Good day. Thank you for standing by.
Welcome to the Factory of the Future Prepared Remarks and Q&A Session Conference Call.
At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Angela Bitting, Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Chief ESG Officer.
Please go ahead.
Thank you, Michelle.
Hello, everyone. I'd like to thank all of you in the room and online for joining us today for our prepared remarks and the Q&A from Twist Bioscience's Factory of the Future, just outside Portland, Oregon.
Slides for today's event can be found on our website at www.twistbioscience.com. With me in the room today are Dr. Emily Leproust, CEO and Co-founder of Twist, and Jim Thorburn, CFO of Twist. Emily will begin with some prepared remarks. We'll then open the call for questions. Unfortunately, you will not be able to submit questions or queue for questions online. If you are listening, you will need to submit them to me at A, B as in boy, I, T as in Tom, T as in Tom, I-N-G, @twistbioscience.com. That's abitting@twistbioscience.com. Email me your questions.
We will read them here in the room.
As a reminder, this call is being recorded. The audio portion will be archived in the Investors section of our website and will be available for two weeks. During today's presentation, we will be making forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or future financial or operating performance.
Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize, and actual results and financial periods are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks include those set forth in the Form 10-K that we filed earlier, as well as those more fully described in other SEC filings.
The forward-looking statements in the presentation are based on information available to us as of the date hereof. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law.
At this point in time, I'd like to turn the call over to Emily Leproust. Emily, take it away.
Thank you, Angela. Thank you for everybody in the room. Thank you for those of you joining online.
Today, we're very excited to have you visit the factory. Before that tour, we thought that we would share a few slides to put in context the investments we've made here, and why it's a great tool for us to keep growing our revenue and keep winning in the marketplace.
As a quick reminder, you already know we write DNA from scratch, and you'll see the machine that does that.
We're very excited about DNA because it has an impact on many different markets, from the production of fragrances and materials, from the genetic testing, cancer testing to therapies and all the way to preservation of structural data through data storage. As we've organized our businesses in four areas. One is in bio. It will be mostly the focus of today, mostly because this facility is mostly dedicated to synthetic biology.
As you also know, we have a thriving business in NGS. We have a burgeoning business in biopharma. We are looking forward to launching our first early access product for data storage in the later part of 2023 calendar.
We have spoken in the past about customers that we have. We have some of the leading companies in each of those businesses. We've shared at our last earnings call the growth in customers that we've been able to achieve over the last few years.
That growth of customers, combined with our innovative products, has enabled us to have a significant and fast revenue growth. As we've discussed in the past, we have a business model which is more of an industrial business model. By that I mean is that we do have a high fixed cost, but our variable cost is low, and you'll see it will be a recurring theme for our business.
What that means is that, at the time of IPO, our growth margins were negative. As we ramped our revenue, as we absorbed our fixed costs, we were able to deliver growing growth margins as we sold products after we've absorbed the fixed cost. Double-clicking on those numbers a bit more, again today we'll focus on mostly on the green part, the synbio part, we now have growing revenue in synbio, NGS, and biopharma. Last slide before I dive in a bit more into our operations is our opportunity.
We've given the last earnings call 2 years of long-term guidance that is based on the combination of existing markets that are growing and our ability to launch innovative products in each of those markets to take market shares and enable the growth of those businesses. As you compare our revenues with the size of those markets, we are still early in our market share penetration, there's a lot of room for us to go into as we're only at a small proportion of those markets. Diving a bit more into the context for this visit. Up until now, we had a main site in San Francisco. Some of you have visited it.
San Francisco is and remains our headquarter. That is where we have the bulk of what we do. That's where we have R&D and biopharma, data storage, and so on. San Francisco is also our first manufacturing site, and we have 61,000 sq ft of lab space. It's not all operations. Some of those labs are R&D. You will see by contract that we have a lot more space here. A few years ago, we knew the capacity that we had in San Francisco, which at that capacity is about $200 million. A few years ago, we knew that the ramp of our revenue was such that we were going to run out.
In 2022 fiscal year, we had $203 million revenue, so we're kind of about full. We made the decision back then that we needed an extension site. We needed to have more manufacturing capacity to meet the growing demand of our business. We had a choice to expand in San Francisco, and we chose to expand in Portland. Mostly, it gives us access to a new and different talent pool.
The cost structure was favorable in Portland, but it was also close enough to San Francisco, such that if we needed support from some of the engineering team, it was just a simple day trip from San Francisco.
