Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ:TWST) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ:TWST) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript November 14, 2025

Twist Bioscience Corporation beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.45, expectations were $-0.5.

Operator: Welcome to Twist Biosciences 2025 Fourth Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Angela Bitting, Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs. Please go ahead.

Angela Bitting: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. I would like to thank you for joining us for Twist Bioscience conference call to review our fiscal 2025 fourth quarter and full year financial results and business progress. We issued our financial results press release before the market, and it is available at our website at www.twistbioscience.com. With me on the call today are Dr. Emily Leproust, CEO and Co-Founder of Twist; Adam Laponis, CFO of Twist; and Dr. Patrick Finn, President and COO of Twist. Today, we will discuss our business progress, financial and operational performance as well as growth opportunities. We will then open the call for questions. We ask that you limit your questions to one and then requeue as a courtesy to others on the call.

This call is being recorded. The audio portion will be archived in the Investors section of our website and will be available for 2 weeks. During today’s presentation, we will make 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 in 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 our press release we issued earlier today as well as more fully described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The forward-looking statements in this presentation are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. We’ll also discuss adjusted EBITDA, a financial measure that does not conform with generally accepted accounting principles. Information may be calculated differently than similar non-GAAP data presented by other companies. When reported, a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures will be included in our earnings documents, which can be found on the Investors section of our website. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO and Co-Founder, Dr. Emily Leproust.

Emily Leproust: Thank you, Angela, and good morning, everyone. Today, our team delivered a record quarter with $99 million in revenue, exceeding our guidance. This represents an increase of 17% year-over-year and our 11th quarter of consecutive growth. For the year, we reported $376.6 million in revenue, growth of 20% over fiscal 2024. Gross margin for the quarter came in at 51.3%. For the year, gross margin was 50.7% compared to 42.6% for fiscal 2024, demonstrating the leverage of fixed costs with higher volume and reflecting our focus over the last 2 years on continuous margin improvement. I’d like to underscore that over the course of fiscal 2025, we grew our business 20%, leveraging our proprietary silicon chip-based technology platform to deliver high-quality products and services rapidly to our growing customer base.

Importantly, through the addition of new products and solutions, we expanded our market share with an eye towards addressing new serviceable market in the year ahead. Our commitment to commercial excellence continues to ensure we meet and exceed our customers’ expectations. Today, with our differentiated manufacturing technology, our innovative R&D for the continuous introduction of new products, our base of more than 3,800 customers across multiple industries, our hundreds of SKUs having a wide range of diverse applications and an increasing market share in multiple markets, we’re operating with incredible execution and financial discipline. And with adjusted EBITDA breakeven within our reach by the end of fiscal 2026, this year, we focus on setting the stage for future growth acceleration.

Turning to our results. SynBio revenue came in at $39.5 million, up 17% year-over-year. Our growth in SynBio continues to be led by the Express portfolio, which remains best-in-class in terms of price, turnaround time and scalability. Two years after launch, our customers have come to depend on the rapid turnaround time, high quality and exceptional experience they receive from Twist as their new normal and what they expect regularly. We have decreased the turnaround time for gene fragments, clono genes, high-throughput DNA preps and high-throughput IgG proteins, and we now run assays and provide antibody characterization data as part of our offering for many customers. One area of substantial growth for SynBio and Biopharma offerings came from customers choosing Twist to power their therapeutics discovery initiatives, both traditional drug discovery and AI-enabled discovery because our platform delivers precision, scale and speed at enabling economics.

While traditional discovery continues to be a focus of many customers, the rapid expansion of AI-enabled drug discovery creates powerful new opportunities and amplifies the value of our technology. Recently, this AI-driven discovery fueled significant growth for Twist. In fiscal 2025, orders from customers working on AI discovery projects grew more than $25 million versus fiscal 2024. These projects primarily fall into the SynBio and Biopharma bucket today and a customer pursuing AI-enabled discovery delivered our single largest purchase order to date. And the emergence of dozens of new organizations across pharma, biotech and big tech, pursuing new discovery approaches expands the market opportunity for SynBio and Biopharma groups today. Rapidly, as we have moved further up the value chain from fragment to genes to prep to protein to delivering characterization data and beyond, the strategic connection between our SynBio and Biopharma groups tightens.

