Hi, everyone. This is Rachel Vatnsdal from the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team with JP Morgan. Thank you so much for joining me today. I've got 10x Genomics on stage. I'm first gonna introduce Serge, CEO of 10x. He is going to start off with a presentation, around 20 minutes, give or take, and then I'll shift to Q&A. If anyone in the room has questions, please feel free to either submit them via the app or you can ping me directly. With that, Serge, I'll let you begin.
Thank you. Thank you. Really great to be back here. So before we begin, I want to point out our safe harbor statement on slide two and invite you to visit our website for additional disclosures regarding forward-looking statements made today. So, 2023, we had another strong year, finishing with $619 million in revenue, representing 20% growth from a year before. We had big increases in customer publications, in intellectual property, and in our installed base of instruments. In the fourth quarter, we had $184 million in revenue, which represents 18% growth from a year before. And importantly, we had $49 million in spatial revenue, and for the full year, 2023, we had $135 million in spatial revenue.
For a long time, we have been well known as the leader in single-cell analysis, and now in 2023, we have also come into our own in spatial biology as well. The big, big reason for that, the key driver, really the big story of 2023 for us, was the launch of our Xenium platform. We sold over 250 instruments in just the first 12 months of launch. This is a really, really special trajectory, both in terms of customer demand and in terms of our ability to scale up operations and manufacturing. It's really rare to see this kind of trajectory, this kind of momentum, right out of the gate. The platform was also met with incredible enthusiasm by customers, and you can see this across the board, across social media, conference presentations, customers talking to each other.
Xenium has also emerged very clearly as the top-performing system in the market. Best sensitivity, best specificity, best throughput, best biological insights, and this is based on the work done by multiple independent researchers doing really rigorous, really careful studies, using their own systems, their own data, in their own hands. So now, as we enter the new year, more and more customers have actually gone through the full cycle of buying these systems, installing them, running, generating insights, making discoveries, putting those together with publications, and actually having papers published. This is truly remarkable speed and really speaks to the special trajectory and the enormous potential of this platform, which is why we truly believe that Xenium is ushering in a new age of genomic analysis. This is just the beginning for Xenium, and in many ways for the company as well.
We built 10x with the premise that this is the century of biology, that some of the greatest value-creating opportunities in history lie ahead of us, that will transform healthcare, that will transform the world. And that the key challenge, in fact, the crux of the opportunity, is that we still understand relatively little about the underlying biology. What we don't know, what we don't understand, it's much greater than what we do understand. And our goal at 10x is to accelerate that understanding, the mastery of biology, to ultimately advance human health. And the most thrilling, thrilling thing about biology, what makes it particularly unique and particularly challenging, is its immense complexity. Each one of us has close to 40 trillion cells.
Each one of those has this really complex, long genome, and within each cell, there's a myriad of individual molecules interacting with each other in all kinds of complex, dynamic ways. There's just no getting around the fact that in order to understand biology, you need to be able to confront that complexity. You need to be able to actually measure these biological systems, tissue samples, at the resolution and that scale that actually is able to capture that complexity. To do that, the world needs new generations of tools, new generations of technologies. That's what we built 10x for, to deliver new generations of tools, new generations of technologies, to accelerate progress in science and ultimately in medicine.
And so from the beginning, we focused on building up foundational capabilities, building up deep expertise across multiple different disciplines, setting up the right processes, nurturing a really tight, multidisciplinary, disciplinary culture to enable collaboration at speed. And then we also think really deeply about where the world is going, what are the big questions that need answering, and then work backwards to determine what products, what technologies need to be developed in the service of those questions. And then once we gain conviction, we move fast with speed to deliver awesome breakthrough products. And so this capability, that's what we call our innovation engine. Ability to build breakthrough products fast and also knowing what products to build. This we see as a core foundational advantage, and our innovation engine has been incredibly productive across the years. Many breakthrough products, a lot of innovation, revolutionizing multiple fields in biological research.
