And this is an issue of the 6k consumables going down pretty rapidly as people are planning to transition to the X and again exacerbate it somewhat by the larger number of Xs we are delivering. And the other part is a slightly slower than expected ramp up on the full utilization of the X. The other 50% of that 75% is coming from some of the customer conservatism that we’re seeing in terms of longer sales cycles and slower than expected recovery across the board beyond China. So now second quarter versus the first quarter and then third quarter versus second quarter, so we did see a ramp up from first quarter and the second quarter across many dimensions. Obviously, we shipped more Xs. So we saw a jump on the instrument side. We did see a healthy ramp up on our 6k consumables, primarily driven by the clinical segment.
And you’re right, we did actually see a jump from Q1 to Q2 in China. But that was expected given China was really depressed for us and other companies in Q1. Moving on to Q3, what you’re seeing in some of the sequential ramp down, there are two big reasons for it, right? One, the aforementioned 6k consumable reduction is going to hit sort of a local maxima there because of the larger transition expected to the X. So we’re shipping more Xs. That impact on the 6k consumables is going to ramp up. And we don’t yet have a full ramp up on our X consumables yet, right? We expect that in Q4, and I’ll come back to that. And the other piece is we do expect China to actually be down slightly from Q2, again, because of the expectation that the recovery is proceeding unfortunately more slowly than we had expected.
And then, the last piece around that, and just we do expect Q4 to be up significantly, and Q4 is the first quarter you actually start seeing the X consumables come in. You see your traditional end of the year ramp up in some of the spend from company. So you are still seeing that, and that’s built into our guidance. The last thing you mentioned was about pull through. By the way, we have not given you pull through on X. As with all new instruments, we’ll only come out with that once the instrument ramp up has stayed stabilized. So we do expect, given the interest in X and the kinds of cohort studies and experiments that our customers are telling us they want to do on X, we do expect that our initial assumptions and pull through are still justified.
On the NovaSeq 6000, which is probably what you were referring to, we have called down our pull through numbers for this year. But that is really driven by the transition to the X and the larger than expected impact of that transition that I’ve talked about.
Operator: And we’ll take a question from Tejas Savant with Morgan Stanley.
Tejas Savant: One, Chuck, for you on the leadership changes here. Perhaps, Joydeep, feel free to chime in as well. Dan asked about sort of margins and your commitment to 25% and you call that sort of stretchy, but something that you’re certainly committed to. Would that sort of framing apply to your mid-teens girls that you talked about at the analyst day as well for Core Illumina. Chuck, for you on the leadership changes, beyond sort of the CEO seat, obviously, the CTO and CMO search is underway as well. Any color you can share there on the thought process behind that? On the base business itself, on the NovaSeq, placements here for the X clearly came in, I think it was 28 to 30 units above the piece where we were, but sequencing instrument revenue beat us by only about 5% to 6%.
Right? So the question really is, are you seeing more aggressive discounting? Is that something Illumina is pushing through in response to the macroenvironment? You called out sort of BGI starting to be sort of competitive in China, but just any color on just the pricing dynamics on the instrument side would be helpful as well.
Charles Dadswell: On the executive team and on the process here, so I think the first thing we want to do is just both thank Alex and Phil for all the things that they’ve done for Illumina. With Alex, what we know is that he’s moving on to a new role. He’ll be taking the CEO in another company. And I think that we should be really proud to see the kind of leaderships that we grow out of Illumina. So Alex started with Illumina, went over to GRAIL, he came back to Illumina and now he’s going to land as a CEO. And we’re all looking forward to kind of where that’s going to be. We have a really deep bench in our R&D program. And it’s really heartening to see employee number four, Steve Barnard, who is the first scientist the company ever hired, bringing him into that role.
He knows the technology, he knows the team, and he’ll be able to seamlessly pick up where Alex left off. On the Chief Medical Officer, we’re going to take some time and look at that organization. We’re going to evaluate where we are on the clinical side and on the medical side. Our commitment to our clinical customers, our clinical markets, and our clinical programs continues, and we’ll open up that search after we have some time to examine exactly where that organization fits and what we need.
