Everyone for joining us this morning. Pleasure to have with us Illumina. From the company, we have CFO Joydeep Goswami, and from Investor Relations, we have Salli. And I'm Vijay Kumar, I cover life science tools, med tech. But maybe just diving right into it, Joydeep, this has been a pretty remarkable year for Illumina. Shares are down 50%, you know, off 50-80% from the peak. You know, when I think about the macro, clearly that's been challenging, but obviously, Illumina's had its own set of issues. I think I want to start with this, with you know, some of the bear debates that I've been—questions I've been getting, right?
I think one of the questions has been, look, Illumina launched a new system which lowered price per sample from $600-$200, and there is no price elasticity or demand. We're not seeing volumes of 3x, and that's why we're seeing some of these numbers, right? So when you think about that, price elasticity of demand, how would you respond to that, you know, that question?
Yeah, I think. So look, it has been a remarkable year on that front. But, you know, part of it is, you know, focusing on the right things for us, right? So, X was an innovation and has been an innovation that's been really well received by the market. We're proud of that. We are, you know, also seeing that interest continue with the launch of the 25B flow cell. And we continue to believe that it will spur, you know, much more interest and much more utilization of sequencing.
So, you know, and we are seeing, by the way, you know, we are continuing to see growth in sequencing utilization, and that's the numbers we have, we have been putting out in terms of how much increase in sequencing gigabase growth we're seeing, both on a quarter-on-quarter, but on a year-on-year basis, right? Yes, the numbers have been muted this year for 2 reasons, and partly it's the macroeconomics, but partly it's also the transition from the 6K to the X, and with the X not fully having ramped up. Some of those numbers are headwinds for us into this year.
But if I look out long term, both on our ability and our focus on execution and getting people ramped up on the X and continuing to introduce innovations such as the X, but also, being in a market where NGS brings unique value in terms of biology at scale, and a large market with a penetration under 10%, there's plenty of room to grow. And yeah, for us, it's a question of when rather than if that growth comes.
Or maybe just to ask the question slightly differently, Joydeep, what gives you the confidence that this is not—that this is a transition issue, right? 6 K to X, because we have—I don't think we've seen a transition issue in your prior product cycles. Why isn't this a price elasticity of demand question?
Yeah. So I think two things, right? So one, you know, we are seeing that people that are adopting the X already, right, we're seeing more sequencing growth in those customers than in customers that have not adopted the X. So elasticity being spurred by the X, and I think it's not just the pricing that's spurring that, right? It's the capability of the instrument in terms of the speed and in terms of integrated bioinformatics, the upfront simplification of workflow, and other benefits that the instrument is providing that is spurring that demand. So I you know, I think it's an important question, which you know, to basically confirm that elasticity is happening, right? Now, you know, and elasticity will happen over multiple years as well, right?
So we see this as a five or six-year cycle. While that price decline, most of that price decline, it hits you right up front, but the benefits of that elasticity continue over a longer period of time as well.
When you say, you know, you are seeing more, a sequencing activity on X, clearly the system can do more, so obviously you would expect more data, but is that also translating to higher consumable revenues? I think that this is where the question is.
Yeah. So let me break that down in two things. And again, what I was saying is you're seeing more sequencing activity in customers that have adopted the X, right? And that's split between the 6K and the X. But let me answer your question in two ways. First, I think there's a difference between clinical and research customers. In clinical customers, it really is incremental, right? Because what you're seeing is, what you're gonna see is assays that have been validated on the 6K will not immediately switch over, right? They will continue, and so that provides a baseline that is also growing, by the way, as more samples come into with more awareness and more reimbursement. You will continue to see that increase on the 6 Ks.
What gets put on the X's is newer assays that they—that were marginally viable or not viable at all on the 6 K, but that are truly incremental in terms of volume as time goes on, right? So the clinical side is fairly clear on that, how that transition happens and is incremental. On the research side, it's a little bit more nuanced, right? So on the research side, I think most of the adoption of the X is enabling things that truly, again, were more difficult to do on the 6 K. So if you are looking at an expansion into a much larger cohort or for population genomics studies, or you're looking at a mass movement of a cohort into a multi-omic analysis, like proteomics or something else, right?
