All right, good afternoon, everybody. This is Doug Schenkel from Wolfe Research. It's my pleasure to welcome Emily Leproust, Twist's CEO, and Adam Laponis, the company's Chief Financial Officer. Thanks to the two of you for being here. I know it was a quick turnaround with, it feels like it was a while ago, but I think earnings were Friday, right? I appreciate you doing this just a couple of days later. I think most folks who are listening or in the room know this, but at its core, Twist has built a platform that enables it to build high-quality, customizable DNA, RNA, and proteins in a way that is very attractive for different customers. Over the years, the company has grown to now service a wide variety of customers ranging from academic researchers, clinical diagnostic companies, biopharmaceutical companies, industrial chemical companies.
I'll stop, but the platform has been leveraged in many different ways. Before going further, thank you both for being here. We really appreciate the opportunity to chat. To give everybody a framework for the next half an hour, I want to start by talking about the state of the company and, to be very direct about it, look at the disconnect between what I think has been a series of good quarterly updates where I think the two of you are really happy with how things are going. When you look at the stock chart, there's a big disconnect. I want to talk a little bit about that. Related to that, I would then want to talk about some loose-end questions on the fourth quarter and how you're thinking about 2026.
The last couple of things I want to talk about are really, and I'm looking because I don't want to mess up the new name of the segment, but I do want to talk about NGS, what's going on with some of your customers there and how we should think about the long-term opportunity. Maybe more importantly, or just as importantly, I want to talk about, I abbreviated it to the synthesis and solutions segment, but really to talk about how things are going there as well. That is the roadmap. Again, I think when we look at how you're tracking relative to consensus expectations, how you're tracking relative to guidance, you've been exceeding target really for all of last year. Yet the stock is down, I think, over 40% year -to- date.
To really just cut to the chase because there does seem to be a big disconnect. What do you think the street is missing right now?
Yeah. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for the setup. Really loved this conference, first time, but if we're invited again, we'll come back.
Absolutely. You can always come back. Now, if I ask really direct questions, you may not know, but I appreciate it.
You're right. I should reserve judgment till the end.
Yeah, we'll see how this goes.
That's right. Business is doing really well, as you mentioned. If you look at the top line, we're at $99 million in Q4. If you look at for the year, $376.6 million. If you go back to the guidance in November last year, that was a high point in the economy. Everybody thought that 2025 would be an economic boom. Even though it's been a difficult environment because of funding, tariffs, and so on, we exceeded our initial guidance by, I think, $7 million in the midpoint. Even in a tough environment, and that's what we do, we're able to do well and exceed. If you look at gross margin, not only last year, but over the last two years, we've grown 20 percentage points of margin, which is really hard to do.
When we said we would do it, I think not everybody believed we could, but we always knew that we could, and we've done it. The third thing that we manage is our adjusted EBITDA break-even. We're not quite at zero yet, but a loss of $8 million last quarter. You can squint that if we keep growing, as we said we would, and maintain gross margin above 50%, then we'll be able to get to adjusted EBITDA break-even in Q4 of 2026. Yes, business is doing really well. It's not an accident. We have dominating technology. We are employing commercial violence to drive those growth. If you compare to our peers in the tools space, our peers are not doing well. If you look at Azenta, IDT, they're barely at zero, sometimes below zero of growth.
Even probably our more competent competitor, GenScript, we're still growing double of their growth rate. Not only are we doing well in a tough environment, but we also are taking share. In terms of what is the street missing, unfortunately, and I'm sure we'll touch on it, there's noise around this one NGS customer that is transitioning from a clinical trial to commercial ramp. That makes for two difficult numbers. One is a Q4 to Q1 sequential drop in NGS, and two, maybe a guidance for NGS for the year, 2026, that maybe is a bit less than was expected, even though we're well within consensus for the guide. If you subscribe this one customer, we were just shy of 20% for the year in NGS, and we'll be just shy of 20% for FY 2026.