We take real pride in our ability to innovate, to move fast, to be nimble, and increasingly, we're now able to do this at larger and larger scale, to, to command more and more resources, resources to fuel our innovation engine. To complement our product development abilities, we also scaled up our commercial engine for global reach and top-notch customer experience. We have a large worldwide direct sales force. We have a best-in-class support organization that's just obsessed with customer success. And this, the commercial reach, we see as another core pillar of our advantage. We have also built out really strong capabilities in our operations organization, which is really, really important because we need to be able to manufacture and reliably deliver what are really sophisticated, really complex technologies to our customers, and be able to do this at really high quality.
And so now we have created this foundation to scale well into the future, and to be able to optimize costs and drive the right structures over time for wider and wider adoption. And so we have used these capabilities to build out products that we believe will enable the future of biological research. It became clear to us early on that the ability to preserve single-cell context and spatial information is going to be critical across just about all measurements in biology. And from first principles, there's really three ways of doing this technologically, and those are the three ways. Those ways are represented by the three platforms that we have developed at 10x. The Chromium Single Cell platform, Visium Spatial, and Xenium In Situ.
And so having them all under one roof gives us the confidence that we have the full set of solutions for the future of biological analysis. So first, the Chromium Single Cell platform. So this, Chromium is the unambiguous leader in single-cell. It's the platform that really catalyzed the single-cell revolution, that really created the single-cell market as we know it today. It works on dissociated cells, allows customers to take individual cells across 1,000s to millions of cells in a single experiment, and analyze each across a broad array of analytes, from transcriptomics to epigenomics, to proteins, to immune receptors, and also be able to do it together simultaneously in a multi-omic context. The system is known for its really high performance, quality of data, robustness.
There's 1,000s and 1,000s of customer labs around the world using Chromium across just about every area of biological research. And there's now this large ecosystem of customers' data sets, protocols, that provides real value to our customers because it allows them to collaborate with each other, to learn from each other, to put their data in the context of other data sets. So Chromium has come really far in a really relatively short amount of time, but at the same time, we believe the potential for the platform is much greater still. The cell is the fundamental unit of biology, and the vast majority of research that can benefit from single-cell analysis doesn't yet. And so our goal is to keep investing aggressively in the platform, both in terms of product development and in terms of commercial focus.
Now, turning to Visium, which is the leading platform for spatial discovery. It works in tissues. It measures the full transcriptome across the entire tissue section, and for each molecule that it measures, it's able to map that molecule to its position within the tissue. And by virtue of that, it generates spatial data. And so, and because of that, it ends up bridging the worlds of histology and genomics together, the worlds that previously existed far apart from each other. Since the initial launch of the platform a few years ago, we have added many new capabilities, including last year, multi-omic protein profiling. We now have over 500 CytAssist instruments installed throughout the world. This is the instrument that has really supercharged the platform, delivered really top-notch workflow, really high-quality data. Visium is really the ideal tool for unbiased spatial discovery.
But once you know what you're looking for, you know which genes you want to focus on, then Xenium becomes the ideal platform of choice. And so what Xenium allows you to do is to measure large panels of molecules directly in tissue, in situ, in an integrated, imaging-based approach. It provides this incredibly detailed view of your tissues, individual molecules at subcellular resolution. Something that felt just like science fiction just a few years ago is now available in hundreds of labs around the world. The system is fully integrated, provides end-to-end workflow, intuitive software. It's designed for routine use, so it just works in customers' hands, despite the really complex, sophisticated technology underneath. It produces very clean data, custom panels, and importantly, it's compatible with H&E staining, which makes it compatible with standard pathology workflows.
Now, our three platforms provide highly complementary insights, highly complementary data, and having them all under one roof provides a lot of value to our customers. So most Visium and Xenium application experiments, for example, make use of Chromium Single-Cell data. Many Xenium experiments naturally lend themselves to further exploration with Visium and vice versa. And so the best way for a researcher to get the max amount of insight from their sample is to apply all three platforms in combination. And so there is a big advantage to customers to being a part of the 10x product ecosystem, because it allows them to get the best insights, the best value, and the best support across the board. So products have been used to make discoveries across just about every area of biology, every disease, every therapeutic area.
It's in fact really hard to think of an area of biology where our products have not led to major breakthroughs. And one common theme, one of the big learnings of the past several years of all this research, is just this pervasive heterogeneity that exists across just about all biological systems, all tissues. And what this means is that in order to understand biology, you really need to get to the level of individual, individual cells. You need to understand what they're doing and how they interact with each other. And which means that it is our belief that over time, every sample will need to be analyzed with single-cell context, with spatial information.... In many ways, if you look at how our product's already used, you see the evidence of that in the marketplace already.