More customers now leverage both products and services to accelerate discovery and identify breakthrough therapeutics. This growing convergence highlights the power of our integrated platforms and reinforces Twist’s unique position to serve the full spectrum of innovation and discovery with more products and services to facilitate this growing opportunity coming in the months ahead. Over the last several years, our product introductions are focused on pharma and biotech customers pursuing therapeutic discovery as well as academic research. As we analyze the future market opportunities, we believe this continues to be the right areas of focus for additional tools and services. Moving forward, we have a robust road map and planned product introductions to augment our portfolio that we believe will continue to drive revenue growth in 2026 and in the future.

Turning to NGS. We reported revenues of $53 million, growth of 16% year-over-year, driven largely by continued commercial success from our diagnostic customers’ clinical assays. Our NGS products are an integral component within many commercial diagnostic workflows. Recall that we provide tools for customers offering tests for therapy selection, liquid biopsy, comprehensive genomic profiling, rare disease, noninvasive parental testing and progression genetics. In addition, we continue to support minimal residual disease customers with several of these groups targeting commercial launch in late 2026 and planning commercial scaling into 2027. And we are beginning to see conversion of the microarray to FlexPrep sequencing workflow. Introduced about a year ago, we believe this product provides significant potential growth opportunities, both for population genetics and AgBio applications.

During the quarter, we had 2 significant population genetic wins with the funnel growing in serviceable opportunity for the $500 million market that uses SNP microarray technology today. Customers in both segments run millions of samples. So once converted, the business is bulky. We have maintained our sequencing agnostic strategy throughout our NGS product portfolio with all sequencing platforms. While the majority of our customer continues to use the Illumina platform, and we have an active OEM agreement with Illumina, we also see growing interest in other platforms. To this end, we announced an advancement of our agreement with Element Biosciences last month that enables us to gain exclusive access to Element’s new Trinity Freestyle workflow, facilitating the use of Twist, a full lineup of library prep for the IVT system.

Together, Element and Twist shortens the workflow from sample to sequencer from more than 20 hours down to 5 hours, a true time savings. In addition, we are powering the gene by gene population genetics test that runs on the Illumina Genomics sequencing platform. This complements our work with PacBio, Oxford Nanopore and others. We continue to see traction building for RNA-Seq workflows, having customers who offer diagnostic tests as well as labs offering clinical services with growth expected across all areas of our NGS portfolio in 2026. Looking at Biopharma Services, we reported $6.4 million in revenue, an increase of 22% year-over-year. Importantly, orders of approximately $11.5 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal ’25 reflect a large order that spans both SynBio and Biopharma from a key account that we do not expect to repeat every quarter.

More customers now partner with Twist across the full design, build, test and learn cycle for developability assays and characterization data. This trend continues to grow, especially among AI-driven drug discovery companies. Many of these customers operate without a wet lab and rely on Twist to execute the critical experiments that bring their designs to life. We help them move fast, generate robust data and advance programs with great confidence. We see much more integration between our SynBio and Biopharma businesses as customers increasingly use both our products and services to power their discovery pipelines. To capture this opportunity, we aligned our sales organizations to deepen collaboration and fully leverage the synergies between the two.

We also received valuable feedback from investors that our SynBio and Biopharma names for revenue grouping [indiscernible]. Reflecting on this progress and feedback, we will combine SynBio and Biopharma revenue for reporting going forward under the term DNA synthesis and protein solutions, indicating synthesis and manufacturing of sequences for DNA, RNA, protein and data for customers going through design, build, test, learn cycle. DNA synthesis and protein solutions more accurately represents our customer base, and we intend to provide additional insight into industry groupings that better reflects how we serve a broad range of customers. Our NGS tools will now be called NGS applications as its products and services facilitate DNA reading, sequencing workflows.

Beginning in the first quarter of fiscal ’26, we will be breaking out industry groupings into therapeutics, diagnostic, industry and applied markets as well as academics and government. In addition, something that is underappreciated about Twist is a number of organizations that buy products from Twist and then resell them under a different brand name. As such, we will also share global supply partner revenue encompassing distributor and OEM partners as part of our industry breakdown. These new groupings enhance transparency and better align with how our business operates, providing investor insight into our strong growth engine. I would now like to turn the call over to Paddy for commentary on our growth initiatives for 2026.