At the end of the day, you're only as good as others say you are. Our goal is to deliver and exceed our guide for 2026. We think we set up a prudent guide to enable potential upside.
That's helpful. I know, Adam, as we were sitting here, I was talking about the quick turnaround from last week's earnings results. You got the 10-K out over, I guess, over the weekend, but this morning. It'd be nice to give you a little bit of a break, but we're not going to. I think the thing I'm thinking about as I'm leading into this question is you did hint on the quarterly call that we're going to start getting more disclosures on customer groups and I think a few other metrics as well. Can you share a little bit more about what metrics you are going to share? I do think, at least in my humble opinion, one of the challenges is I think investors are looking for more detail on exactly where the growth is coming from in the two segments.
Long-winded way of saying or asking, what new disclosures are we going to be getting starting fiscal Q1?
I'm happy to talk a little bit about it and also maybe even add some color on the category, and I can talk to that as well. When I look at the, one of the things we think is underappreciated is just the strength in the business in various industry segments. Updating that to reflect the therapeutic space, which reflects a lot of what's going on in the DNA synthesis and protein solutions. A large number of those customers are playing into therapeutic development. Looking at diagnostics and just the size of the scope of the diagnostics, as well as looking at the OEM and distributor elements for business, I think that's underappreciated as well. We think those will be helpful markers. Obviously, identifying where academic and government sits and how the breakdown between the two product segments works in that will be insightful, I think.
Those areas are kind of the foundational. We do get a lot of questions like, well, hey, how is it? We looked at the number of genes shipped, and we look at the revenue. We back into an ASP. A lot of what we say is that pricing driving it is other things. We are being thoughtful on how we go about it, but we are thinking about what kind of insights can we give that neutralize for some of the other elements that actually we like. We talk a lot about human genes are oftentimes shorter. We price on a per base pair. If you are doing research for shorter genes, you are buying a 1 kB gene versus a 3 kB gene, we do not have a, we do not look at the ASP on the gene. We look at the price per base pair.
How do we neutralize for that and give insights at that level to actually help give investors more information around that, as well as how are we doing on the diagnostic side of the business in terms of the penetration and growth in terms of the number of assays?
Emily, can I ask you one higher level question before we move to just a couple of loose ends on the fourth quarter and 2026 guidance? Over the last few years, the industry had to get more disciplined because of the environment. Essentially, the term responsible growth became front and center. You guys have done a great job of growing and, to your point, getting to the point where free cash flow positivity is only a few quarters away. Do you feel like there's anything you've had to compromise on as you've made that transition?
Oh, yeah. I mean, definitely. There's only so many cycles of R&D. And if you look from, and Adam may correct my number, but from 2022 to 2025, we have flat OpEx. Actually, OpEx went down $1 million. At the same time, we grew revenue 85%. And gross margin went from less than 30% to more than 50%. But that was the right thing to do. That's what running a disciplined team is. And we have so many cycles of R&D. And we have more ideas than we have money. And so we definitely have to compromise and make choices. And for instance, over the last few years, we've had to make efforts to engineer cost out of our process. And that's one of the things that has enabled us to get to that 50% gross margin.
Any cycles that you put in cost engineering, we are not putting into revenue growth. Definitely, that's one of the rebalancing that now we have the opportunity to make. That's where the 50%, we never want to go back, but we do not have to juice up the gross margin. Actually, the investment is better suited by investing in revenue growth. There are no regrets. We had to do it. When we looked at the math of getting to agility beta break-even and then cash flow break-even, the math does not math if we are not at 50% gross margin. We had to do it. Very, very glad we did. We have learned a lot. Now we can refocus some of those R&D efforts.
If you drive a car with a turbo, as you know, you put pedal to the metal, and it does not go right away. There is a little bit of latency before the turbo kicks in. We have done that transition. There is going to be a little bit of latency. All of the revenue we are going to get in 2026, most of the R&D is done. The R&D was done in 2025. The effort that we do in 2026 will fully pay off in 2027 and beyond.