That leads us to our facility here that you're visiting, which is mostly a manufacturing facility. We have 110,000 square feet dedicated to operations. We had a right of first refusal on an additional 100,000 square feet, which we triggered. We are using 110,000 square feet, but we have access to an extra 100,000 square feet when we need to expand. It is also a 24/7 operation like in San Francisco.
What that means is that we have four shifts. We have a 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. shift. We have a 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. shift. We have a first part of the week and second part of the week.
Those are the four shifts. Again, in this facility, we are mostly focused on the synthetic biology product lines, such as gene Oligo Pools. We will have the ability to also do other products, but today is the major focus. A quick reminder on why we win. Again, hopefully the tool and those slides will help you in that analysis. The first is the cost structure that we have.
We've used within the company that we use, we use our cost structure as an advantage. The second is scale. We sell our customers to literally back of the truck. We have the capacity to make what they want.
Our quality is top of line. We have the top quality product. Our customer experience is, I believe, one of the best in the industry, and we get constant positive feedback from customers on that area. Last but not least, we're going after a five way market technology for our market. Our innovative product and solution are really what helps us drive the numbers.
Today, we are focusing on the factory of the future, which is here. That factory of the future is going to enable us to keep launching those innovative products that maybe require a bit more square footage than was available in San Francisco. Diving into the product, the production, how we make genes.
I want to share the concept of front-end and back-end. If you are online, I am on page 13. The front-end, that's where all of our product starts. All the DNA for all the products that you see on the right are made on the same chip at the same time.
That front-end gives us a massive economy of scale that we use to our advantage. Then, because different products require different processing of the DNA that is being made, the oligos, the short pieces of DNA, there are different back-end labs. Today you'll see the back-end lab for Oligo Pools, you'll see the back-end lab for genes. You'll see the back-end lab for antibodies.
You won't see the other back-end labs because they are not here. That, that is conceptually the very important information about the genes is the front-end, that there's a massive cost advantage. There is a back end where in some ways the back end is, as I mentioned before, it's unremarkable by how unremarkable it is.
The back end, mostly labs where you can buy the equipment, but if you have those equipments without having the back end, you don't get the benefit. Diving a little bit more. First, let's start into the front end. In the front end, that is where the magic happens. That is where the technological innovation resides mostly. You'll see the silicon chip.
The silicon chip is a chip of silicon that has the same size as a 96-well plate. Where our competitors use a 96-well plate to build oligos, where they make 96 oligos on one plate. In that same footprint, we can make 1 million oligos or more. That is foundational technology. We shrink the volume used, and that lowers the cost of reagent.
As I mentioned, we make all the products for all the customers on the same chip at the same time, which means that there's a lot of tracking that has to happen, especially considering that we have developed on our e-commerce an ability for our customers to really tailor all the products the way they want.
Something that's, it's hard to see, but something that is foundational as well is the software infrastructure that we've built around this to be able to make the right DNA with the right vector and the right buffer for the right customer, adds, again, a cost structure that is not only competitive but differentiated. Zooming in a little bit on the silicon chip. Again, on the silicon chip, there is a zoom in the yellow box. That is a zoom of a cluster. On the silicon chip we have up to 10,000 clusters. Each of those clusters has 121 green dots. Each of those green dots is where we make one DNA sequence.
The size of the dot is 50 microns, so it's the size of a hair. That's why on the silicon chip, as opposed to the 96-well plate, we can pack in a million or more of those oligo sequences. On each of those tiny green dots, we deliver reagents to write the oligos one step at a time. This delivery is done with an inkjet printhead, which delivers drop.
At the bottom right you see the illustration where each drop has a volume of about 10 picoliters of reagent, and that drives the sensitivity of DNA on the surface. Next slide, page 14. I'm going to show. 17, sorry. I will show what happens on one of those 1 million features. We do the typical DNA chemistry.
Typical photolithography, we start with a coupling of a first base that attaches the base on the surface, and then oxidation to stabilize the base onto the surface, then deblocking to remove the blocking group, and then repeating that, in this example, adding an A and then a G, a G, a C, a T, a C, a G, and an A. We can build DNA one base at a time, on the instrumentation.
Again, because we only use 10 picoliters per oligo, that we drive down the amount of reagents used, and that enables us to have a very significant cost advantage. I mentioned before that quality is very inherent to everything we do. If I can make a pun, quality is literally in our DNA.