Patrick Finn: Thanks, Emily. As we close fiscal 2025, it’s remarkable what we have achieved in the last year, and I’m even more excited about what is to come. While my comments during earnings throughout the last year focused on margin initiatives, we have now crossed the important threshold of 50% margin, almost 20 margin points increase over the last 2 years. We expect to continue to remain above 50% margin moving forward. And this year, my remarks will focus on our growth plans. Today, I’d like to talk about a remarkable and differentiated product introduction for our NGS product line aimed at empowering our customers in an area of increasing importance for cancer diagnosis, monitoring and treatment. I’m pleased to share that we’re in the final stages of optimizing an express product for minimal residual disease, or MRD, which we expect to introduce commercially in early calendar 2026.

As you know, MRD for therapy selection, cancer monitoring and early treatment of recurrence offers tremendous promise. We already work with many MRD customers providing library prep and target enrichment panels for tumor-informed and tumor-naive panels as well as whole genome sequencing approaches. And we continue to hear from customers developing tumor-informed assays that they gain better sensitivity and specificity using hundreds or thousands of sequences specific to a patient’s tumor. The data presented at recent medical meetings back up these beliefs. Importantly, recent studies also show that physicians desire, the capability to sequence the cancers present and have a test in hand for a patient with cancer within a 4-week window. While we currently manufacture enrichment panels within about 5 business days, we hear the desire for delivery of a tumor-informed panel as fast as 12 hours.

Using our proprietary DNA synthesis platform, we developed a process to do just that, manufacture and ship an individualized panel as fast as 12 hours after receiving the sequence data. Our MRD Express solution provides the speed and simplicity of a tumor-naive test while maintaining the precision and sensitivity of a tumor-informed assay, something not possible using any other method of DNA synthesis. Taking a step back and looking at the broader implications, we all know family and friends and maybe many of you personally impacted by a cancer diagnosis. In the midst of the storm, turnaround time is critically important, both to determine treatment and create a personalized panel to monitor recurrence of disease. At Twist, we believe it’s our responsibility to respond rapidly, potentially offering a path to enable reduced treatment time or pursue therapy at an earlier stage of disease.

This higher calling motivates all of our Twisters to go above and beyond for our customers to play a role in transforming cancer into a manageable chronic condition. On the business side, we believe Twist MRD Express has the ability to support our customers in changing the diagnostic and treatment paradigm, lowering the operational barrier of entry for personalized MRD. We enable this shift through our synthesis platform along with automation, delivering personalized panels in a time line equivalent to tumor-naive workflow. We believe our connection to the customer, our ability to turn a customized panel in as few as 12 hours, all underpinned by our proprietary platform will enable increasing availability of tumor-informed cancer assays. On top of this, we have the capacity today to serve these markets, future-proofing customer supply chain constraints and vulnerabilities.

With that, I’ll turn the call over to Adam to discuss our financials.

Adam Laponis: Thank you, Paddy. Revenue for the fourth quarter increased to $99 million, growth of 17% year-over-year and approximately 3% sequentially. For fiscal 2025, revenue increased to $376.6 million, growth of 20% year-over-year. Gross margin came in at 51.3% for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, with the margin for full year of 50.7%, an increase of 8 margin points versus fiscal 2024, with approximately 90% of revenue growth in FY ’25 dropping to the gross margin line, supported by our continuous process improvement efforts. Taking a deeper dive into revenue. SynBio revenue increased to $39.5 million, growth of 17% year-over-year. For the full year, SynBio revenue increased to $145 million compared to $123.5 million in fiscal 2024, an increase of 17%.

NGS revenue for the fourth quarter grew approximately $53 million compared to $45.5 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, an increase of 16% year-over-year. For the quarter, revenue from our top 10 NGS customers accounted for approximately 39% of NGS revenue. For fiscal 2025, NGS revenue increased to $208.1 million, growth of 23% year-over-year. We served 588 NGS customers in the quarter with 159 having adopted our products. For Biopharma, revenue was $6.4 million for the quarter, growth of 22% over the same period of fiscal ’24, with orders of $11.5 million. We had 84 active programs as of the end of September 2025, and we started 47 new programs during the quarter. Compared to last quarter, these programs are more substantive as we see a shift to AI discovery-driven projects.