That gets much easier to do with the X. And we've also heard a lot of excitement on expanding the amount of single cells being analyzed or spatial analysis that's being enabled by the X, just because, you know, the cost of doing that experiment would have been prohibitive on something like a 6K, and now becomes much more manageable on the X, right? So those are the kinds of things that drive elasticity in research customers and give them a reason to adopt the X and for us to see incremental revenue growth as well, you know, despite the drop in prices. And again, I would encourage you to look at this as a multi-year cycle, right? Because yes, in the first year after adoption, you do see more of a immediate year-on-year price decline.
That becomes much lower in subsequent years, although the volume ramp-up happens year-over-year.
You also have, on the customers, especially on the research side, that might be transitioning some of their work over, a decline in their NovaSeq 6000 consumables because they don't need as many of those. So those offsetting trends, so you might be seeing nice uptake on the NovaSeq X, but it's offset to some degree with the NovaSeq 6000. And this year we've had more intensity on that front. Next year, we should see those lines cross and start to see more uptake on the consumable side that's only partially offset by the NovaSeq 6000 consumables now coming down. So there's a lot of moving trends here to pay attention to.
Gotcha. You brought up several points, but maybe let's start with the clinical, right? You mentioned the transition here might be more gradual into the next. I think the question I get from investors is, well, if you can do 2x more number of samples, right, wouldn't I need to use just, like, fewer chips going forward, whether the transition happens next year or 3 years from now? And I think part of it, I think turnaround time matters for that, you know, customer class. But you know, talk about, like, why this transition shouldn't be an impact in clinical.
Yeah, so in clinical, a couple of things, right? So one, you know, volumes in clinical continue to ramp up, and we mentioned this even before X came on the scene, right? You're seeing volumes ramp up very, very quickly, and I think with increased reimbursement and greater awareness of the benefits of NGS-mediated panels, I think that's only going to increase, right? And then you're seeing trends like MRD and MCED further expand that number of samples coming. So growth in clinical volumes is something, especially on the oncology and genetic disease testing side, we have seen for a long time, and these trends continue to be very strong. The second thing I think on the clinical sequencing side is important to keep in mind is what I mentioned earlier again, right?
This was on the assays that are already validated on the 6 K. You will see them continue on the 6 K for a while. In fact, you know, if I go back to the HiSeq to the 6 K transition, we still have assays that are run on the HiSeqs right now, which is astounding, right? It's been 6+ years, and people, you know, are so locked into a validated assay that they don't see a reason really to go through that validation again. So what you get then is incremental volume coming on the X, right? So this is incremental growth rather than swapping out something that's running on the 6 K, and replacing it with same volumes and then, you know, but just, you know, running it on using less flow cells as you, as you articulated, right?
The clinical side of the story is very strong, and it's accretive.
Understood. And maybe to ask the question slightly differently, Joy, and maybe, Sally, you can chime in as well. Like, when I look at your consumable guidance for this year, the pull-through rate, the $1 million going down to $700,000-$900,000, I think is the most recent update we've had. That dropped on it. I think what some of my, you know, people who have been negative, sort of bearish, are saying, "Look, because you can do more, that's exactly why you're seeing..." And I think you gave some color on, hey, this transition, like, we're seeing the specific to X customers, right?
Correct.
The disruption.
Yeah.
Like, maybe elaborate on that and why you feel like that $700-$900K pull-through that we're seeing right now is a temporal transitory issue.
Yeah. So again, lots to unpack in that. So first of all, let me say, you know, we had expected that, and we continue, we will continue to expect that pull-through on the X, on the 6 K instruments, will go down as people transition to the X, right? So no surprise there. This year, we had anticipated that number to go, to that 800-900. It's not 700; it's 800-900. And, and, you know, as of, Q3 projections, we are seeing that number stay in that range, but towards the low end of the range. I will also remind you that pull-through is also a calculated metric, right?
So it's revenue divided by the number of instruments out there, especially in a transitionary year, if people are, you know, reducing their inventory level or reducing the amount they're using the X, sorry, the 6000s before they transition to the X, you are going to see that number, you know, hit. The last thing I will say is, and Salli mentioned this earlier, right? We have not seen the full switch over to the X just as of yet. First, you know, people are waiting for the 25B flow cell because that is the real workhorse in that on the X. And especially for many of these early adopters, they are heavy users of the X, right? So they're really waiting for that 25B flow cell. So that just came out this quarter.