The way that our customers use our products, they're essentially replacing much of the conventional toolkit of, of standard life sciences. That oftentimes presents a challenge for us to of estimating market size, because we're not displacing any particular technology, we're not contained to any particular application. We are gathering dollars and customers from all across the ecosystem. We're creating new markets. But one way to estimate the opportunity is to look through the lens of the types of questions that researchers ask, and estimate how many dollars are flowing into answering those questions, and which ones of those questions can be most readily answered using our tools. And if you look at lens, four categories of questions emerge. First is atlasing. So this refers to baseline characterization of biological systems. What cell types, cells, cell states exist?
Next is figuring out genetic mechanisms, really the subject of functional genomics, going downstream from DNA, from genes, from variants, to figuring out what they do, how they actually behave, what biology they influence within cells, within tissues. This is really the domain of functional genomics, where the genomics field has been focused on for the last 10+ years. The third category is what is really mainstream biology. If you think of a typical biologist, they're focused on a particular system, particular gene pathway, cell pathway, and here the opportunity is to give them a much larger context, a genome-scale, cell-specific context, to truly illuminate the biology they've been trying to understand. These customers, by and large, are not necessarily very technology sophisticated, so ease of use, data analysis, and cost becomes important to them.
And the fourth category is translational applications in biopharma and for clinical research. These applications typically come after basic scientific research, with the intention of specifically impacting human health. We've established strong beachheads here, but it's still really early. There's a lot more coming here. Now, now I'll touch briefly, in a bit more detail on two of these, areas. So first, atlasing. This is where single-cell really got going, really kind of exploded out of the scene. And on first glance, it might appear that this is a pretty contained application, because once you construct your atlas, you're kind of done.
But the fact is, biology is incredibly complex, and despite all the work that has been done toward atlasing, it's still really early days, and there's much more to be done going forward to really reflect the actual complexity of biology. And so researchers are looking to do much more, do a larger and more atlases, to move beyond just transcriptomics toward multi-omics, towards spatial information, toward more phenotypes, development stages, diseases, expand out to more human populations, geographies, ethnicities. And so because of that, there's these large efforts around the world to put more funding, larger projects, to do more atlasing experiments. And then on the other end of the spectrum are translational applications. So whereas our technologies tend to start with atlasing, over time, we expect them to become increasingly critical for translational work.
We're already seeing that potential in the trajectory we're seeing in the business now. Over the past several years, based on the publications that have been coming out, based on the clinical trials that have started using our products, and also based on larger consortium studies that have been coming together, like the Mosaic study that we talked about earlier last year, which entails analyzing 1,000s of clinical samples to look for biomarkers and to build predictive models for cancer. What's really remarkable is that up until recently, our products were not really even suitable for translational applications, which is now changing with the arrival of Chromium Flex product, with the arrival of cross-platform FFPE compatibility, with the protein capability coming onto our spatial products as well.
And so going forward, we see this growing opportunity in translational applications, and we intend to lean into it and put additional commercial focus toward realizing it. And so we have these big markets, these big opportunities in front of us, and now we have major drivers that will propel us to take full advantage of these opportunities. So first, underlying all of this is our foundational strength, and that's in technology and product innovation. And we're going to be keep releasing new products to deliver better insights, more workflows, better cost structure, to keep driving into our markets. The cell is the fundamental unit of biology, and so we expect single-cell approaches to keep expanding into more and more areas of scientific research.
For the same reason that the cell is the fundamental unit of biology, we expect the expansion of translational applications as well. Spatial biology has been on a really strong trajectory right out of the gate, and we expect that to continue as it delivers the new era of genomic analysis and transforms multiple fields, and we expect it to be a big growth driver for us going forward. Over the coming years, we also expect to see increasing evidence of clinical utility start to emerge of these approaches, which will set us up really well for future markets down the road, but also will serve as an accelerant to further accelerate these other drivers, especially in translational applications.