For fiscal 2025, revenue was $23.5 million, growth of 15%. Looking geographically. Americas revenue increased to approximately $57.3 million in the fourth quarter compared to $52.7 million in the same period of fiscal 2024, growth of 9% year-over-year. For the fiscal year, the Americas accounted for 60% of revenue. EMEA revenue rose to $34.6 million in the fourth quarter versus $25.5 million in the same period of fiscal 2024, exceptional growth of 35% year-over-year. For the fiscal year, EMEA represented 33% of revenue. APAC revenue increased to $7.2 million in the fourth quarter compared to $6.5 million in the same period of fiscal ’24, an increase of 9% year-over-year. APAC accounted for 7% of our revenue in fiscal 2025. China continues to be a relatively small portion of our revenue at approximately 1% of total revenue for fiscal 2025.

Moving down the P&L. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenues for the fourth quarter were $80.8 million compared with $74.3 million in the same period of 2024. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenues for fiscal 2025 were $327.3 million, which marks our third consecutive year of relatively flat operating expenses, excluding cost of revenues. Looking at our progress and our path to profitability. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, adjusted EBITDA was a loss of approximately $7.8 million, an improvement of $9.2 million versus the fourth quarter of fiscal ’24. For fiscal ’25, adjusted EBITDA was a loss of approximately $46.9 million, an improvement of approximately $46.6 million versus fiscal 2024. Cash flow from operating activities continues to improve, and we are driving to breakeven.

For the 12 months ended September 30, 2025, net cash used in operating activities was $47.6 million compared to $64.1 million for the equivalent 12-month period in 2024. Capital expenditures in fiscal 2025 were $28 million, reflecting our investment in growth for fiscal 2026 and beyond. We ended the fiscal year with cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of approximately $232.4 million. As Emily mentioned, beginning next quarter, we will provide new revenue by industry for the following categories that increased clarity around our key customer groups and transparency on how we are progressing as follows: Therapeutics customers, which include both large pharma and early-stage biotech, diagnostics customers who use our products to deliver a clinical report for a patient; industrial and applied customers, including agricultural bio; academic research and government customers; global supply partners, which will include distributor and OEM partners servicing customers across a variety of industries.

We believe these new categories will provide added color and metrics for investors to track our progress in reaching different end markets and customer segments. We do intend to share a retrospective view on the new industry group performance in our fiscal first quarter reporting. Turning to guidance for fiscal 2026. We expect total revenues of $425 million to $435 million, growth of approximately 13% to 15.5% year-over-year. For our DNA Synthesis and Protein Solutions Group, we expect revenue of $194 million to $199 million, growth of 15% to 18% over fiscal 2025, reflecting strong demand from our AI discovery customers. For our NGS Applications Group, we expect revenue of $231 million to $236 million, growth of 11% to 13.5% over fiscal 2025.

We see a path back to 20% growth year-over-year by Q4 as we expect a large diagnostic customer will begin ramping their commercial volume in the second quarter. As added color, our NGS forecast assumes approximately 1 to 2 points of growth for MRD in fiscal ’26, with the ramp for this particular product group coming in late ’26 into ’27. We expect gross margin to be above 52% for fiscal 2026, and we expect to exit fiscal ’26 with our fourth quarter achieving adjusted EBITDA breakeven. For the first quarter of fiscal 2026, we expect revenue of $100 million to $101 million, growth of 13% to 14% compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Our guidance includes the expectation that our Q1 revenue will be impacted by a large cancer diagnostics customer who is transitioning their assay from research to commercial with a reacceleration of purchasing in the second quarter of fiscal 2026.

We also see significant revenue from the record AI drug discovery order such that our 2 product groups will be relatively equivalent to the first quarter. With that, I’ll turn the call back to Emily.

