Perfect. Good morning, everyone. This is Rachel Vatnsdal from the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team at J.P. Morgan. I'm joined today by Jacob from the Illumina team. So, as a reminder, this is a 40-minute session. The first half will be a prepared presentation, followed by roughly 20 minutes of Q&A. With that, Jacob, I will pass it off to you.
Thanks, Rachel, and to J.P. Morgan for hosting us at this conference, and to all of you for joining us today. I'm Jacob Thaysen, CEO of Illumina. All right, as a reminder, our presentation does include some forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures, and I encourage you all to spend time on this information in our SEC filing. I'll cover four areas today in our presentation. First, I will share my view of the business and the significant opportunity ahead for Illumina. Second, I will cover preliminary Q4 and full year 2024 results and provide some commentary on our outlook for 2025. Third, I will share the strong progress we've made against our new strategy to move from cost per gigabase to the highest quality insight for the lowest end-to-end cost. And fourth, I will talk about the path ahead and why we're incredibly excited about it.
Let's get started with the overview. Okay, over more than a quarter century, Illumina pioneered the growth of next-generation sequencing from a nascent technology to a foundational tool in biology. NGS has now become integral to the genomic research and clinical applications worldwide. Today, Illumina is operating from a position of global strength. In 2024 alone, more than 480 petabases of data was generated on our sequencers. That is equivalent to approximately an impressively five million whole genomes. Our leading technologies enable breakthrough research that is increasingly transitioning into clinical applications, and 56% of Illumina's sequencing consumables revenue now comes from clinical customers. Illumina's revenue is highly diversified across products, markets, and geographies. This powers a strong business model, healthy free cash flow generations, and a solid balance sheet, providing flexibility to continue to drive the genomics market forward.
I've shared that we believe that over the next decade, NGS will become broadly adopted and have an even more significant impact. NGS will be deeply embedded in healthcare and will provide the highest quality of insight to ensure patients are given the most effective personalized care. In addition, sovereign nations will embrace whole genome sequencing, moving truly from sick care into healthcare. The power of NGS will unlock deeper insights in multiomics, by multiomics. And finally, AI-powered cohorts of whole genome sequence multiomics data will provide insights that will help transform our partners' drug discovery going forward. Illumina is uniquely positioned to provide this value at scale. We're working towards shifting the industry from a sole focus on cost per gigabase towards what really impacts customers: obtaining the highest quality insight for the lowest end-to-end cost. Therefore, Illumina's long-term market opportunity remains significant.
Of the more than $125 billion total addressable market, only $10 billion is today served by NGS. Illumina is engaged in many tangible near-term drivers of sequencing activity across both the research and the clinical markets. For the clinical market, penetration will increase as genomics becomes the standard of care for therapy selection, early detection, and MRD, and also expand into other disease types. The research market will increasingly focus on understanding diseases through the lens of additional multiomics that require high-intensity sequencing and much many more samples. Illumina will continue to lead the ecosystem through relentless innovation and partnering. Moving along to our high-level Q4 and full year 2024 results, as well as our preliminary 2025 outlook. Illumina delivered a Q4 result that exceeded our expectations, primarily driven by greater and, as expected, NovaSeq X Plus shipments.
Core revenue for Q4 was approximately $1.1 billion, up approximately 1% from the prior year, with non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 19.7% for the quarter. Illumina non-GAAP EPS was in the range of $0.91-$0.93. You can see the full year results also here. I'm incredibly proud of what the Illumina team accomplished in 2024. Our innovation and product launches, customer centricity, and focus on operational excellence have driven significant progress towards our refresh strategy for returning to growth. Our ability to improve margins, even under tough market conditions, showcases the essence of the new Illumina operating model, and you'll see more of that going forward, and our focus on innovation will continue to be underpinned by spending time with our customers and partners to share insights and support their ambitions. For 2025, we expect revenue growth in the low single-digit percentage range on a constant currency basis.