And so now when we think about innovation and future product development, a really important core principle that animates our decision-making, that drives how we think about new products, is the belief in the universality of these technologies. These are general-purpose tools that are meant to go to address all areas of biologies, that can answer a really broad spectrum of research questions. And it's, it is our imperative to drive wider and wider adoption, to democratize their use, to propel them to ubiquity... And that means first, we're gonna keep investing in core capabilities to measure more and more biology, to drive more and more insights at a greater and greater level of detail, means raising the bar on more analytes, more applications, more multiomics to drive higher resolution, higher sensitivity, more multiplexing, more scale, more throughput, measure more cells and more tissues.
It's also really critical to keep investing in ease of use. Our products are known that they just work in customers' hands, but what works in one customer's hands might not be so easy to use for another customer, especially as we enter new customer segments, especially as we are reaching to wider and wider adoption. And so we're gonna keep investing in workflow optimization, addressing experimental logistics, sample prep, sample breadth, data analysis, computation, delivering more efficient insights. And finally, lower cost. We strongly believe there is huge elasticity of demand in our markets. At this stage, our opportunity set is not really bound by samples or by dollars, and so our goal is to deliver the right pricing structures to capture more and more of the economics from the ecosystem.
That means driving down costs along multiple vectors, along lower cost per cell, per tissue area, per sample, per experiment, per project. The key is to deliver more and more value per dollar of customer spend, to convert more and more of life science research to this new generation of tools and technologies. So it's along these lines that we're very excited about future capabilities we will be bringing out to Chromium. Chromium is well known as the best performing system for single-cell analysis, along multiple dimensions, has the widest diversity of applications. Now we have a number of developments in the works that we'll be talking about later this year that will really raise the bar on performance, take Chromium to the next level, advances in sensitivity, cell recovery, throughput and scale, ease of use, applications.
These developments will also put us on a path to lowering cost over time, so that over time, we can drive to the price point of $100 per sample. We believe that as we advance in that direction, the market for single-cell analysis will expand tremendously. Turning to Xenium, we have exciting developments coming throughout this year. First, cell segmentation. This refers to the ability to accurately map cell boundaries in customers' tissues. Now, Xenium launched with a really robust cell segmentation approach, but this is a really challenging problem to make work across all different tissues, across all different samples. We've been making great progress in terms of stains, in terms of chemistry, in terms of computation, computational approach, and really excited about releasing this new product, this new version of cell segmentation later this quarter.
Then in the second quarter, we're going to release a huge increase in plex level that Xenium, the Xenium platform can enable. Now, our strategy of having highly customized panels that are suitable for people's, for customers' applications, has been very successful. But many customers are also interested in larger panels, whether to measure more genes or just not to have to customize. And so we've pushed the envelope along several areas in a truly multidisciplinary 10x fashion, to deliver this new capability to scale up plex level by an order of magnitude while delivering really high quality, high sensitivity, high specificity, all within a five-day run across a large tissue area. Then later in the year, in the second half of the year, we're also going to deliver in-line multiplex protein capability detection along with gene expression.
Now, Xenium, from the beginning, had the ability to detect protein in line with gene expression using immunofluorescence. But with immunofluorescence, you can only detect one or two markers at a time. So with this, you'll be able to scale up to larger panels, and this is something that a lot of our customers are really excited by. And finally, as towards the end of the year and beyond, we'll be releasing more multiplex gene expression panels to give our customers even more flexibility and more options. And the important thing to recognize here that this is just the beginning. What is really exciting about Xenium, what has been exciting to us from the very start, is the amount of technological headroom that this platform affords.
So we have many years' worth of development ahead of us to keep driving toward, to add more applications, to add more throughput, to drive down cost over the years, and we can't wait to introduce those capabilities to our customers. And now for Visium, as I mentioned, over the past several years, we've released a number of really important new features, new products, new capabilities to the platform, so that at this stage, it's substantially more advanced than the state of the platform four years ago when we first launched. But one request we've been hearing over and over again from our customers is the desire for high resolution.
And the reason for that is that as great as Visium is, as useful as the data is, the resolution of current Visium is not high enough to detect some of the finer features in tissues, not enough to get down to the level of individual cells. And so for the past few years, we've been working on a product called Visium HD to deliver high resolution. Now, this is a really ambitious undertaking, a really big technological challenge. And to give you a sense of just how ambitious, this is a diagram that shows on the left, the technology behind the standard Visium, the current Visium, which is based around these 55 micron spots arranged in a hexagonal pattern. On the right is the technology that will enable Visium HD, that shows this continuous lawn of two micron squares.