Emily Leproust: Thank you, Adam. Our team executed exceptionally well throughout 2025, delivering strong results and building the foundation for what comes next. At Twist, we often say for a strong finish, we go again. We see substantial opportunity ahead across all our markets. Staying close to our customers continues to be our greatest competitive advantage. It allows us to anticipate emerging needs and identify the next set of products that would move the needle for growth. Like our customers, we have an ambedance of ideas and a disciplined approach to prioritization. Over the past 2 years, we deliberately focused on gross margin expansion and with gross margins now above 50%, we have successfully positioned the business for continued profitable growth.

As we reallocate R&D resources towards growth, we’re investing in innovation that we believe will drive sustained top line acceleration. Our road map remains robust and well sequenced to deliver growth over the next several years. Looking forward, we expect balanced growth across our DNA synthesis and Protein Solutions and NGS applications with some normal quarterly variation. We’re advancing new products that support customers leveraging AI and drug discovery as well as those using traditional therapeutics development methods. Fiscal 2026 is about translating our margin strength into durable revenue growth. We know where we need to go, and we are already on our way. With that, let’s open the call for questions. Operator?

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] One moment for our first question and it comes from Catherine Schulte with Baird.

Catherine Ramsey: Maybe first on gross margins. Guidance for the fiscal year implies, I think, low 60s incremental margins off of ’25. So it would be in that 75% to 80% range if we did it off of ’24. But I think the expectation was you’d flow more of the ’25 upside through. So I guess the question is, is this pricing driven? Do you have some manufacturing investments that you’re making? And when do we get back to the kind of 75% to 80% incrementals?

Adam Laponis: Catherine, this is Adam. Thanks for the question. Very much encouraged by the progress of the team over the last 2 years. The 20% growth in gross margin has been extraordinary. While we expect to continue to see the 75% to 80% on average, we are lapping some tough comps, particularly given what we saw in Q3 of this year. For the last quarter, we dropped, I think it was over 80% of gross revenue growth dropped to the gross margin line. And generally, I’d expect that to continue to hold in the future. And if you look at that 2-year metric, it absolutely will, but there will be some noise. And I’d say it is more around the specific customer mix that we see in any given quarter that drives it more than anything else. But we expect it to continue to expand. That said, we will continue to focus on revenue growth as well as gross margin and optimize for the gross profit.

Catherine Ramsey: Okay. Great. And then for NGS, I think that guide came in a little bit below Street for fiscal ’26. Can you just talk through the drivers there and maybe get a little more granular on the expectations for that customer ramping that moving into production. And I think the guide implies 11% to 13% or 14% growth for NGS. How should we think about long-term growth for that business? Is this kind of the new baseline that we should be thinking about?

Adam Laponis: I’m happy to take that one. In terms of growth for NGS, we’re very excited about the prospects. We mentioned it on the call last quarter that we have a customer transitioning from their verification and validation that there would be an air pocket in Q4, and that would continue through Q1. We expect that, that customer will ramp as well as other customers. A couple of points of commentary and color that we provided. We expect to be back to 20% growth by fourth quarter in the NGS business as well as we expect to continue to see growth from MRD and other new product introductions. And we’ve assumed about 1% to 2% of overall growth from the MRD business products in 2026.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners.

Puneet Souda: Wondering if you can provide a view into — in SynBio and with the new segmenting, can you elaborate a bit on the Biopharma order? What — obviously, that’s driven by AI, but just trying to understand how sustainable this is? How much of a momentum? What are you hearing from the customer development teams? How meaningful the AI contribution could be in fiscal year ’26?

Patrick Finn: Puneet, thanks for the question. We’ve been talking for a few quarters about strategically how important the biopharma business is and the close ties to the SynBio product offering. And I think you’re starting to see real validation of that with the order described in our comments today. It leverages everything that we’re good at. Our knowledge from a single gene all the way through to discovery. But what we’re seeing with the AI potential is — it’s our throughput and scale that really enables and supports that offering. So we continue to be very optimistic in that space and see a fantastic lineup of the total Twist offering all the way through from one gene all the way through to full discovery that basically puts us in a good spot for our future opportunities.

Operator: One moment for our next question. It comes from Brendan Smith with TD Cowen.

Brendan Smith: I also wanted to ask just a little bit more about guidance into next year. Maybe just quickly for — I know you’re not guiding to GMs in Q1, but can you give us a sense of how you’re thinking about gross margin sequentially from Q4 and then over the course of next year to really get to that 52% plus on the full year 2026? And then maybe just quickly on the NGS portfolio, anything that you’re hearing specifically from customers really that’s kind of driving some of your assumptions to get to maybe the upper versus lower bound of the guide there?

