Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (NASDAQ:PACB) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dan Brennan: Yeah. Super helpful. And maybe just a quick follow-up. I know it’s obviously super early. It’s May 2nd. First customers got this at the end of March. But in terms of kind of filling the boxes and when we think about what Revio could do with — you’ve discussed maybe four quarters out is when you actually could see a run rate pull-through. Just kind of what are you hearing from customers on that front in terms of the box can generate — I think sequence 1,300 genomes. So as we think about modeling out pull-through and the early users and kind of the demand trends like what would the — that early traction suggest about the utilization of Revio?

Christian Henry: Yeah. Dan, it is really impossible for me to really kind of predict the future, but a couple of things that I can kind of comment on. First of all, the consumable shipments for Revio were higher than we had modeled, even straight out of the gate. And so what that says is there’s enthusiasm to get going. Second, in my prepared remarks, we talked a lot about there are lots of customer conversations that we have where people are moving short-read projects to long-read. And so what that means to me is that first of all, they see utility in long-reads and utility on Revio. But secondly, it means that samples exist to make that transition happen reasonably quickly. And so those are both two encouraging signs. So far, since, as you said, most of these systems were delivered anywhere from mid to late March, and so it’s still way too early to really to have a read.

But the one other thing I would say is people are using their systems. Hundreds of SMRT Cells have been run, hundreds upon hundreds have been run. And overall, the results are — the performance is quite high, which gives us — which helps the new instrument funnel, of course. But it also helps you say, hey, this is going to be a robust product that customers can run hard and over time. So that’s about all I could say on it now, but we will watch from quarter-to-quarter and try to give color where we can. And as we get a few quarters into this, start to report some of those kind of pull-through metrics and our perspective on where they’re going. But it’s a bit early yet, Dan.

Operator: Thank you. And the next question will come from David Westenberg from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

David Westenberg: Hi. Thank you for taking the question, and I echo congrats on these really great instrument orders and placements here. I wanted to start off with the gross margin here. I know that you had some people that bought Sequel II in year — like last year, I think they got a discount. And then I was just wondering here, how should we think about gross margins? When do we start to really see the leverage of the manufacturing? And as we get into 2024, maybe you roll off that discount and you’re going to see higher ASPs and better gross margins. And then last one on the gross margin side. That $3.5 million of inventory coming off. Is that all the headwind in the guidance for this year or is there more than that? And I think all those questions are probably for Susan, actually.