People are just starting to validate their workflows on the 25B. So you will see that transition happen, you know, once they've finished validation, and our best guess is, you know, in the first half of next year, right? That's when you really start seeing a ramp-up in X consumables. But, you know, we do expect that your pull-through on the 6K will go down over time. That's normal. And then it's gonna be a amalgam of research and clinicals, so that the reduction will not be as sudden as people have expected.
Understood. When you, you know, think about that pull-through per box, right? I know it's a metric that the street focuses, but may not give an accurate picture, right? Like, you mentioned 25B in a flow cell launch. Like, when customers do adopt, like, do you expect the overall utilization of chips on 25B to exceed the 6K-
Yes, we do.
Is that your expectation?
The pull-through, you mean, right?
Yes.
Yes, we do expect it to exceed the 6K.
I think on your third quarter call, you mentioned something about the disruption that you're seeing. It's this is very specific to customers who bought an X. Is that true? Is it the this this-
That's correct. Yeah, the disruption, the transition where we've seen a reduction in 6K purchases, is much more specific to customers that have either ordered an X or already received an X.
Gotcha. And, and when you look at those customer base who've not ordered an X, they, they are still at trend line, trend line levels, barring macro?
They are definitely at trend line levels, barring macro, correct?
Okay. And, and these customers who ordered an X, right, let's say you're doing a certain dollar amount of business with them. Once they bought the X, do you expect the dollar amount of business with these customers to grow over time? Or, should it, should it decline because of this transition and then start increasing?
For a particular customer, you will see that, you know, decline for a period of time and then increasing. Now, the period between the decline and the ramp-up is going to be smaller than what you've seen this year, right? This year was a little peculiar because the 25 B wasn't available till Q4, so you saw a decline and a sustained decline, before, you know, the ramp-up starts to happen finally in Q4.
Gotcha. So, just, maybe if you, if you could give us, like, a customer analogy, right? Like, once this customer buys an X, what happens to their purchasing patterns? How long does the transition last now that we have the 25B flow cell, and what drives the reacceleration? Is that restocking which drives the reacceleration, or is that more experiments?
Yeah, so, you know, it's way too early for me to give you kind of time frames on, you know, how long it's done. And it's gonna be very different for different customers. However, just thinking about it structurally, right, you do see a little bit of the burn down before the X gets installed and adopted. Typically, most customers run a few validation runs, right, on there. And so this could take, you know, depending on the customer, you know, about a quarter or slightly less than a quarter, just slightly more than a quarter, right? Again, depends on the customer.
We are trying our best to make sure that we have service engineers and field application specialists available so that the ramp-up time is as short as possible for any customer. Once they finish that validation, that's when you talk about two or two things coming in, right? They start ramping up their experiments on the X, so that, you know, is a sustained pull-through of X consumables. And there is a period of initial ramp-up as they, you know, first stock up in terms of inventory, right? And again, it's hard for me to predict at this point, you know, how much inventory they'll take on initially, but that's after … Post-validation is where you really see that ramp-up occur.
I see. And I guess, once we get through this validation phase and the ramping up, that dollar level of business in that normalized environment, should that be back at trend line, what this customer is doing, you know, when they had a 6K instrument, or should it be about?
Trend line of pull-through. So we do expect that they, you know, you will see an increase in the volumes, the sequencing volumes, right? So, as far as the trend line of the, trend line of increase over time, yes, that should be similar or maybe slightly accelerated, given the higher, capabilities of the instrument.
Gotcha. Then maybe, you know, looking at your near term, right, Q4, when I look at the guidance rate, obviously, last year you had an easy comp. Your guidance is still contemplating, I think, sequencing consumable declines of mid-singles against this easy comp, which would imply, like, despite having launched the 25B flow cell, it's not having a material impact in Q4. Like, can you just walk us through those Q4 assumptions and why?
Compared to year-on-year over last year, you mean?
Either year-on-year or sequentially, why things should improve from 3Q?
So again, for two reasons, right? One, remember that, you know, in Q4, we are seeing just the validation runs of the 25B, right? And it was also launched, you know, late October, so you have part of the quarter cutting off holidays, and so it is a little bit muted, but more because of the timing of the launch and the validation piece of it. The other thing that if you look year-on-year, you are seeing a little bit more of that impact of burn down on the 6K inventories and the fact that we are not expecting a budget flush this year, which we did get a little bit of that last year.