Yeah. I think it's important, again, in my humble opinion, because I remember pre-IPO how many opportunities you talked about that could basically, you could leverage the investment you made in the platform, how many things you could do with that. I think a disproportionate amount of your R&D had to go towards gross margin optimization. Now that you're above 50%, to your point, you can lean in again. If that's the right way of thinking about it, we won't hold you to this. If we look out five years, and we're sitting here today, and there's the synthesis and solutions business, there's the NGS business, both are roughly $150 million-$200 million businesses coming out of last year. Five years from now, is there something we're not even thinking about that is going to generate $100 million-$150 million in revenue? Is that a possibility given what you've built?
Yeah, it's possible. That's what we want is to give us optionality. We don't have an R&D for NGS and an R&D for DNA synthesis and protein solution. It's kind of blended. Depending on market dynamics, depending on opportunities, we may push more on one or another. The key for us is it used to be that a new dollar in synbio was better than a dollar in NGS. Through our gross margin effort, now the gross margin is about the same in both. We can drive. The growth in the new segment of DNA synthesis and protein solution is as financially attractive as the growth in NGS. We're going to be opportunistic to follow opportunities. I can give an example.
A year ago, there's a conference called PEGS, and it's in Lisbon, and it's the antibody conference of the year in Europe. For the first time, we saw an opportunity that was new to us, which was companies, pharma companies that were discovering antibodies, they didn't want the DNA. They did not want the protein. They wanted the data. We had two groups. We had a group in Portland, Oregon, that could synthesize protein and synthesize DNA and express proteins. We have a group in Boston where that was discovering our own antibody for customers, doing a service that customers were asking, and we had characterization capabilities. When we saw the opportunity, we joined the two. We said that there was, from 2024 to 2025, there was more than $25 million order growth from those AI companies.
That is the kind of company we are where a year ago before that conference, we did not even know that we were going to sell this SKU that would be one of the fastest growing SKU in the company. When we saw the opportunities, we saw that we had it. We were pragmatic and made it happen. To your point, it could be that in five years, that data becomes a much bigger piece than the rest of the company. It could be that something else happens between now and the next five years. I think the good thing about Twist is that we are very adaptable. We are very technical. We are close to the customer. When things happen, we can lean in.
At the end of the day, the decision about do we do this or not is always, does it help load the chip? That is our driving force. We have a fab. We synthesize DNA on a silicon chip. We miniaturize it. The more volume we can bring on the chip, it's good for Twist. If it doesn't bring volume on the chip, it's a distraction. We don't do it. Yeah, there could be. When it happens, we'll be opportunistic to grab it.
All right. Let's talk about the segments and interweave some Q4 and 2026 questions. NGS, just to frame it, I think I wrote this down right. I was doing it on the fly, but I think it accounted for $208 million of revenue last year. That's about 55% of sales, grew over 20% year-over-year. I think the guidance implies, I think, about 12% growth at the midpoint for fiscal 2026. Going back to your 2024 deck, recognizing all the disclaimers you had when you present anything for the first time. I think you guys talked about the addressable market in MRD liquid biopsy to be about $2.2 billion. Can you just, is that still in the right ballpark? And is that the right way to think about the opportunity for Twist?
Yeah. I mean, for the NGS, I mean, the big buckets for markets, one is the Library Prep market.
That's what you've been doing for a while.
That's what we've been doing for a while. That's about a $2 billion market. Then there's the panel market, which is probably a $500 million market. That's actually, historically, what we got in. We entered into our customers with panels. Over time, we expanded with Library Prep. What we've done with Library Prep is, in the beginning, we used to OEM Library Prep kits from others that we would resell. Over time, we re-engineered our own Library Prep kits to, one, be cheaper and give us better margin, but more importantly, improve the performance. The work we've done with our ligase, our polymerase, improves the sensitivity of the assay. There's another market, the microarray market. We think there's a $500 million opportunity for us to convert microarray to Twist Plus sequencing.