On a reported basis, we expect revenue in the range of $4.28 billion-$4.4 billion. We're planning for a non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 23%, a 170 basis point improvement from 2024, as we continue on the focus on operational excellence. And with the continued focus also on below the line, we expect approximately 10% non-GAAP EPS growth. This preliminary outlook for 2025 is based on the current macroeconomic conditions and environment, and we do not attempt to reflect any potential changes in legislation. We will provide the full year guidance for 2025 in our Q4 and full year 2024 earnings call, which is scheduled for February 6th. During our strategy update in August, we set a path to achieve several key financial targets by 2027: high single-digit growth, 500 basis point of operating margin expansion, and double-digit to teens EPS growth for 2025 through 2027.
We have already made meaningful progress towards them. 2024 was a solid initial step, and 2025 will bring us even closer to these goals. While we remain well on track, 2027 is not the end of the journey. We're just getting started. Our pipeline is full of exciting innovations that are building on the foundation to enable us to grow beyond what we're looking to accomplish in the near term. We've also been executing on our capital allocation strategy. Our first priority remains investing back into our business for driving growth and improving capabilities and productivity. We have a robust innovation pipeline that spans investment in sequencing platforms, multiomics technologies, and a range of services, software, and data offerings. Second, our M&A strategy will be focusing on bolt-on acquisitions that can expand our addressable markets. We also expect to continue bolstering our ecosystem with strategic investments, partnerships, and our initiatives.
Third, we intend to maintain a solid balance sheet and an investment-grade credit rating, and finally, our share buybacks aim to be non-deductible over time, with the potential of additional opportunistic buybacks. We're excited to resume our share buybacks following the August strategy update. Over the remainder of 2024, we bought back approximately $116 million of stock in aggregate. Now, I would like to review our refresh strategy, where we have our focus and also what will drive near-term growth. We continue to expect three key drivers to return Illumina to high single-digit growth by 2027. In the next few slides, I'll go through each of them. The NovaSeq X is delivering on the promise of setting a new standard for NGS that enables deeper and high-quality sequencing and serves as the platform of the future for multiomics.
We placed 91 X systems in Q4 alone, and a pull-through for the X averaged $1.3 million per instrument in 2024. We're making strong progress with the transition to the NovaSeq X. By the second half of this year, we should see approximately 75% of total high-throughput gigabase shift and approximately 50% of total high-throughput consumables revenue to be now on the X. And as more sequencing volume moves to the X, the impact of the reduced pricing lessens. And we expect to see a higher portion of the volume translate into true revenue growth. And as you're aware, we announced the MiSeq i100 last October. We started shipping in December and placed more than 70 instruments before year-end. Customers are excited to expand their applications with faster answers.
And some are even planning to use the MiSeq i100 to test experiments before running them at scale on the NovaSeq X. We'll be sharing more details in the upcoming earnings call. The growth in data sequenced over the past couple of years shows that our customers are truly using the X for deeper and broader sequencing. The X Series will continue to serve as the foundation for growth in sequencing volume. This underpins my confidence in our high-throughput consumables growth. Customers have been excited about breakthroughs in multiomics Illumina has under development. These solutions are poised to deliver the highest quality insight for the lowest end-to-end cost. As an example, the KOLs we've introduced, constellation mapped read , haven't just shared their positive feedback. They are thrilled with this technology. It's helping them to see an unprecedented level of information with substantially simplified workflow.
With constellation, KOLs have been able to detect large structural variants that were previously very challenging to see with short reads. One KOL shared that until constellation, it has actually been impossible with any technology to detect the most common causes of hemophilia A in boys. We have now made that possible. We're also very excited about Illumina's proteomics solution, which we've jointly developed with Standard BioTools and are launching in the first half of this year. Illumina's protein solution provides a true complete end-to-end solution for proteomics with easier automated workflow than other on-market products. With 9,000 protein panels, this is the largest orthogonal validated NGS proteomics panel in the industry. Recent publications have highlighted promising data that shows that this significantly outperforms other on-market NGS proteomics products with respect to precision and reproducibility, with impressive median coefficient of variation of less than 5% across all 9,000 proteins.