Not a huge amount, but, you know, we are expecting less of that this year than last year. But I would really look at the... What we're looking for in Q4 is, you know, a healthy kind of reaction to the 25B in the market. Enough customers kind of starting to validate it and getting that initial order, and both of those, you know, so far seem to be playing out.
Can you just maybe elaborate on that last point on, you know, how many customers have received a 25B flow cell at this point in time, and what's been their experience? I think early on in the X launch, we had some software issues.
Yeah.
Any, any software issues?
Yeah. So no. So the software issues that we had mentioned in the Q2 Earnings Call or Q3, in August, right, have been resolved, right? So we even at that point, we had mentioned we had been working on it, and we had started deploying the solutions, and the deployment of those solutions has gone off really well, right? And then, when we launched the 25B, we also updated the software again, so that not only, you know, supports the 25B, but also improves the performance on the 10B flow cell as well. And as far as we can tell right now, both of those changes and the launch of the 25B have been incredibly well received by customers.
Gotcha. And then, maybe, switching over to instruments, I think on third quarter, the comments around orders and backlog, I think, was what caught people. You know, when you look at your order intake in third quarter, it slowed down to,
Yeah
... 50 systems. You did cite macro challenges, but again, like, your exposure is different, right? Diagnostics versus rest of tools when they talk about China biopharma.
Mm-hmm.
Why is Illumina seeing these macro challenges, and is that different from your peers?
Well, it's so, you know, China is a similar impact on most of us, right? It's an issue of liquidity, and then maybe for us, a little bit more on, you know, one of our major competitors being from China, right? So that's China was somewhat expected, but it did get worse as we looked into the second half of the year than expected. On the other side of the thing, what we, you know, meant by macroeconomics there was less to do with. It had much more to do with people slowing down the timing of their purchases, right? So I want to reiterate, right, the interest in the X the size of our funnel remains incredibly strong.
What was surprising for us a little bit was we had expected that funnel to convert at higher rates in Q3 and Q4. That didn't happen in Q3, and obviously, that's kind of what you're, what you're saying. So the interest is there. The speed at which the funnel is converting right now is slower. We do believe that given the high level of interest and with the introduction of the 25B flow cell, that over the next few quarters, we'll see that in, you know, that conversion rate pick back up. But, you know, right now, that's. We had to come out and give you guidance based on what we were seeing in the market.
In terms of magnitude, it's slow, it's slower-
Yeah
... but we're looking at instead of 60 orders, going to 50 orders. So obviously, we'd like to get back to 60 and then some, but 50 orders was still a pretty decent quarter, all things considered, in the environment we're in.
Understood. And then that, you know, slow down in decision-making, was that, you know, perhaps, you know, specific to diagnostic customers or government academic customers?
No, it was quite widespread, actually. So let me... You know, on the academic side, we definitely are seeing more cautiousness, and, you know, waiting to see how funding will be in 2024 before they decide to spend a certain amount of money. On the clinical side, it's a tale of two cities, really, right? We're definitely seeing strong interest in orders, including fleet expansion orders from customers that are well funded, right? So nothing, no slowdown, you know, no kind of pullback on any of that. Where we did get impacted on the clinical side is, you know, with a lot of customers that have had funding challenges or are seeing things, you know, not so rosy into next year. There has been a much more market slowdown on those orders converting.
... Understood. I think you brought up that funnel remains healthy.
Mm-hmm.
Is that like how, you know, when you look at that funnel, what gives you the confidence that's still a healthy funnel, as in it's not stale, you know, just given the macro?
Yeah. So first of all, you know, we continue to add new opportunities to the funnel, right? So that's one thing of, you know, that hasn't slowed, that hasn't stopped, as Sally was saying, right? So your next question around stale. Well, so the reps usually go back, and you'll reconfirm with the customer that, "Hey, are you still interested? Is this just a matter of timing or, you know, you don't have line of sight to the budget anymore, you're not interested," right? In which case, you would actually take things out of the funnel rather than just leave them in there. And you look at, as you pointed out, we look at what is the, you know, the staleness of the funnel and whether these things are actually going to happen or not, right?
So that's being evaluated, or actually, on a weekly basis by the sales team and the sales leadership.