The latest example is the gene by gene, the ancestry genetic consumer genetic analysis moved from a microarray to Twist Plus Ultima. Overall, in NGS, we have about a $3 billion opportunity. We have less than 10% market share. There is still a lot to do. When we go in, we go in with a solution that is, we do not go in where you need a lot of marketing to win. We go in with a highly differentiated solution so that the performance, the speed, the price, the ease of use speaks for itself.
Have you shared what the split, as you broke down the compartments within NGS, have you broken down what your revenue, the split of revenue is within each of those subsegments?
Not yet. Not yet, something to keep our thumb in the book there. It's probably overweighted on the panels because historically, it was the first product that we launched. The next will be Library Prep, growing fast. The smallest right now will be the microarray conversion, although we have a number of wins there. Yeah, that's definitely something that we're keeping in mind and that can be useful to investors where we can think about talking more about.
The legacy business, the original focus within NGS, I mean, we can kind of see what's happening with some of your competitors. My guess is you're looking at those and you're seeing, is it fair to say you're growing better than the competition in that?
Yeah. I think the technical term is we're wiping the floor with them.
Okay. Perfect. Yeah. I remember that from business school. And so it's interesting. If that's growing robustly, and then I think between looking at whether a company has publicly disclosed it or pulling protocols, if we know or have high degrees of confidence, my words, not yours, but you're working with companies like GRAIL and Guardant and Personalis and GeneGX, just to name a handful, but companies that most investors are pretty enthused about, volume growth is very robust for all of those, at least if we look at sell-side models. If those are your customers and everybody's excited about those volumes, the volume outlook for those companies, and you're essentially the arms dealer to all of them, at least for a component of their sample prep, how do we basically, again, kind of marry that with the fact that you've guided to 12% this year?
Is it just kind of a matter of time before things reaccelerate?
I mean, there's this one customer dynamics, and we can have Adam go over the exact numbers. If you remove that one customer, the business by itself is growing about 20%. In the case of GRAIL and GenScript, because of related party transactions, actually, a lot of the numbers are public. The dynamic is we have one customer where we have a transition from a clinical trials to commercial ramp that's creating noise, I would say. The fundamentals of the business are great. We have the rest of the dynamic companies are growing really, really well. We are doing well outside of diagnostic as well. I mentioned the microarray conversion. We are leaning into the new sequencers. Illumina is a great technology.
A lot of the volume is through Illumina, but for almost offense and defense reasons, we want to be tied in into any sequencing workflow so that when we can expand, but if they were to take significant shares from Illumina, we will be there to benefit from it. With expanding the kind of NGS assets we are offering, it used to be just DNA, so SNPs, structural arrangement, copy number. Then we leaned into methylation. We probably have one of the best, if not the best, methylation platform on the market. We went to mRNA, so RNA-seq. We are expanding. There are things we do not do. Again, when we do something, we do it really well. We do not do single cells. We do not do spatial. When we go into a market, we want to do really well.
Adam, do you want to talk about the one customer dynamic?
Yeah. I think, I mean, Emily hit on it already, but I think if you neutralize that one customer, the business was almost growing at 20% in 2025. That similar dynamic exists in the guide for 2026. The sequential noise through Q3 to Q4, as well as Q4 to Q1, can be solely attributed to that one customer dynamic.
One of the things people have picked up on is, I think normally you would expect, I think depending on how you do the math on the $5 million or so air pocket, it looks like the sequential growth is not as robust Q4 to Q1 as one might have expected within NGS. I think from talking to you offline, what is missing in those observations is more of the $5 million may be falling into Q1 than Q4. Is that right?
The way I'd say it is, it was a little less than $5 million in Q4. It might be a little bit more than $5 million.
Okay. Sorry. That's it. Yeah.
The aggregate is five in each. It's that mix between the two that we're doing.
Okay. Separate from that, the business is doing what it should be doing.