This is not only impressive, but essential for identifying clinically relevant targets and insights. We are getting ready for prime time, and I believe that Illumina's proteomics solution will become the standard going forward. I encourage you to attend the Standard BioTools presentation on Thursday to hear more about the impressive performance innovations in the SomaScan technology that powers the Illumina proteomics solutions. All Illumina solutions are supported by Illumina's advanced software stack that customers can use for integrated workflows across a range of multiomics applications. We're just super excited to see what benefits our customers can unlock with these technologies. With the X and our best-in-class DRAGEN software suite, we've made sequencing even more accessible. Services and multiomics data from our customers' population studies, as well as drug discovery, support our third key growth driver.
We believe these efforts have significant potential to evolve the broader ecosystem and enable higher volume of sequencing. We're partnering with leading players to broaden our reach into the intersection of technology, healthcare, and pharma. You've seen examples in our and others' announcements even yesterday. This partnership will enable our customers to generate more detailed data and richer insights. So I'm very excited for the path ahead. Illumina has a great foundation to work from and clear plans to go after the next wave of innovation in our ecosystem. We're already partnering with the ecosystem and collaborating closely with our customers, and we'll continue to ensure that the innovation roadmap is directly linked to their plans. We will return to growth in 2025. The NovaSeq X Series is key to unlocking more and larger sequencing projects and will drive the majority of growth in this year.
The addition of multiomics and our increased focus on service, software, and data will add further layers of growth as we move into 2026 and 2027. We're on track to step back to high single-digit growth revenue and 26% operating margin for 2027 and fund EPS growth in the double-digit to teens range. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate you joining the presentation today, and I also look forward to seeing many of you in the coming days and, of course, at our Q4 and full year earnings call in February. Thank you.
Perfect. Thank you, Jacob. So maybe first off, I wanted to ask on some of the announcements that we received from you guys earlier this week. Most notably, you announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to improve the analysis of multiomics data and accelerate some of the developments within clinical research. So can you elaborate on the first phase of this collaboration and discuss some of your specific goals with the partnership? Additionally, how do you see this really aligning with Illumina's long-term plan and long-term goals?
Yeah, thanks for that, Rachel, and I'm super excited by the relationship and the announcement we've come out with, both with NVIDIA, but certainly also with Truveta, and there will be all announcements coming out, but as I mentioned in our presentation, we truly believe that what we have done over the last few decades is Illumina have really set the standard for sequencing, but there's now an opportunity to really move into multiomics to really understand and transform our understanding on biology, but the amount of data that goes into this is just enormous, and the complication of actually analyzing that, I think no human can actually sit in front of their computer and do so with an Excel sheet, so the AI is going to be tremendously important to do so, and that's really where the relationship with NVIDIA is going to be powerful.
We've already built great tools on the DRAGEN platform, but now working with NVIDIA both to bring the DRAGEN onto the GPU platforms and CPUs and, of course, where we are today on the FPGA, but to ensure that all customers, whatever platform they have or whatever technology they have, will be able to address it. But secondly, also getting the tools that NVIDIA has been working on for building foundational models, make them available in our platform so customers can get access to this. We really want to make sure that our customers, especially in the research environment today, get access to the best tools so they can build what we call foundational models and really to have a deeper, much deeper insight on biology, and I'm excited about that.
I think we will all sit here in a few years and think back and see this is the starting of a new era. I think this is going to change how we think about healthcare, how we think about treatments, but also drug discovery, and, of course, going from sick care into healthcare, so there's a lot there, but we're just getting started.
Perfect. Then I wanted to dig into some of the pre-announcement numbers that you just unveiled for us. So in 4Q, you mentioned that you shipped 91 NovaSeq X instruments. The guidance in the back half really assumed the placements would be higher than the first half placements of 117. That backs into a 60 instrument placement guide that you guys had at 4Q. So obviously, you crushed that number. So can you walk us through what really drove those expectations? What drove the beat in the quarter? Was there anything from a reagent rental type of model that we should be aware of, or how were you able to achieve the 91 placements?
Well, first of all, and I will have Ankur stepping in here also, but first of all, we're super excited about the results, and we're super excited about seeing customers really have a planning for 2025 and continue the transition onto the X platform. As we talked about and showed in the presentation, is that we do see that moving to the X is driving significant more volume. So I'm excited to see that more customers are adopting Xs. But it's not only new customers. It's also customers that already done work on one or two Xs are now buying five packs or 10 packs of Xs. So we're seeing really that progress. But Ankur, you want to step further into this?