Just to give you a workflow of how we get to a DNA, we first have to make a silicon chip. There's a lot of QC on the writer. We aggregate all the orders from customers. There's a lot of QC on the writer. When the DNA is purified and extracted, we actually do a 100% oligo QC by NGS sequencing. Meaning that on every chip, we sequence the DNA we make to make sure that the quality is there where we want. In addition to the quality advantage, I also mentioned the scale advantage.
We can make 1 million oligos at the same time, but there's also a massive cost advantage. Because we're making genes, all we need is one cluster.
One of those 10,000 is all we need to make 1 gene. I think today we are sharing with you the variable cost of the reagents that it takes us to make a gene. It's not something that we'll update over time, we thought it was important. The variable cost to make all the oligos we need to make a gene is less than $1. I won't give you the answer. You're smart analysts and investors. I'll let you do the calculation. To make a gene of 1.8 kb, you need to synthesize both strands.
That means that you need to synthesize about 3,600 bases. I encourage you to go on the website of our competitor, find out the price that it costs to make 3,600 bases, and you'll see that there's a huge difference in terms of just the cost of making the oligos for us versus how other people do it. This is a key cost advantage that enables us to take market share.
That's stay on the front end. Next, I'll move to the back end. On the back end, that's where we are able to make different kind of products. Just as an example here, I'm showing you what our customers do.
They go on the web, once they have designed their oligos, sorry. They go on the web, they can choose many different configurations. Just as a few examples, they can choose to have Clonal Genes, or they can choose to have Gene Fragments. They can choose how much little weight of DNA they get. Do they want 2 microgram? Do they want 1 milligram?
They can choose to have it in tube or plate. They can have a glycerol stock . We can normalize, we can resuspend the code. They can have endotoxin-free if they want, and they can choose their vector. Even if that is in the plate, they can tell us, "I want it in a 96-well plate , in 3 different plates." They can have a lift, a half lift.
It's really an Echo plate. It's really, it's with something like Burger King, but it's DNA your way, right? You can really choose everything you want. On the web, they're able to choose all those configurations, and that's why the software is important for us to be able to deliver the right DNA in the right tube, send to the right address with the right barcode and the right invoice. That's where it's important.
Once we book the order, and we've made the DNA on the front end, it goes into a back-end workflow, shown here, page 22. It is a complicated molecular biology workflow.
Once it goes made and protected and transferred, we can assemble them into a fragment that can, after QC, that can ship if someone wants a fragment. If someone wants a clonal gene, we transform it, we plate it, we pick it, we grow it, we miniprep it, we NGS QC it. As you can see, there is a lot of QC all around to make sure that we're shipping the right DNA at the right to the right address. One thing that is very important as you make all of that is to control the cost. We have such an advantage on the front end that we want to make sure that we keep that advantage.
The way we do that is shown on the next slide, is to be very conscious about our variable cost and our fixed cost. In the variable cost, those are all the regions that it takes to make the regular sample of the genes, clone them, QC them, ship them. Again, we are sharing our variable costs for today. It's not something that we'll share all the time, but we want to give you some perspective. About $35 to 40 of variable cost. That includes the less than a dollar I mentioned earlier.
Again, if you try to compare how our competitors do it, where we're very confident that their numbers for variable cost is actually very significantly bigger than ours. That is our advantage of miniaturization. The second advantage that we have, and we'll focus on, is our fixed cost. Our fixed cost is high. You'll see there's a lot of CapEx.
That means there's a lot of depreciation. However, because that fixed cost is already invested, it enables us to have a huge advantage as we scale. As the demand grows, we can make more and more genes, without substantially changing the fixed cost.
What that means is that we can use fixed cost as an advantage in competitive situation. Indeed, so maybe moving to the next slide. As our business scales, we can use the fixed cost as leverage. As I said, we've made the investment in the equipment.
We've made the investment in labor, which is a fixed cost in the lab. That labor could make 1,000 genes a day or 2,000 genes a day or 3,000 genes a day. As the demand grows, we can leverage the investments we've made in our fixed cost, whereas our competition, if they go from 1,000 genes a day to 2,000 genes a day, they need to double the number of people, they need to double the number of pipettes.
They don't have a scale advantage whereas we do. That's why, from a historical point of view, we've been aggressive with price because our strategy was to, as quickly as possible, bring in volume to absorb the fixed cost. As we drive penetration in the market, in companies, as our revenue grows beyond a fixed cost absorption, we get a great advantage from our variable costs.
Prepare your questions because I'm coming to an end in about 2 slides. As, again, the benefit that we have is we build an industrial scale DNA synthesis, gene synthesis. The benefit that we have come from first miniaturization. I mentioned this on the front end, you'll be able to see it.