Understood. And I think you used to disclose advanced pipeline.
Mm-hmm.
I'm curious, that advanced pipeline has also slowed down?
It has. Again, you know, so we were making... Here's how that works, right? The advanced pipeline are things where people either had line of sight to budget and definitely had interest, and that's, you know, and then they give you a timing of when that budget is coming through, so when they will want that instrument. There's certain probability of that pipeline converting in a particular quarter, and, you know, we did see the probabilities shift, and that's what caused us to rewire that. It's not that the pipeline shrunk, but the speed at which that pipeline converted actually did reduce for us in Q3 and Q4.
Gotcha. I think another question that comes up is, again, sort of related to this, price elasticity of demand. Because the X can do more, your existing 6,000 customers, perhaps they just need to purchase one X in lieu of up to 6,000 systems. Have you seen that? Like, when you see these customers buying X-
Yeah
... are they swapping out two existing systems with one X?
So not to our knowledge. And again, let's break this down into a few things, right? So one, let me start with, there are about 1,000 6K customers, of which about 75% have one X, right? So it's not—they're not gonna, you know, swap out two for one. The remainder do have multiple X's, and there's a distribution there of how many X's they have. Sorry, how many 6Ks they have. So of the people that are ordering, and you split that into research and clinical, right? On the clinical side, I'll reiterate what I said before, right? These are customers that will continue to utilize their 6Ks on validated assays, so it's not a swap there. They're adding X's to go after new assays, which are much more sequencing-intensive, right?
So either more samples or more sequencing per analysis or both. On the research side, you know, most of the demand we have seen are people that are very high sequencing users, and they had, you know, planned increases in sequencing activity for which they are moving to the X for those specific cohorts or specific types of analyses, right? The last thing I would say, yes, it is always possible that, you know, just buying an X just to do exactly the same amount of sequencing as you would have done before. That is a possibility. However, that's never played out in our history, right?
People buy instruments to do much more sequencing and, you know, given where we are in terms of penetration of our, the TAMs we plan, it's highly unlikely that one would say we are saturated when we're at less than 10% penetration into some of these very large TAMs.
Understood. And before we switch on to Grail and China, we'll save them towards the end. I just want to touch on margins. You know, your growth margins now, I think 65-66.
Yep.
Can it get back to, like, 70% where you were before, the macro issues?
Yeah, it can, and where it will, right? It is the growth margins this year. Remember, we had anticipated a decline in gross margins because of two things, right? One, your mix changed a little bit this year. Some more instruments, just again, being the first year of a major instrument launch. So that tends to pull down margins. The other thing that happened was that the margins on the X itself, the instrument and the consumables, are going to be lower than the 6K margins, again, you know, as we are wrapping up production. So both those were anticipated. There was a further impact, you know, because volumes were lower than expected, revenues were lower than expected. That tends to impact your gross margins because your absorption of the plants, your absorption of fixed costs is lower.
So, you know, that did impact the gross margins this year. We have corrected a lot of that and, you know, as going into next year, a lot of these factors start to turn. So you will see a sequential year-on-year margin improvement next year. And then, of course, we're taking additional measures to improve productivity, which should allow us to get back to those high 60s%-low 70s% gross margins over time. So I think that was most of your question, right?
I would just add, if you look back at 2017, 2018, when we launched the NovaSeq 6000-
Yeah.
We saw a similar fall off in gross margin, and then a recovery afterward for some of the same reasons that Joydeep's talking about now.
So, which was my follow-up question, right? So if I look at that last cycle, Salli, I think it took, like, four quarters for you to hit the, you know, from the bottom to get back to normalized. So, assuming, like, Q4 of 2023 is the bottom, should we apply a similar sort of full quarter to get back to normalized levels?
It depends a little bit on how the, you know, the macroeconomic situation is. That absorption factor will take a little bit longer to play out, but I think what you should expect is, you know, sequential improvement of gross margins as we get into next year and subsequent years.
Sequential, is that on a quarterly basis, Joydeep?
Well, generally, you should, but again, quarter on quarter, you know, Q4 tends to generally be the highest margins because you have the most volume in that last quarter. Obviously, this year is anomalous from that point of view, but in general, that's what you see, right? Q1 tends to be about the lowest in the year, and Q4 tends to be the highest. So I don't think I can tell you exactly which are you gonna get sequential growth, but for the next few quarters, I think you should see that sequential improvement.