Yeah. So again, very, very pleased with the performance there, Rachel. 91 was the number which is well beyond our expectations as well as we've been talking about it. But the two things that kind of look very, very promising to us, one, I've always said throughout this that we've had a very robust pipeline for our instrumentation. And embedded in our guide was a thinking that the deal flow and the deal closure process has been elongated throughout the first three quarters of the year. And we couldn't really take a call on what will we see during the end of the year. What we saw in this push was actually a pretty sizable interest from our clinical customers, where several of our clinical customers bought multiple units of X together.
And as part of our discussions, we've been having discussions with a lot of our clinical customers around newer applications that are in development, like MRD, et cetera. And for us, this is more a signal around capacity addition that some of our customers are now making in preparation for what they are planning for their next year, et cetera. So it was good to see that come through. The deal closure rates were better than we anticipated. And yeah, we're having very good conversations with our clinical customers there.
Perfect. Then shifting to the consumable side of the equation then. In 3Q, you mentioned that you were expecting that sequencing consumables would actually decline sequentially, just given some of the seasonality and holiday season. So can you walk us through what was some of the color on what you saw from a consumable trend intra-quarter? If we do some back-of-the-napkin math on 91 placements on NovaSeq in 4Q, getting to like $720 million-$730 million of consumables revenue, is that the right ballpark? Or if not, correct me, where am I wrong?
Yeah, again, I mean, you're right. I mean, Q4 for us is always a little bit slower in consumables, not slower overall, but there's simply just less working days. People are enjoying the holiday breaks. And of course, our consumables is a run rate. So we do normally see that we have a sequential step down. So that was as expected. Ankur, maybe you want to provide some more insights on that also?
Yeah. To contextualize on the consumables for the X, where we've been going through the transition from 6K, especially within the high throughput, and then overall, we've seen very, very good transition throughout the year. What we've also seen is that the underlying sequencing activity has remained quite robust throughout the year. In the first three quarters, we talked about it being up 30%-40%. During Q4, as we looked at the activity, it has remained strong, although all the specifics of that we'll talk about during the earnings call, et cetera. But the underlying demand and the running of the instruments was quite robust. We'd call during the earnings call, during our guidance, that we do anticipate volumes to be lower in Q4, and it kind of played out that way.
Between Thanksgiving all the way up to Christmas, you see a kind of reduction in the actual utilization, the actual run of the tests. So it kind of fell in the ranges of where we were anticipating and guiding as well. It kind of, if you look at the instruments and the overall underlying demand, still sets us up quite well as we look into 2025.
Helpful. One trend that I think we've been getting asked about a lot is just NIH funding, given the new administration. So I wanted to see, first up, have you seen any shift in customer behavior intra-quarter since the new administration was elected? And then also, what are your thoughts in regards to funding as we look to next year for academic and government customers as well?
Yeah, overall, I mean, remember also the budgets for NIH and us are set in the fall. So we don't see actually a lot of changes in 2025. But we also expect that even though there will be considerations and, of course, the new administration will look into all types of funding, the areas that we are within, both genomics but also multiomics, are areas that actually likely will see increased funding. So even though that the overall NIH budget might be under pressure, and I think we're more positive today than maybe a few weeks ago, a few months ago, we don't think that it's going to change a lot. But there will be puts and takes with the new administrations coming in. Honestly, we have seen a lot of curveballs over the last five years.
I don't think this is a bigger challenge for us than what we can overcome.
Perfect. So maybe along those same lines then, just in terms of the 2025 guidance, you laid out low single digits today. Can you walk us through what are the underlying assumptions on that, given some of the uncertainty that we have around things like NIH? So walk us through, how do you really get confidence in that low single digit, and what does it assume from a market perspective?
