay, that's all I have. Thank you.
Yep. All right, great. Thanks, Wenbin. I know you covered a lot of ground on kind of where Cytek stands now today. But let's maybe first start with Aurora Evo, right? You know, kind of spoke to some of the improvements, higher throughput, automation, relative to kinda just the flagship Aurora there. Generally more tailored to kind of pharma end market customers. But what do you, what can you tell us about the launch so far? What's kind of initial customer feedback been like? Anything that they're kind of flagging that's kind of guiding how you're thinking about the continued roll out moving forward?
Actually, it has been very well received since it was first launched at CYTO last year. Clearly and by Q4, Evo is already the dominant share of our overall Aurora Analyzer sales. In terms of customers, in fact, not even though it was first initially designed to tailor the needs of pharma for faster speed and smaller molecular detection, more intelligence and automatic turnaround and shutdown and all those features. In fact, it also received a lot of attention and support from our academic users. Q4, across both academic and pharma, they have come into our Evo systems. Our early customers of Aurora and which by now is already eight to nine years old, are also coming to Cytek to replace their older instruments.
That has been really driving the overall our cell analyzer growth in the space. It has done very well, and we feel this is going to continue for the 2026.
I know in your slides you also spoke to, kind of the expansion of the market itself. It's kind of a, I would say, a consistent topic of conversation among investors trying to understand really where the broader flow cytometry market is going and how it's continuing to evolve. Can you help us kind of unpack your thoughts on 2026 guidance, really what some of your underlying assumptions about the market growth opportunity is for flow cytometry overall, and then how you kind of feel Cytek fits into what could potentially be kind of a recovery there?
Sure. The way we thought about the guide was that we would see a continuation of the growth of the service and the reagent business at rates, you know, fairly consistent with what we've seen in 2025 because those two areas of the business are driven by the install base in the case of service and a big market share growth opportunity in the case of reagents. We assumed fairly flat to modest growth in instruments. The last thing that we did in the equation was to put in a contingency to, you know, provide for those uncertainties that we can't predict. You know, sitting here in early 2025, we certainly didn't predict some of the things that happened to the market since then.
We thought it's prudent to put in a contingency to cover those sorts of situations. Look, as the year unfolds, we'll continue to reevaluate that. I think, you know, to your question of how Cytek fits in to the overall flow cytometry market, what the Evo demonstrates is that customers will pay a premium for innovation and for features that add value. Wenbin mentioned in the slides that flow cytometers are used in high utilization settings in big core labs inside universities and pharma, pharmaceutical companies. If you develop features like high throughput and automated shutdown, startup and shutdown that improve productivity, people will pay for that. We've seen. We've grown above the market because of that innovation, and that's certainly something that we could expect to see going into 2026.
Yeah. I mean, you spoke to a couple of the different end markets now that you guys are operating in, just from a customer side. What can you kinda tell us about, I would say admittedly early feedback in 2026, but any trends you're seeing from the U.S. academic ordering, and how this is kind of comparing to sentiment, like you mentioned from, let's say, this time last year? Anything to kind of note in the relative shift?
Look, I think sentiment's much better in the academic and government market. You know, we're comparing it to a low base. You know, a year ago, there was discussion of cuts in NIH funding of up to 40% and, you know, there were a number of instances of the administration, you know, threatening to withdraw funding from certain institutions over, you know, a variety of issues. In most of those cases, those situations have been resolved through negotiation. The outlook for NIH funding is not that there's gonna be much growth, but it doesn't appear that they're gonna be the sort of draconian cuts that were discussed this time last year. You know, that backdrop has caused the universities to be, you know, quite a bit more positive than they were.
you know, we saw a big catch-up in Q4, or strong growth from that sector. There may have been some catch-up element there, but was certainly positive.
I mean, maybe on the other end market that you guys are tapped into. I think a lot of last year with pharma spending concerns and contractions, we had kind of perpetually heard that, you know, if they didn't have to buy a brand-new, expensive, big device or they could maybe put it off a little bit, that's kind of what they were doing for a lot of 2025. As they're moving into 2026 now, funding is kind of being reevaluated. Market feels a little bit different than it did.
To what degree do you think some of maybe those purchases that were potentially put on hold last year or just kind of kicked down the can, kicked the can down the road a little bit, could we see some of that kind of make up like you were kind of referencing there from the pharma side of things? Are you starting to hear about any of that yet?
On the pharma side, the pharma spending tends to be to follow a fairly consistent secular growth trend. If you look at our total pharma revenues for the last couple of years, there's been a little lumpy. Was down in 2025 slightly versus 2024, but over a two-year period, it's grown at a CAGR of around 3%. You know, what we see there is lumpy quarter to quarter but overall positive growth. In the academic and government market, you know, we saw significant year-on-year declines for the first three quarters of 2025 and then significant growth in Q4. That appeared that the catch-up spending happened in Q4.