Adam Laponis: Brendan, happy to take the question. In terms of gross margin in the guide, we do see improvements throughout the year. I’d say it is going to parallel with revenue growth being the primary driver of our gross margin expansion as we are continuing to see our efforts from continuous process improvements play out, but we’re also continuing to invest in new capabilities across the business to drive our new product initiatives and growth. And as mentioned in the call, a lot of focus on the AI drug discovery and capabilities to support those customers. In terms of the exit point and also where to go from here, we are — we do see a path to continued gross margin expansion, not just in 2026, but well into 2027 and beyond. But again, optimizing for that gross profit dollar, not necessarily just the gross margin now that we’re above 50% and not looking backwards.

Operator: Our next question comes from Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI.

Vijay Kumar: I had a 2-part question on NGS. NGS, I think your Q1 guidance, it looks like it’s going to be down sequentially, maybe revenues up mid-singles. And I understand that Q4 had the customer transition impact, right? So why would Q1 growth be below Q4? Is there some additional timing elements on Q1 NGS? And sort of related on the MRD Express, did I hear you correctly that sensitivity on a tumor-naive assay would be as good as tumor informed? And is there any data that you highlighted? What kind of interest are you seeing in this product?

Adam Laponis: All right. Well, maybe I can start with the NGS guidance, and I’ll let Paddy talk to the MRD element of it here. In terms of the NGS guidance, Vijay, thank you for the question on this. We gave the update back in Q3’s call that we had a customer transitioning from commercial — from validation to commercial ramp, and that impacted Q1, and it’s going to continue to impact Q4, and we expect to see a sequential growth from that point forward for the NGS business starting in Q2. So we will continue to see that air pocket continue in Q1. And then in Q2 and beyond, we’ll see the sequential growth such that by the time we get to Q4, we’re expecting to be back at 20% year-over-year growth in the NGS business. I’ll let Paddy talk to the MRD portion of the question first.

Patrick Finn: Vijay, thanks for the question. I think when we look at recent medical conferences, I think you’re seeing that the tumor-informed approach is leading to increased sensitivity in the assay. And that’s got us excited about potential with the clinical endpoint for the patients that are going through a tough time. So we see sensitivity enhancements from tumor informed. And again, our scale and speed, we think, is really going to help enable the segment of the market that’s focused on that approach.

Operator: And it’s from the line of Subbu Nambi with Guggenheim.

Subhalaxmi Nambi: Paddy, just a follow-up on that MRD. MRD Express is an exciting launch next year. Could you speak to who the end user is? It almost sounded in your description like Twist is executing the MRD assay for the physician or delivering the panel to a hospital to run in-house? Or is it the same customer as your NGS diagnostics?

Patrick Finn: Subbu, a great question, and thank you for the opportunity to clarify. Twist’s role in the community is an enabler, okay? We don’t run the test. We supply our customers and our partners to enable them to drive their assays to the clinic. So again, our role will be to supply and enable them.

Subhalaxmi Nambi: Perfect. So how will you approach pricing for the MRD Express? What are the expected margins here? And I’ll hop back in the queue.

Patrick Finn: Yes, a good question. So pricing has not been set at this point. It will go from our basic principle, Subbu, which is we’re here to enable our customers at scale to truly drive their product to market. And we think with this product, in particular, truly the impact of MRD to health care. We’ve listened closely to the customer base. I think we understand the value to this market segment of speed and this 12-hour turnaround time. And I think our operating scale and quite frankly, derisking any vulnerabilities in supply chain is good value, and we’ll share that value with our customers as we go forward and enable them to drive best-in-class differentiated assays out to the market.

Operator: One moment for our next question. that comes from Matthew Larew with William Blair.

Matthew Larew: You reiterated the expectation to hit EBITDA breakeven in the fiscal fourth quarter. But obviously, the year is starting a little bit lower on the top line. Given growth is contingent on the expectation of an NGS customer ramp and MRD contribution, how much breathing room do you expect to have in the fiscal fourth quarter? And I guess how air tight are you going to hold yourselves to hitting that mark? I guess that’s the first question. And the second is, Adam, just what does the guide include in terms of the macro picture, given we’ve seen perhaps some recent positive updates relative to your pharma and biotech customers and perhaps there may be some more certainty for your academic customers coming over the next few weeks or months?