Think of each square as a pixel, and there's over 11 million pixels that are driving underlying the tissue in Visium HD, compared to only 5,000 in standard Visium. So it's a huge difference in, in resolution, several orders of magnitude. And so when you overlay the tissue on top of these, of these arrays, the results look absolutely stunning. On the left, you see Visium, the standard Visium, which provides really useful data, but clearly the picture is pixelated and missing some of the finer details of the tissue. On the right is Visium HD, where you can't even see the individual pixels. It looks like an immunofluorescence image, but in fact, the pixels are there, and behind each pixel is a whole transcriptome worth of data. This is beautiful data.
It's absolutely stunning in the amount of information content that this product will be able to deliver. Of course, it's one thing to be able to generate a data set. It's a whole other thing, it's vastly more challenging, to build a product, to make it work across many samples, many tissues, many settings. And here, we have the huge benefit of all the components and all the technologies we've developed in the meantime, most importantly, the CytAssist, which enables really compelling workflow, really high precision, and really great data quality. And now you see Visium HD applied to across a range of samples with really beautiful data. So it's not surprising that if you look back across the last few years, this has been clearly, by far, the most requested single product in our history.
Customers have been waiting for a long time for this product, and now I'm happy to say they're not gonna have to wait much longer. Visium HD will be shipping this quarter. It's available for order now. Will run on the largest growing install base of CytAssist, has great workflow, great data, will run across a large range of tissues, works in FFPE, compatible with H&E and immunofluorescence, and we really can't wait to see what customers do with the product in their hands. And if you'd like to learn more about HD or any of our other products and technologies, please join us next month at the AGBT Conference in Florida. Thank you.
Perfect. Thank you, Serge. To start it off, you guys have pre-announced this morning your Q4 results with revenue of $184 million, beating Street estimates pretty handily. As you look back on 2023, can you walk us through some of the key highlights in the 10x story?
Yeah. So I think, the big, the big part of the story, of course, as I mentioned in the beginning, was sort of the emergence of the spatial biology as a huge franchise, as us being the leaders in it. The big part, the key story was really the launch of Xenium, and has gone as well as any technology in the history of life sciences. In terms of the initial customer demand, customer instrument placements, our ability to scale up demand, you really have to go back to look back maybe to the NGS takeoff to, to find anything, that can compare. So it's been really exciting. In the meantime, we've made tons of progress, within the company operationally, in terms of product development, as you can see now, with the momentum coming on the Visium side as we enter this year.
And also, despite, you know, like, a number of macro challenges, this past year, we've made good progress on our other franchises as well.
Great. Then, you know, I wanted to dig into placements and just this budget flush dynamic. So on 4Q, can you walk us through... Did you see any level of budget flush, or were the placements that you placed in 4Q potentially pull forward as well? And then as a clarification, can you walk us through the placements across Chromium, Visium, and Xenium within 4Q?
Justin, you wanna take this one?
Yeah. So as far as the fourth quarter budget flush dynamics go, it's really more of a regional story, maybe starting with China. China was about what we thought it would be. It was down from Q3 to Q4. We saw some strength in EMEA and relative weakness in AMR. As far as looking at the customer segment dynamics, it was worse in biopharma. We saw less budget flush there. Relatively, a little bit better in academic, but we still didn't see the same seasonality that we had seen in the past in Q4 from the academic customers.
Got it. Okay, that's helpful. Maybe just transitioning into 2024 then, you know, as we go into this year, how should we think about framing up the top line expectations for 10x in light of, you know, some of these issues with China lingering, for example? And then can you provide any color on Chromium and just the broader spatial portfolio and those trajectories for 2024?
Well, so as we enter the year, there's like, we have clearly huge momentum on the spatial side, like the new product launch. We're really excited about what's gonna happen with Visium HD. I think there's a lot of product momentum on the Xenium side as well, and we're really excited to, you know, to be talking about what's going to be happening in Chromium as well. As I mentioned, there's a number of new developments there that should be really welcome by our customers. So I think we have really nice, powerful setup as we think about the long term in terms of our product development and in terms of our sort of broad reach of our commercial force. But of course, there's also going to be still challenges as we enter the year.