Going into 2026, as we say, we, you know, we incorporated fairly conservative assumptions for instrument spend in the guide and, you know, we will see how that plays out.
Okay. I know in the slides you started touching on this, and we caught up last week about it after the earnings call, just about the strength in APAC, right? Looking at kind of the geographic diversification of the revenue growth, seems like China stimulus might be helping in that region. Maybe give us a sense, first of all, kind of China versus rest of APAC as well, to whatever degree you're able to speak to that. Really, what could kinda give you conviction in that region being a pretty durable growth driver for Cytek?
I think in my slide I have also shown right now APAC and the rest of the world and our market share within Cytek, our revenue space is 25%. Globally overall is about 30% supposed to be. That just means first year we are still underrepresented with regarding to APAC. That provide us an opportunity to continue to catch up with the overall global distribution of the business. That's for second part is over the last few years, we have already established Cytek as the premier supplier in the flow cytometry space especially. We have seen a shift from conventional to the full spectrum. We have been very well-recognized globally right now as a leader in that space.
When they make a decision with regarding to purchase, and Cytek is always the first one and they will see. We have benefited from there. In addition, overall and because from government policy perspective and there's an incentive over there to invest to drive the economy in both China and other part of the APAC. That's helping as well. From all those aspects, we see APAC will continue to grow and we are quite optimistic right now for 2026.
Okay. All right. Great. You know, I know sometimes when we talk about the intimate workings of these flow cytometers and even coming to the factory, when you really just open it up, it's like can feel crazy complex, right? Maybe zooming out just a little bit, help us understand really when we're kind of looking across different life science workflows that you serve, like which lab functions, you know, irrespective of where they kind of fall in your customers, really just simply can't proceed without your instruments kind of today. How would that differ realistically in how you're thinking about tools that labs more or less view as kind of discretionary or kind of nice to have upgrades, if you will?
Yeah, I think during my presentation, I also mentioned about the first years. Flow cytometer has been broadly adopted, right? From discovery to validation, clinical trial and the QC in the bioprocessing space. In the research setting or the PhD scientific work, they need a flow cytometer and to study. What is flow cytometer? Basically is a cell counter, right? It analyzes the surface protein and it basically look at it to look at the protein on the surface of a cell, then look at different type of proteins on the surface of the cells and do a statistical analysis and count those cells.
That provides a lot of information and to the scientists with regarding to understand either the health situations or drug effectiveness and all of those aspects. They need this kind of tools. Now as the today, the development becomes more and more sophisticated. They need to look at more and more parameters because we know there are so many different type of proteins within the human body and on the surface of cells. They need to look at this across the whole areas to truly understand what's going on with the cell's situation before they can actually move on to look at inside the cells, look at the genes and sequencing side.
This actually that just means they need a tool to be more effective, quicker to get to a conclusion. Instead of in the old days, they only look at a few parameters. Because of this, now they suddenly find, they need a tool out there, and Cytek is the right tool, really has driven from low dimensional to the really high dimensional, providing all the information they need effectively, quickly, and also cost effectively. That's how it, why today Cytek become a predominant supplier for the space and for the applications. First they need a tool. Second, they need a advanced tool. Third is Cytek is the one right out there to meet their needs.
Maybe just in the last minute here, you know, I think there's a few different considerations, right? Against the kind of broader funding recovery backdrop, there's the actual end markets that you're kind of expanding into and then, you know, additional upgrades to some of the existing machinery that you've got or devices I should say that you've got. But as you kind of look at the runway ahead, let's say for the next just 12, 18 months, where you guys are seeing... I guess I should ask, where are you seeing kind of the biggest disconnect in what you think is the primary value driver here for the platform versus maybe where a lot of us on the outside are spending more of our time or maybe a little bit more focused?
I think it's the biggest disconnect is probably the assumption that all tools are discretionary. As Wenbin described, a flow cytometer gives you the basic protein information about the proteins that are carried on a cell, what the mechanism of the drug is, and what the, importantly, what the body's immune response is. Without that basic information, you can't do anything beyond that. I think one disconnect is understanding the role of our instruments in the average lab. I think the second is that, you know, our business is globally diversified and, you know, something like 5% of our business is directly NIH funded.
You know, we're more than 50% outside the U.S. and then inside the U.S., you know, academic and government is a minority of our business, and then NIH is a minority of that. I think that's another perhaps disconnect. I think that we've been able to consistently grow faster than the market, and I think that's probably underappreciated as well. Lastly, our growing installed base is a flywheel that generates consistent revenue growth, you know, quarter in, quarter out. Perhaps that's a bit underappreciated, and that will become a bigger and bigger factor in Cytek's revenue growth going forward.
All right, great. I think with that, we are at time. Thank you, everybody, for paying attention, listening in, joining us. From Bentonville, it's great to see you guys. Thanks for joining.
Yeah. Thanks, man.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.