Adam Laponis: Thanks, Matt. And I say I never want to predict the macro environment. So we always will be on the — on the side of caution and assuming things don’t improve from where we are today. So we’ve got — we’ve obviously left ourselves assumption that the environment stays relatively stable. And in terms of the growth opportunities, we do assume that acceleration of the commercial customer — the customer ramping its commercial product today. We also have only assumed 1 to 2 points of growth for the year from our MRD products. We know that, that ramp is going to come. We’re extremely excited about it. The difficulty is always in timing that. We want to make sure we’re on the right side of that timing, but we are extremely excited for that ramp and the opportunity it brings to the business, not just in ’26, but in many years to come.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel with Wolfe Research.

Douglas Schenkel: I got a few questions. So thanks for, I guess, getting us in. So first, on SynBio, you had an academic promotion that removed the Express Gene pricing premium for academic customers in response to funding pressure. Is that promotion still in place? And if so, how much longer do you plan on running it? And then building off of that, how should we be thinking about price per gene ’26 versus ’25? So that’s the first topic. The second is there’s obviously been a lot of focus on Q1 guidance specific to NGS and the sequential step down. As you have pointed out to others, you have repeatedly noted over the course of the last several months, a pacing dynamic within NGS. Is the guidance simply a function of that? Or is there any change in underlying trends or demand?

The third topic, which I think is a pretty important one, and I’m not sure this is the right forum. And if it’s not, we can certainly come back to this at our conference next week. But I believe one of the challenges that investors have with Twist is defining the market opportunity. In the newly named DNA synthesis segment, what is the size of the market opportunity and how penetrated are you? And on the NGS side, specific to MRD and MCED, what is the market size? How penetrated are you? And what is average Twist revenue per assay? I think that would make this — those are questions that I think if people have the answers to, it would help with modeling and frankly, help people basically develop some more conviction in the long-term growth trajectory of the business.

Emily Leproust: Thanks, Doug. Great question. This is Emily Leproust. And good job squeezing 3 questions in one. So maybe briefly on SynBio, you’re correct that we had an academic promotion where we got customers express for the price that stand out. That has been widely successful. We’re in the new year and the price has not changed. It is just working for us commercially. And you can see in the number of genes that the growth in genes from — in Q4 was really strong, thanks to that. So we are not announcing whether or not it will close. But as long as it’s working, we’ll keep doing it and it is working. As far as the Q1 guide, yes, it’s purely a pacing dynamic in Q1. There’s a lot of excitement and we are winning on many fronts.

Of course, we’ve been very, very strong in liquid biopsy. And the MRD bespoke that we’re enabling now with adding 12- to 24-hour express delivery. I think that will be a long-term catalyst. Our FlexPrep launch is starting to work well for the AgBio market and the population generic market. So that’s another source of long-term strength. We’ve worked really hard to integrate into a number of sequencers. The workflow of Twist and the Element AVITI really shortens the time between the sample and being on the sequencer. And since you’re doing all the washes after the capture on the sequencer, you can be on the sequencer in as low as 5 hours. So there’s lots of good things that are happening in NGS. And we definitely don’t see a lower demand. It’s just that it’s the law of big numbers.

It’s a big customer that has an air pocket. And we’ve signaled some very good growth coming back in Q4 for NGS. And then the last question around defining market. we totally hear you. Now is not the right forum, but I think we’re looking at ways to help our investor base be as excited as we are about the market. We’re very far from penetration and we have differentiated product. And so to us, that means that we have a lot of growth coming. It is true that we are a tools company. Right now, diagnostic company have a moment. They deserve it. They worked on their business models. Their reimbursement is really good. And so yes, in comparison right now, maybe our growth compared to diagnostic companies is a little bit lower. But compared to tools company, I think we are — I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think we are doing really, really well against our competitors.