Understood. Then, on margins, operating margins, right, if gross margins are, you know, that's a longer term, high 60s-70s, is there any reason why your operating margins for core Illumina can get back, like, 30%? And is there, like, a timeframe? Because at the end, I don't want a specific answer.
Yeah.
It's more, "Hey, it's like 5 or 10 years out," I think that would be-
Yeah
... a disappointment, right? How do you think about it?
I think you're absolutely right, right? And this is kind of has been our commitment that, you know, we do commit to operating leverage, and strong operating leverage going forward. And that would, you know, that comes from... So there's nothing structurally that prevents us from getting back into that, you know, the high 20s-30%, operating margin on the core, business side. So a couple of things on that front, right? Obviously, the efforts that we're driving to improve productivity, both R&D, but also OpEx productivity, the things that we're driving to improve gross margin, all of those help in the long run to get us back to those numbers.
The two things that we said we are not going to do is obviously try to accelerate that to the extent that it will harm our ability to sustain our technological leadership. So although you will see R&D productivity and R&D as a percentage of revenue come down over time, we're not gonna do that at a speed at which it impacts our ability to innovate and put products that are category defining. The second part is, you know, we take our ability to serve our customers in the geographies that we serve very, very seriously, right? So you're going to see us continue to invest on those fronts. Of course, we'll get more productive. We're obviously working on technology to allow us to serve these customers much more efficiently. You'll continue to see that.
But the timing is going to meter that out so that we continue to be able to serve our customers well.
Understood. I think you know, obviously with a lot of management change here, what's been Jacob's sort of priorities here in the first few months, and what is he doing that's different? What direction is he taking the company to?
So Jacob, Jacob's been around for about 60 days now. You know, obviously, this is a lot of time spent on ramping up and coming up to speed with our businesses, and it's been a great experience for me, right? Because I think part of it is him coming from the industry and having a knowledge of the NGS and, you know, life sciences and tools and diagnostics business, it's almost like we speak the same language, right? So it's the transition has been very very smooth until now, and it's you know and I don't see any reason for that to change.
He has been spending time, again, other than coming up to speed, he's already been jumping into portfolio reviews for what's in the pipeline for us, what decisions we're making on, the X and, and, near-term launches, and of course, into the budgeting process that we are in the midst of right now, right? So all those three are as expected. Also, he's started to think about his, you know, his sort of move on, on, modifying the strategy for us in the longer term, which areas he wants to us to focus on more, and, and less, right? So that's still work in progress that, we'll have to come back to you at some point next year.
Gotcha. And just, longer term, when you look at the business, is Illumina still a double top-line company when you think about that longer-term operating model?
Look, I think we have a market that is very large with very little penetration right now. So we are bullish on growth and, you know, our ability to continue to take our fair share of that growth in these markets. You know, we continue to believe in NGS to be able to transform how biology is done, both on the research and the clinical side, and we're doing everything we can to expand the utility of NGS in these markets, and especially Illumina NGS in these markets for our customers.
Understood. I think most of your peers have taken the view that first half 2024 will look very similar to back half of 2023, with some normalization in back half of 2024. But just given the X launch and the transition issues, you know, for Illumina, should fiscal 2024, should we see revenue growth? Are there any dynamics, like the plus and minuses, we should think of?
Yeah, so I think you're right. I like the rest of our peers, we see 2024 playing out similar to where 2023 was, right? For us, you know, the upsides really are around, you know, speeding up of transition to the X and, and, you know, the customer spending on more X's coming through, wrapping up. Because if they see the data on the 25B, they see a little bit more certainty in terms of their funding. So those things should be positives. There's obviously, we are dependent on, you know, somewhat our customers getting funded on the clinical side as well, right? And wrapping up on MRD and MSAT will be, you know, key drivers on that front as well. And then, you know, China, depending on whether it gets...
If it gets better, we should benefit from that as well. On the downside, it's, you know, pretty much the same factors, right? But it could go the other way. Anything that further clouds people's ability to spend on instruments, both on high throughput and mid throughput, will be a headwind, and China could be a further headwind, right? It's hard to predict what will happen in China. Clearly, we and others in our industry were wrong about how China would evolve in 2023, so we are monitoring the market carefully. We're making sure that we're serving our customers well, and we're evolving our strategy to play in China the right way going forward.