Yeah, overall, as you mentioned also in the market perspective, we don't assume any changes in the macroeconomic environment, but we don't assume any changes in legislation either. So that's on the highest level. If we take one step further also, as I was also mentioning, it's still a transition year from the X. So we're still seeing the impact of, of course, the pricing reduction we took on the X. And now the volume is coming out, but we also see 2025 being a transition year. And thereby, even though we expect to see positive volume revenue growth on consumables, it's still not to the level that corresponds to the actually underlying volume. But as I was also mentioning, by mid this year, we expect to have 75% of all volume on the X and 50% of the revenue.
So we certainly will start to see more of a positive impact on the growth from consumable volume onto revenue. You want to go a little further into the details?
Yeah, I'll add a couple more things around the X transition. So Jacob has alluded to 2025 will still, at least the first half and some part of the second half, would still be the year of transition, which is embedded within our guidance. But if you step back up from thinking about 2025 for the company, we're very well positioned overall to be able to continue to drive the trends both within genomics as well as within the multi-omic space. We've talked about several new product launches, some in early access versus the new ones. Either in the core genome, we've talked about constellation long reads. We're getting a lot of interest from our customers, as well as in the multiomics on the single cell and the proteomic side.
So that positions us well, more especially in the research side, wherever the funding movements, if they happen, kind of positions us with the newer technologies for driving research. And then at the macro level, the geopolitical side probably is a factor that we'll continue to watch for to see how it evolves with the new administration coming in and see what actual policies actually do get in place and how do they impact the business. So considering those is how we're thinking about the next year. We've had, again, a very, very strong Q4 from an X installations perspective that gives us good confidence in the overall transition and the confidence that our customers are placing in our multiomics strategy, thinking about how X can be used in more ways than just running their genomic samples.
Perfect. That's helpful. Then along the same lines, just in terms of the 2025 numbers that you gave us, you pointed towards operating margins of roughly 23% for the year as a guidance number. I believe that's about 170 basis points relative to the 500 basis point target that you guys had laid out at your analyst update earlier this summer. So walk us through, how should we think about the levers to get to that operating margin expansion this year? How much of it is driven by things like gross margin and some of the pricing dynamics at play versus some of the other OpEx things that are in your own control as well?
Yeah, I think first and foremost, we're super excited about what we also did here in 2024 and proved to ourselves, but also to everyone else, that even in tough market conditions, that Illumina can actually improve margins, and that speaks to the effort we put into what we call operational excellence, but really a very strong focus in the organization to really drive on all elements in the business, on how we do things better. I truly believe that a great company is always focusing on that. It doesn't matter whether you are growing faster or the market is growing faster or slow. You always need to be focusing on doing things better every day.
And the energy that actually goes into that, but the excitement that comes out of that, when I started to push that into the company, there's a little bit of that, oh, this is about cost cutting. But it's all about actually driving more efficiency and actually bringing more enjoyment in the work because nobody wants to be unproductive. Nobody wants to waste time on things that are not actually optimized and not work the way it should be. So we're now starting to see that the organization is really getting started and really coming up with ideas how we can do things even better. And we have a whole program around that. I won't go into details, but a lot of the improvements we're seeing in 2025 also will be driven by operational excellence.
I mean, the growth of where we are expecting is simply not strong enough to drive the overall margin improvement. So a lot will be driven by operational excellence.
That's right. And across all lines of the P&L, it'll be in gross margin as well as in the operating expenses. But I would want to just add and close on that. Despite all the margin expansion, we will still continue to invest both in innovation as well as expansion of the broader genomic ecosystem. Just saw a couple of announcements yesterday. We're investing in Truveta. We're working with NVIDIA as we continue to expand what really is a possibility of taking the power of genomics into the hands of all the researchers as well as clinicians across the world. And we'll continue to invest while expanding margins.
Maybe just last question on 2025, I promise. Just in terms of the placement number that you guys did this quarter, 91 placements, how should we think about that impacting the trajectory of placements for NovaSeq as we head into 2025?
Yeah, I think we're getting a little ahead of ourselves if we say 91 times 4 for 2025. We don't expect that. We were super pleased with the end of the year. We also know that Q4 is always the strongest quarter from instrument placement. So we're excited about that. But we don't expect that that will be the level going into next year. In fact, we do expect maybe to see a lower level into 2025 of placements.