I did not speak to it quite directly, but I mentioned that there's a lot of QC happening. We use NGS QC, whereas traditionally the QC of the gene is done by Sanger. Sanger is very expensive, that adds to the viable cost. However, when we use NGS QC, we can drive those programs. That's how the viable cost we mentioned of $35-$40 includes making sure we have the perfect genes. Automation and throughput is a key driver of our growth and bringing efficiency to the scale. That's why, again, as we grow more revenue, as we launch more innovative products, we are very confident in our gross margin profile.
Last but not least, again today I mentioned that you see the genes, the antibody, the Oligo Pools, but the same platform enables us to do a wide variety of other products which we won't see today. Last slide, as a reminder, the brand that we have established is a brand of high quality, low cost provider. And as a reminder, I'm sure you've done your channel check, but we are not shrinking the market. We are lowering the cost to that point, so that our customers have more ideas than their budget.
What that means is that we are dealing with an elastic market. The low cost positioning enables us to take market share.
That's why we're not shrinking the market. The high quality enables us to make sure that customer keeps coming back. We do have a growing customer base. We have an expanding market and in synbio and NGS, we have new market opportunities with the desktop edge. As you've seen in the past, we have launched very innovative products, and we have a pipeline of continuing that investment in innovative products.
Hopefully the one theme to leave with today is that scale is truly the key to our success. Scale through good leveraging of our fixed cost, as is from day one the business model, the strategy that we've employed.
We've been quite happy with what we've achieved so far, thanks to all the twists here.
We look forward to continuing in that direction. With that, I think I'm 9:30, exactly on time for Q&A.
We can take Q&A in this room.
We should take Q&A in the room. Yes.
Then.
Absolutely. As they come in online, if you have them, please email me at A, V as in boy, I-T-T-I-N-G @twistbioscience.com.
If you could just talk about going back to the $35 to 40 variable COGS. Maybe I didn't, maybe I missed it. I just want to understand, like, what is that per? Is that.
That is per gene and fragment.
Gene and fragment.
On the Synbio side, one of the product line we have are fragments and genes. To make a gene and a fragment.
The $1.
Less than $1 is to make one cluster on the sequencing chip, and that cluster can be up to 121 oligos. To make a gene or to make a fragment, you need 1 cluster for a less than a 1.8 KB gene. If you need a 5 KB gene, you may need up to 3 clusters. Again, it gets quite low.
Just my other question is just on the automation. I know when we were there a few weeks ago, part of the process is manual and probably will be manual, but the way you explained the fact the future allows you to run under multiple lines, it just makes it much more efficient in terms of at some point in your process and sometimes because they kind of intersect and create some bottlenecks.
Could you talk about automation just in general? Are there parts of the process that you feel actually can be automated with sort of maybe not necessitating an advent in technology, but like areas that you think you could improve on the automation side? What that could potentially do to the efficiency?
Yeah. No, thank you. Great question. For speaking broadly about our synthetic biology products like genes, Oligo Pools and fragments, the manual parts, where we do manual labor, are used to basically bring the reagents and bring the consumables on some kind of a machine. Using a barcode reader to scan a few barcodes and then pressing a button to start the machine.
That's the extent of the manual labor. Once that process is done on the machine, you have to go to the next machine. Again, we use manual labor to move the plate to the next machine, essentially bring the reagent, bring the consumable, scan a few barcodes and start.
What we believe is we have automated in the most efficient way, the part that is very difficult, which is the movement of liquid. To your question, could we integrate more? Again, the back end, there's multiple steps, there's multiple machines. Could we do a true assembly line like a car factory, where there's robots that you move the plate from one place to the next.
Over the years, there are some areas that we have done that. There's been part of the process that used to be on three different machines, and that we have condensed on one machine. It is possible.
However, I think that's a mistake that many burgeoning, emerging biotech company do, is they try to automate everything. Actually the cost of automating that movement of plates sometimes may not be worth it. We long answer to say, we can automate more some of those plate transfer, but we are trying to be very disciplined and thoughtful as to what has an actual positive ROI.
I would say that in general, there's not a lot more that we would want to do. It's pretty, we've been places where it's been already pretty well efficiently designed.
My last question is just so, is that, the not wanting to go fully automated, is that because of it could become a quality issue?
No, it's not a quality.
Or is it a.
It's a pure ROI.
Okay.
It's okay, we look at, right, what is the R&D investment to design a integrated system, right? What will that save in terms of labor?