When you say fiscal 2024, similar to 2023, I think fiscal 2023 organic revenues-based business was down. Are we still looking at declines for 2024 or?
Yeah, so again, remember, this was, this was meant less to be a guidance.
Yeah.
We're not giving guidance at this point.
Yeah.
This was really... you know, consensus out there was for 10%+ growth in 2024, and we felt like we should at least, you know, make sure people are not running around with that expectation, right? So we will come back in February and give you a much cleaner look at what 2024 is going to look like. What Jacob, when he said it was, 2024 was gonna look, similar to 2023, was more in the dollar numbers, right? That, you know, we expect revenue to be, you know, roughly about, in the, in the range of what 2023 was.
Gotcha. And, assuming like gross margins, we see some expansion next year. So we should see some operating margin expansion. Is that a fair statement?
You'll see operating margin fairly close to where you or expect to see fairly close to where we are this year. And you're right, we do expect that gross margin will be higher, and we do expect that our, you know, our headcounts will be lower next year than they are this year, right? So those, the cost reductions that we took this year will be in effect next year on a full year basis. What's offsetting that really is the, you know, the variable compensation normalization that you will see going from this year into next year, and that's really the fact that this year we are not paying substantial portion of the variable compensation and the stock-based compensation that was due to our executives and our employees just because of our performance, right?
But next year we do expect to pay it if we hit our numbers, and that will be the headwind.
And should that variable comp reset offset the GMX and lower-
It does. Yeah, it does do that.
Okay, so flattish operating margins. Maybe last here on GRAIL. I know we were supposed to get a jurisdictional hearing at some point in Q4.
Mm-hmm.
What's the update on the hearing?
You're talking about the European Court of Justice?
Yeah.
Yeah, so that is still on track, I think, for mid-December-
Mm-hmm
... timeframe.
For the EU Court of Justice, and then we do have a decision coming up, we expect by the end of the year for the Fifth Circuit Court, FTC.
It's the FTC, yeah, FTC.
Okay. Okay, and then I think on third quarter, press release had, I think, mentioned a special committee on GRAIL.
Mm-hmm.
What... You know, who's on this committee, or what is this committee doing? Like, why do we need a special committee?
Yeah, so this is a special committee of the board on GRAIL. The idea, really, of this special committee was to expedite decision-making on several of the GRAIL issues, right? These are complex, these are, you know, evolving based on, you know, what we see from the from the European Commission, from the FTC, from some of the legal cases. So it was really to form a small committee that could get together on a more regular basis and make decisions or at least, you know, facilitate making decisions on some of these issues.
We haven't given the composition or the names of the people on the committee, but it is consisting of both new and old board members that have experience in divestitures, have experience in, you know, financial issues of this magnitude.
Gotcha. Maybe in the last minute here, I think in the past, you mentioned, strategic interest remains high in GRAIL. I think there's been skepticism on the street on, is that real? Like, shouldn't Illumina outlay like $1 billion plus of cash, like, you know, spin this off? Like, just elaborate on when you say strategic interest.
Yeah, so look, I wanna emphasize, right, it's early in the process. Even before the divestiture order came out, we had received inbound interest in GRAIL. But realistically, we are filing a Form 10 before the end of the year, so that really kicks off the ability for us to engage with others that have an interest in GRAIL, either through some sort of a sponsorship and a spin solution or an outright sale. And let's wait till that. I mean, that's the first time we'll know if there's a counterparty and, you know, to what extent there's interest in GRAIL.
Understood. And if the bears—the bear view was, look, there is no strategic interest in an-
Yeah
... asset like GRAIL because it's burning cash, your response would be, your response on that skepticism would be like, "That's, that couldn't be further from the truth?
At this point, I think we've... our advisors are telling us there is interest in the market, and there is interest in what GRAIL brings to the market, what GRAIL brings in its leadership in the MSAT space, right? But again, I mean, these are market-based transactions, so I would be remiss if I told you something here that jumped the gun a little bit on playing the process out.
Fantastic. I think with that, we're at the end of time. Joydeep, Salli-
Thanks.
Thank you for your time this morning.
Thanks, appreciate it.
Thank you.