Especially given the number of new products and early products, you've gotta be, you've gotta be cognizant that of, like, pretty wide error bars at this stage. I don't know if you want to add something.
Yeah, just to add to that, you know, this was a solid quarter in Q4. I think that we finished the year in a strong way. In looking at 2024 outlook, you know, we'll talk more about 2024 outlook when we get on our earnings call next month. You know, but I do think that it's important that we don't get too far ahead of ourselves as far as expectations go. I do think that some conservatism upfront is appropriate, given the macro trends and the product transitions that we've talked about. We've got a great cost profile heading into next year. Our focus on free cash flow positive has paid off. We were free cash flow positive in Q4.
I feel good about our setup for overall 2024 as far as driving cash flows, although I wouldn't expect that to repeat in Q1, given the seasonal step down in revenue that we see from Q4 to Q1.
Great, that's helpful. Maybe just a follow-up question on China, as you mentioned some of the pockets of weakness there. How should we think about China and, you know, some of the puts and takes as we head into 2024? When do you have visibility on when that market could really return, and are you seeing any green shoots so far?
Yeah.
Well, so yeah, China has been a challenging market for us, well, for a lot of people-
Yeah
For us as well. And, you know, one of the things that has sort of exacerbated that was the business model that we have in China, which involves multiple intermediaries. We sell through distributors, by and large, and those distributors increasingly over the last several years sell to service providers, who themselves then sell to, to end customers. And so then fluctuations in end customer demand kind of take a while to propagate through. And, over the last two years, because of COVID and then sort of the general economy disruptions there, you had sort of this effect of inventories getting built up at every one of those junctions, and it takes some amount of time to wind down those inventories and also just to gain visibility.
Up until, you know, sort of the second quarter of last year, we didn't even have people on the ground really in China from, you know, outside of our, some of our salespeople. And we've been, you know, we've been traveling there, kind of getting first-hand knowledge and getting closer to our service providers, getting closer to our customers to get a better sense of the underlying dynamics and the underlying inventory levels. You know, our view is that it still is gonna take some amount of time to work through those. We've been making some amount of progress working through those inventories, and but it's one of those things where it's, you know, the last few years have taught us it's dangerous to predict recovery in China, and so we want to be cautious at this stage.
Yeah, as far as current exposure in China goes, we ended 2023 and looking at full year, you know, high single digits% of overall revenue. Q4 was mid-single digits% of overall revenue. And when you look at 2023 compared to 2022, each of those declined approximately four percentage points. And so, yeah, you know, I hesitate to call a bottom in China right now, but I can say that Q4 played out largely like we had expected it to.
Great. That's helpful. Maybe just shifting over to some questions on the portfolio then. So first up, on spatial, this franchise has been, you know, a source of meaningful strength throughout 2023. So maybe taking a step back, can you just remind investors what makes your spatial portfolio so unique? And then, you, you know, you mentioned some of this product cycle update today with the Xenium HD. How should we think about this product cycle and further adoption throughout spatial?
Yeah. So we've kind of made the decision early on that spatial is going to be a really big market and really kind of a revolutionary set of technologies to bring to the world. And we took a really deliberate and really a rigorous approach to building out these platforms, and you see the manifestation of that now in the market. So Xenium, as I mentioned, is best in performance along multiple factors, along multiple dimensions, best sensitivity, best specificity, highest quality of data, and importantly, best at producing insights and producing those fast.
So compared to any other in situ platform, it really stands head and shoulders above the rest, and we intend to press our advantage and as you saw later this year, to keep releasing more innovation to really take it to the next level. So we feel really good about where the platform is and even better about where it's headed in terms of capabilities. Visium has been a great platform for unbiased discovery. If you have a set of samples, clinical samples, FFPE there, and you want another phenotype, and you want to run a study on those to associate those phenotypes with molecular information, there is no better platform out there than Visium, and especially now with Visium HD. That is the...
This is by far the best way to get the most information, the most relevant information for it. Again, between all the advances we've made around FFPE compatibility, around the workflow, around data quality, and now resolution, there's really, it really stands head and shoulders above the rest, and we feel really good about the state of the platform, too.