Yeah, we'll probably work through the details of that guidance during earnings. Too early to work through all of those specifics. But I'd say very, very happy with where the placement numbers have landed for the year.
Maybe then shifting over to some of your long-term targets that you unveiled a few months ago here. You talked about how there's various levers to get to that high single-digit growth target in 2027. Obviously, you laid out low single digits today in 2025. But help us understand what that ramp should look like, especially exiting this year. How close are we going to get to that high singles? Is 2026 still kind of a recovery year? Do we hit it at some point in that in terms of the high singles? Walk us through the assumptions there.
Yeah, so if you just look at just one of the slides also that showed that coming from out of 2024 with a growth of negative a few percent and now going into mid-single-digit, low single-digit growth, you actually see a good step up in the growth numbers. And thereby, we expect to see similar steps into the following years. And most of that still is driven by us now having transitioned in 2026 most of the volume to the X and thereby seeing substantially more translation of the revenue growth from volume to revenue growth from the consumables. So we expect to see, but this is not a step function, anything like that. It's a continuous movement. And that's why we are expecting that we will continue to improve over 2026 and 2027.
As we also mentioned is that in 2026 and 2027, we also believe that we are layering off new growth drivers like the multiomics start to take power. This year, we're launching the proteomics solution, so we're excited about that. There's also coming single cell out, and there will be other things coming out over the next period of time that will start to drive growth, but it won't be meaningful before 2026 and 2027. Then we also established the new organization, SAGA which is really focusing on driving our array business, our service businesses going forward, which we also start to expect to have impacts in those years, so these components are the growth driver for us in the near future.
But again, we also think that 2027 was a milestone we set out there that we wanted to have everybody to see that, look, we're getting back to high single-digit growth and to strong margins. But we're just getting started. This is not the end. This is not saying that this is how we're going to be. We, of course, want to perform much stronger going forward.
Yeah, for sure. One other thing, just when I'm looking back at some of the strategy update slides from earlier this year, constellation reads were not actually mentioned a ton. And obviously now, that I think was a key highlight from the presentation today. So can you walk us through what changed? How did that get so exciting over the last five to six months here? And then what are your assumptions? You mentioned that you're going to commercial launch on constellation in 2026. What are your assumptions from a pricing strategy standpoint on that as well?
Yeah, we did actually mention in the strategy update. We didn't call it constellation at that point. We called it Comprehensive Genome, and we gave a little bit of insights. But what excited about that technology is that we set out a few years ago to eliminate sample prep, so really make sure that customers could go from sample onto the flow cell and load the flow cell within a few minutes, and in fact, I tried it. It actually works. I think all of you here in the audience can actually do it. It's super, extremely simple. But what turned out when you do that and when you have that simplicity, you also have very high quality DNA. You have not fragmented your DNA.
So you come in with very long reads of DNA that sits along long fragments of DNA up to a billion base pairs that actually sits on the flow cell. And now, because we also have actually a camera in the instrument, if you take a picture, you can actually associate your reads with the place they are actually on the DNA. And it turned out that, and this was our bioinformatics people that realized that, with that, you can actually now get much higher quality insights. So you can now start to see structural variants. You can see phasing and other things that you couldn't do with short reads before. So in fact, now, and that's why we call it the Comprehensive Genome, is that you get all the insights that you actually want from the genome with this technique. So you get the best of all worlds.
That's why I really love it as an example of where we say highest quality insights with low end to end. You get very, very simple sample prep, and you get comprehensive insights on your genome. We believe this is going to be the standard of the genome going forward. So we're excited about that. We have more. There's so much interest for that right now that we can't work with all the researchers and clinicians that actually want to look at this right now. And we're just getting ready. It's just getting us mature enough to get into with the technology to get into 2026. So I'm excited about the, and that's just one example. Then we have many other things coming out.
Perfect. Maybe just on the NovaSeq X transition, you've talked about some of the data points there and how we're working through some of the pricing headwinds associated with that transition. How do you expect that transition to impact 2025 expectations at this point?
Ankur.