Okay.
Measure the ROI. Are we better off doing that, or are we better off investing our R&D dollar into a different product. We have to be very disciplined in that analysis.
That's what we've done so far, and we continue to do that.
Hi, Emily. It's Steven Mah with Cowen. Maybe just a follow-up question to Matt's question about the gene manufacturing cost of $35 to 40.
Design variable cost.
Variable cost, yeah. Is that based on the South San Francisco cost, or is that more of a blended cost in integrating the Factory of the Future? Because, maybe, yeah, if you can discuss maybe the labor costs of here in Portland versus San Francisco, maybe some of the fixed costs, the facility costs if that's cheaper compared to San Francisco.
A final question on the life science talent pools, speak about being able to recruit qualified life science folks here in Portland.
Yeah. We have staff and agent complete. Broad strokes, the numbers are based on San Francisco numbers of the process here is very substantially the same. We won't know until we run it, but we believe that the viable cost should be similar. From a talent point of view, what we find is that there is great talent both in the Bay Area and in the Portland Area.
However, what we do find is that for the manufacturing labor pool, so far, what I find is it's harder to retain them in the Bay Area than it is to retain them here in Wisconsin. The talent pool is equally qualified.
The cost may be slightly lower in the Portland area. What we are seeing so far, that's what the expectation coming in, is that from a retention point of view, it's probably a bit easier. I think it makes sense because just the cost of living is just lower in the Portland area. It's just easier for the workforce to thrive in the Portland area than in the Bay Area.
Okay. Great. Thanks. Just one more question. obviously, we haven't toured the facility yet, but I, we drove around and it's clearly quite big. Can you give us a sense of some of these innovative new products you mentioned, and you said it was going to leverage the immense space you have here? I mean, what would that entail in the new products?
Yeah. Great question.
Because it is the main driver was to increase capacity because it will give us opportunity to launch new products. One product that we're trying to be public about is the concept of fast gene. This is not the marketing gene, so when we launch it may be a different name. Basically, can we have the same gene that we've been selling today, but produce it in a substantially faster amount of time? That is what we've also planned in this facility. It is a more linear production chain.
It's the same, it's the same equipment than in San Francisco, but we have more of them, and meaning that, when the work is done on one machine and there's another unit that's ready to go to the next step. We think there'll be less wait time from going to one unit to another. That should give us an opportunity to make genes. I think they have the same cost structure as the slow gene.
Again, not the marketing name, but so we'll have two flavors of genes. One is manufactured, one is made at the same PS now.
We believe that the fast production will have a higher value to our customer, and we should be able to extract a higher premium price, even though the cost may be substantially the same. That's one flavor. Another flavor of DNA that we've been mentioning is actually RNA. Pre-COVID, as you probably know, it will have been very difficult to launch an RNA drug as a new modality because the going through the FDA safety protocol would have been quite lengthy. Now that billions of people have had RNA vaccines, we know it's safe. What we are seeing in the marketplace is a number of companies that are choosing RNA as a new modality.
For their drug discovery, they need access to many different RNA sequences. We have frankly, literally been driving to the market by the demand. Once we've made the DNA, it's a question of just transforming that DNA into RNA, capping it, fusing it. It's something that we can do at scale in a very cost-competitive manner. We think that we may have the opportunity to go into the RNA market in a way that is quite innovative and quite competitive.
Will the facility be GMP certified at some point, or is it already?
The facility here is not GMP-certified at this time. In South San Francisco, the facility, part of the facility is ISO 1745, which is very close to GMP, we use that part to produce all of our NGS products. Our NGS products are ISO 1745, which is required by our customer. We know to do ISO 1745, we'll be able to leverage that knowledge so that in that new facility, we can make Synbio products like Oligo Pool flex Genes, like libraries under ISO 1745. Again, at probably premium pricing because it has more value. We have the internal knowledge of doing it.
Now we have the space, and our intention is over time to have some parts dedicated to ISO 1745 production of synbio pro-products.
Great. Thank you.
This is Matt Sykes, one moment again. Could you maybe just talk about timeline for fast gene? Is that something that as you start ramping up, you'll be ready to go? Just the importance of that unlocking the gene maker market, and if fast gene is sort of in the future, like any potential timeline for that, if you want to.
Yeah. You are very, right, that fast gene is, in our view, key to unlocking the maker market. That's one of the reasons why we're very excited about fast gene. In terms of timeline, I think we shared the second half calendar of 2023 is when we will be able to leverage the full power of the facility to provide an option for fast gene.