Great. Then just to follow up on the Xenium portfolio, you know, that's also had very strong traction since launch. Can you talk through what are you seeing from an order book perspective, and how much really visibility do you have on Xenium going forward? Then how should we think about the framework, you know, potential range of outcomes for placements on Xenium heading into 2024?
Yeah, maybe I'll just start with, like, a high-level view, right? So kind of, zooming out from sort of the quarter-by-quarter fluctuations, clearly, the amount of demand and interest and potential of these applications, both from first principles and from what customers are telling us here, is as big as anything, again, in the history of life sciences. So our view here is that the long-term trajectory here is really, really, really promising, and the early experience we've seen is indicative of, where the platform is headed in the long run. So feel really good about that. We're gonna keep leaning into it. We're putting, you know, more commercial resources into this as well.
And so, as far as, you know, sort of the quarterly fluctuation are concerned, you always have to be mindful that there's particular transient dynamics early in launch, and then you also have sort of different seasonality kind of effects, and maybe Justin can comment on those.
Yeah, as far as Xenium goes, we had a really strong Q3 and Q4, as far as placements go. You know, in Q3, we had the price increase that went into effect at the end of that quarter, and then in Q4, you have just the typical year-end budget dynamics and seasonality. So there's been a lot of factors at play over these last couple quarters, and I think it'll still take some time to determine, you know, what exactly the sustained demand of instrument placements will be. But I do think between Q3 and Q4, with those factors that I just mentioned-
... you know, we probably pulled forward maybe a quarter, quarter and a half, of demand between those two. So, you know, great for a strong finish to the year, but still need you know, more time to determine what that sustained demand is gonna be. But you know, the opportunity is huge, and the funnel is strong, and we feel great about the long-term prospects of Xenium.
Great. Awesome. I just want to say congratulations on the launch of Visium HD. Can you kind of talk about the opportunity here, and how should that look like from a cadence of ramping shipments on this asset? How should we also think about this from a financial contribution perspective? How meaningful could that HD launch be?
Well, you know, customers have been waiting for this product for a while. At the same time, there's a fair amount of pent-up demand. Of course, we have to be careful. I mean, literally, it just became available for customer purchase right now. So in terms of the pipeline, well, we'll see how that grows. I think, you know, we've obviously been working really hard to scale manufacturing, but there's always kind of at the beginning of any launch, you have to be conscious of the ramp from that point of view.
And then, you know, it'll take some amount of time to kind of understand the sustained level of demand as we go through sort of the initial ramp and then the initial burst of demand and the initial operations ramp. But overall, I mean, again, like I said earlier, I think this is a really, really special product. It is the ultimate product for translational discovery, and all the early indicators suggest that it has enormous potential and should put us in a good trajectory with Visium.
Great. That's helpful. Then maybe shifting over in the final one and a half minutes or so here, just on competition, can you walk us through the landscape on competition, both on the single-cell side and on the spatial side? How are you guys positioning yourself about, around some of the new entrants that we've seen, and then how do you see that competition progressing as we move forward?
Yeah. So, you know, I touched on this on the spatial side. There has certainly been a lot of interest, a lot of companies kind of entering the space, small and large. And we've, you know, our North Star is invest in product development, in customer experience, in just having a superior product, superior features, superior insights that we deliver to customers. And you're seeing that validated in the market. You're seeing it based on third-party comparisons, and you're seeing how sort of the market perception of Xenium has really been separating itself out from the rest. We've seen the same thing happen on the Visium side and expect more with HD.
On the single-cell side, again, this market has been around for a while, and, as always is the case, large markets attract new competitors, and there's always been kind of a continuous flux of competitors, again, small and large, coming into this space. And our goal here, again, the North Star, is to keep delivering more and more value to our customers, and we've done that consistently across the years. Chromium is still clearly unambiguously the best-performing system in the market, has the broadest set of application, has the best customer experience and support, and we're only gonna raise the bar going forward. And so that's what we're doing, that's our goal, and we feel good and confident on that.
Perfect. With that, we are out of time. Serge, Justin, thank you so much for joining us. To everyone in the room, thank you as well.
Thank you.
Thank you.