I don’t want to say that we’re wiping the floor with them, but we’re doing really well. And we hear you on finding a metric, like you said, the average test revenue per patient in NGS. We’re looking at metrics. Part of the issue, as you may appreciate, is some of the test, people pay more than average and some of the tests, people pay less than average. And that depends on the test complexity. If you have a test that uses 3 million oligos, well, you’re going to have to pay more than if you’re using 50,000 oligos. The problem is if we have a price per test that’s public every quarter, we may have half our customers being really unhappy, even though the value we provide is fair. So thinking about it and not the forum, but we understand that we want to articulate our market sizing better to help our investors.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Luke Sergott with Barclays.

Unknown Analyst: This is Sam on for Luke. Could you talk a little bit about the new DNA Synthesis and Protein Solutions segment and the rough split between Biopharma and synthetic genes in the ’26 guide. The combined segment guide came in above Street expectations. And I’m just wondering where that’s coming from and if it’s driven by that large AI program.

Emily Leproust: Thanks for the question. I think the impetus was twofold. One, there was, I think, some confusion with our customer base around SynBio and maybe an under appreciation of how much we are doing in therapeutic discovery and development. So that’s number one. Number two, more and more as our sales team go to talk to customers, there was in practice, very little separation from someone who buys a piece of DNA, so DNA synthesis or someone who wants the protein or the characterization. And so as it’s one continuous workflow, some customers stop at fragrance, some stop at genes, some stop at protein, some want the full characterization. It just makes sense to put them together. And as far as the numbers, yes, maybe we’re getting a little bit ahead of what people thought.

I think it’s just a reflection of this business is doing quite well. And there are a lot of synergies between the DNA synthesis piece and the protein piece. A few years ago, some people were asking us, why don’t you spin-off Biopharma? And we knew that it had strategic benefit. And we are seeing it now. It’s not a 1 plus 1 equals 2. It’s a 1 plus 1 equals 3. As far as your question around where is the growth coming? Is it coming from DNA and protein. Frankly, the reason we’re putting it together is because we — one, we don’t know; and two, it kind of doesn’t matter. What’s important is that, that growth is there and we meet customers where they are. And customers may change from quarter-to-quarter. Some quarters, they buy the DNA and some quarters, they buy the protein, and we meet them where they are, and we provide great value.

Our products are differentiated. We win no matter where they want to be, and we are looking forward to capturing that growth.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Mac Etoch with Stephens.

Steven Etoch: Maybe just a few quick ones from me. Just given this 1 to 2 points of growth from MRD, is it possible to frame up the proportion of MRD revenues in fiscal 2025? And I’ll stop there and follow up in a second.

Adam Laponis: Mac, great to hear you and happy to share. What we’ve said in the past is our MRD business is relatively small. It’s a lot of small numbers, and we are growing significantly faster than the overall business. Kind of applying that rule, it’s a relatively small percentage of our overall NGS business in 2025, but it is growing much faster than the overall NGS business, and we expect that trend to continue, not just in 2026, but well beyond.

Operator: Our next question is from Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners.

Puneet Souda: Thanks for the follow-up again. I appreciate you providing a lot of input. But I just want to boil down to a key question. What is the real NGS underlying growth ex this large customer in the first quarter and the fiscal year ’26?

Adam Laponis: Puneet, if you step back a bit and look at where we were in 2025, the overall growth of NGS being around 23% neutralizing for the growth from the one customer, it would be closer to 20%. And if you go into 2026, I’d say the same general dynamic applies as well.

Operator: And we have a question from the line of Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI.

Vijay Kumar: Adam. Sorry, on this Q1 NGS question. The — is the customer headwind — I know you had the customer headwind in the back half, right? Is that worsening in Q1? Is that what’s driving the NGS assumption? And because we already had the headwind in Q4, right? Like why would it worsen sequentially?

Adam Laponis: Vijay, you’re asking the right question. The air pocket from Q4 is continuing into Q1, but then it will significantly reverse as we expect the ramp to begin starting in Q2 of 2026.

Operator: And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A session. I will pass it back to Emily Leproust for final comments.

Emily Leproust: Thank you for your questions and for your continued support. With our strong execution in 2025 and a clear path to profitable growth in 2026, we remain focused on delivering differentiated products and services for our customers and sustained value for our shareholders. Thank you.

Operator: And this concludes our conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.