In the fall.
Oh, in the fall.
Just one other question. Just apologies if you've already discussed this in previous calls and stuff, just how does the enzymatic DNA synthesis point out fit into this? It seems obviously more efficient, less scarring, but is that going to be part of the full end process for Factory of the Future, or is that something to be phased in over time?
That's a good question. As we've said in the past, is that we are developing our own enzymatic synthesis for data storage.
Yeah.
The reason why is, again, it's all about cost. We mentioned that the way to make the Oligos on our machine is less than $1. Today, the enzymatic synthesis cost is higher than the phosphoramidite chemistry cost. It would not make sense today to do it for gene synthesis.
The reason why we're doing it is for data storage. We know that we need to have a synthesis module at data centers for our customers, so we know we need it. The driver for the investment in enzymatic synthesis is for data storage. however we have a practically 6 million Oligos instead of 1 million Oligos. It's 24 times better times 256 times better.
You can imagine that the diversity of oligos we can make could be useful in biopharma, could be useful in gene synthesis, as well as the lower cost. We'll definitely be very aggressive in leveraging to the full extent our end investment. So far it is driven first through data storage.
We've got about four minutes left in the call. I wonder if we can take a couple questions.
Sure.
The first is, what do you think the advantages of Portland are over South San Francisco in terms of manufacturing?
I touched it a little bit, but I think the main advantage for us is an ability to reach a different talent pool. A talent pool that potentially has a lower cost to the company, and a talent pool that lives in an area that has a lower cost of living, which means that we get an advantage in terms of retention. That's definitely an advantage. It is like, at the same time, has the advantage of being close to San Francisco, such that we do, San Francisco is the R&D center, is the innovation center.
As we need to deploy those new processes, those new products, it is close enough that those new products can be launched with relative ease. It's definitely a bit easier to take a 1-hour flight than flying across the country, different time zone or different countries. It has the advantage of a more stable talent pool, we believe, as well as, but at the same time, proximity to the headquarters where R&D innovation can continue to be done.
Great. One more here. Could you talk about the market for fast genes? How big is that market?
There's two parts to that answer. First part is what is the market is today, what we think the market could be. Today, we can buy a fast gene. There's a few companies, you buy DNA, you will get it in 5 days.
The cost, the sales price is very high. It can be up to $1 a base. What that means is that our view is that the actual market today of people buying fast genes is relatively small, just because the price are where it is too expensive for the vast majority of the applications.
What the market could be, what we believe is that there's $1.4 billion being spent by DNA markers that do their own cloning, that buy their own oligos, they do their own metagenomics.
Those customers, a very big fraction of them I mean, they don't want to make the DNA. It's available. Use TGUs fees. They need to do it because of the speed of doing it themselves. We believe that potentially that entire market is available if we can find the right price, that would be a premium price to this price, but not $1. Again, we believe that with the right price, and we'll be able to convince those maker to start making and buying from us instead.
We have the benefit of this fixed cost investment that we can leverage to scale, we believe could enable us. The low viable cost structure could enable us to bring those DNA markers onto Twist. We'll be able to get the premium pricing, premium margin, and give them a great service because they will get the DNA they need at the speed they need without having to do it themselves. It's again, today it's a small market, but it's a big opportunity if we do it right.
A follow-up to that is, who are the DNA markers? Who are making their own DNA?
There's two big groups. One group are industrial companies, so pharmaceutical companies that need DNA to turn into RNA, need DNA to turn into antibodies. They are big scientific teams that are waiting for a product. Making their own DNA quickly enables them to go through the discovery and development of drug vaccines and so on, more quickly. To be fair to some of those customers, they may be buyers of some pieces and may be making, using them to make other pieces. That's the first big bucket, are industrial companies. The second big bucket are academic groups.
The postdocs, grad students, that are doing biological research and, because the time to finish the experiment is so important, they go in the lab and they clone on their own, just to get to the answer faster because, they have to get the answer to the first question to get to the next and the next and the next. Those are the two big buckets.
As a quick reminder, not something valuable for the company in general, I think only 20% of our revenue comes from academic groups. We are quite underweighted on academia.
With the Fast Gene products, we will want to go after both of those group of customers, academia and big industrial companies.
Great. I think operator, we'll conclude the Q&A for the online portion. We can stay here for a few minutes, we will begin the tour of the Factory of the Future. Michelle?
Yes, I'm here.
Thank you all for joining us today. This concludes our conference.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
Thank you, Michelle.
Thank you.