Yeah, I think at the highest level, just to again contextualize for everyone, we just said roughly about 60%, over 60% of the volume has now transitioned over. During the year, our thinking is still the same that we should have the impact of the transition as higher during the first half. And by the time we get to the second half, the pricing impact on the transition should begin to reduce, given that a larger set of the customers of the volume should have moved to X. That's progressing quite well. The pace during Q4 was also quite robust. And our discussions across most of our customers who are trying to take advantage of moving on to X to be able to drive significantly higher volumes and take advantage of the lower sequencing cost is very, very high, as is evidenced by the instruments as well.
So, 2025, generally thinking half one higher impact, half two, it should begin to abate. We should begin to see signs of that reduced impact.
Perfect. Then just competition. I think this is an area that we get a lot of investor questions on, especially in that mid-throughput market. You alluded to some of this on your 3Q call as well. So can you talk about how is Illumina addressing some of the global competitive pressures in that mid-throughput market? And can you remind us of some of the strategies that you're implementing to differentiate your offerings in that segment?
Yeah, I think first of all, I mean, there's competition out there. There's always been competition in NGS. I think Illumina have proven over again and again that we will come out very strong. Actually, I think that competition is just improving our performance internally. I've said that before. So I didn't think that we were spending enough time on focusing on that. I do think that all companies, all individuals are becoming better as an athlete or as a company. When you know you're up against competition, it just sharpens your thinking. And so I really like that. And I think it drives a lot of energy into an organization. And I think that should be a part of a DNA in the company. I also think that there will always be competition here. As I said, there's been competition.
There's a little more competition now than we've seen maybe a few years ago, but what we are seeing in the mid-throughput is that we still win many deals in that space, and we are very excited about that. Our strategy, as we came out with the XLEAP chemistry here in this year, so we came out with a new chemistry that actually with a higher performance, but also to a lower price point, is certainly resonating with our customers. And I think they have really, it has really repositioned our mid-throughput solutions very, very strongly. We were also recently coming out with the MiSeq i100 that, yes, it is a low throughput, but with actually higher capacity, so it actually pushes up into the mid-throughput arena also.
With a very, very simplified workflow, extreme ease of use, very fast turnaround time, but also that you have both your shipping and storage of reagents and our consumables now can be done with room temperature. Actually, not many of you in the audience here is probably in the lab every day. If you're in the lab, and if you are, you have freezers, you have a lot of logistics that goes into because you have to go into the freezer, you have to put things into the freezer, you have to take it out maybe a day in advance, the consumables in order to prepare for the run. Now where you have eliminated all that, first of all, you have more space for more sequencers, but you can actually take and run your sequences immediately. The MiSeq i100 is setting a new standard.
This is what we're going to do for all our platforms going forward. MiSeq i100 is pushing up towards mid-throughput. The new chemistry we have on with the XLEAP chemistry is also providing a much more stronger competitive positioning. That's just an innovation front. We're doing many other things from a commercial arena also.
Maybe as a follow-up to that, I think innovation was also one of the key themes from the strategy update. So can you elaborate on some of your current R&D priorities going forward? You just mentioned some of the product launches that you've done as a result of that. But are there any specific areas that we should be looking out for Illumina?
First of all, we have spent a lot of energy over the past year while I've been here to really talk to our customers, provide them insights on our roadmaps, and have the dialogue around what is important to them. So we ensure that our roadmap is fully aligned with their expectations and what they're looking for. That is number one key. And that means that we will, and as I mentioned before, we are moving from cost per gigabase into highest quality insights with low end-to-end cost. What does that mean? That it's much more application focused. That in the end, customers are not looking for a sequencer. They're looking for an application, and they want us to help them be successful applications. So you will see us having a much more broader perspective.
And you're seeing that with the proteomics solutions that is an end-to-end single cell. It will be an end-to-end whole genome with the constellation end-to-end solution. So there'll be much more focusing on that. But we will focus both on the genomics area, but also multiomics. And informatics is almost still the best kept secret in the industry about our extreme position and our software stack that is really, really differentiated in the market space. So we will continue to that with the mindset of solutions, whole solutions that the customers are looking to in the end become heroes and do what they need to do in their laboratories.
Perfect. With that, that is a great ending point because we are out of time. So.
Thank you, Rachel.
Jacob, Ankur, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you.