Absolutely. I mean, I think about it coming out of this, the one customer is, we're very excited about the long-term growth opportunity.
Dumbing it down for me, this is a customer that accounts for about $5 million per quarter the last few quarters. Is that the right way to think about it?
Or more.
Or more. They are trialing, pulling some things forward as part of that. Is this a sign that it goes up from there as we move forward?
Correct. It's correct. The way I think about it is if you go through the verification, validation, clinical development process, there's a big bulge of activity. You have initial stocking order. That requires, and then the question now is how long before the next round of reordering as their commercial ramp grows and we grow with that.
Can you remind me what you've said about the profile of this customer? You haven't identified them. I think the belief is it's an MRD customer, but I don't think that's necessarily what you guys have said.
What we've said is the customer deals with diagnostics in the space of oncology. Because it's a stocking, it's probably not a bespoke or tumor MRD.
Right. Okay. Bespoke or tumor.
Can't be because of the nature of a stocking order.
Tumor-informed, the revenue flow to us is very tied to patients coming in.
It could be tumor-agnostic.
Could be.
Okay. Diagnostics doesn't necessarily rule out screening, does it?
It does not.
Okay. All right. That'll give us something to bet on at the bar later on. All right. In the time we have left, I want to pivot over to DNA synthesis and protein solutions. About 45% of sales grew 17% last year, guided to about 16% growth this year. One of the things that we and I think others picked up on in the 10-K is price was down about 11% in the fourth quarter when you look at price per gene. That can be a good thing or a bad thing.
I guess what I'm wondering is, cutting to the chase, how much of that is a function of the promotions you've been running to win in academic government versus how much of it is pharma volume where pricing would be lower, but the volume, I mean, I think that's volume you want, especially as pharma is ramping on using you as a key artificial intelligence AI partner. Are we thinking about this the right way?
It's exactly that. It's very much the earth's winning in the therapeutics area. In therapeutics, people want antibodies or VHHs, but typically those tend to be small genes. We price per base. At $0.09 per base, as we win more in the pharma space, it lowers our ASP. That's the number one driver. The second driver is in July, we made a big push to go after the gBlocks from IDT. IDT owned the fragment market with gBlocks. Now we have a product that's faster, cheaper, and higher quality. You don't have to pick two out of three. It's three out of three. When we have a customer move from gBlock, where we have $0 per base, to our fragment, now we get $0.07 per base. It's great volume, but it's less than $0.09 per base.
Those were the two dynamics that drove the lower ASP. The promotion on Express for academic has almost no impact. At the end of the day, ASP is not a KPI we optimize. We have a lot of KPIs at Twist. I spend almost a big part of my day in Tableau. ASP is not one of them. What we optimize for is revenue, revenue ramp, and gross margin. In this case, it's a good guy that ASP is coming down because, again, we are winning in AI and pharma. We're winning in fragments. As we launch new products that maybe target other parts of the market, maybe ASP will go up. Right now, it's a really good guy.
Yeah. It's interesting because you also, I mean, I think this kind of got glossed over on the Q4 call, but you have a pretty big pharma order in Q4 that I think in part explains why, yes, NGS was guided a little bit below expectations for Q1, but on the other side of the business, it's actually seasonally high. That's largely pharma in that order coming through. Is that right?
Yeah, absolutely. Our previous biggest order in the company was $9 million. We got a new record, and it is in that order of magnitude. We recognize a little bit in Q4, and then we are going to digest it in Q1, Q2. That gives us great visibility for the first half for our DSPS segment.
To clarify that, on that order, that was a combination order that is both synbio, historical, and biopharma . Part of that, bringing that together is there's, depending on which part of the project they work on the last week of the quarter, it could have determined where the revenue comes from that quarter, but really excited about the project work there.
Are there more of those in the hopper?
Yeah. Absolutely.
Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. With that, I actually kept us over time, but we got through a lot of what I was hoping to chat about. Thank you both for being here and taking the time.
Thank you so much.