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Healthcare - Medical - Devices - NASDAQ - US
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EARNINGS CALL TRANSCRIPT
EARNINGS CALL TRANSCRIPT 2015 - Q2
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Executives

Trevin Rard - IR Mike Hunkapiller - Chairman & CEO Susan Barnes - CFO Ben Gong - VP, Finance & Treasurer.

Analysts

Amanda Murphy - William Blair Bill Quirk - Piper Jaffray Jonathan Abodeely - XLCR Capital.

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to your Pacific Biosciences of California, Incorporated Second Quarter 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time.

[Operator Instructions] I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Ms. Trevin Rard. Ma'am, you may begin..

Trevin Rard

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to the Pacific Biosciences second quarter 2015 conference call.

Earlier today, we issued a press release outlining the financial results we will be discussing on today's call, a copy of which is available on the Investors section of our website at www.pacb.com, or alternatively as furnished on the Form 8-K available on the Securities and Exchange Commission website at www.sec.gov.

With me today are Mike Hunkapiller, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Susan Barnes, our Chief Financial Officer; and Ben Gong, our Vice President of Finance and Treasurer.

Before we begin, I would like to remind you that on today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements, including plans and expectations relating to our financial projections and products that are subject to assumptions, risks and uncertainties, and may differ materially from actual results.

These risks and uncertainties are more fully described on our Securities and Exchange Commission filings; including our most recently filed current report on Form 10-Q. Pacific Biosciences undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements.

In addition, please note that today's call is being recorded, and will be available for audio replay on the Investors section of our website shortly after the call. Investors electing to use the audio replay are cautioned that forward-looking statements made on today's call may differ or change materially after the completion of the live call.

I'd like to now turn it over to Mike..

Mike Hunkapiller

Thanks, Trevin. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased that our second quarter results and the progress we continue to make in driving our overall business. Highlights of our Q2 financial results are as follows. Total revenue grew to approximately $24.9 million, wasn't doubling our revenue of $11.4 million in Q2 of last year.

Year-to-date revenue was $42.6 million, 85% greater than our revenue of $23.1 million recognized in the first half of 2014. This included the $10 million revenue milestone we achieved in April related to our contract with Roche which we described in our call last quarter.

Excluding the milestone revenue and quarterly amortization of Roche contractual revenue from both years, our total revenue grew by 17% quarter-over-quarter, and grew 29% year-to-date 2015 over year-to-date 2014. Consumable revenue for the second quarter was $4.5 million, up 48% from Q2 2014.

Year-to-date consumables revenue has increased 58% to $8.8 million in the current year compared to $5.6 million in the first half of 2014. System utilization continues to be robust and our average consumable revenue per installed system continues to exceed $130,000 per year on a rolling 12-month basis.

Instrument revenue in the current quarter was $4.3 million compared to $4.7 million in Q2 of 2014. Year-to-date instrument revenue increased 13% to $11.3 million in 2015, compared to $10 million over the same period of 2014.

As we move into the fifth commercialization of the PacBio smart sequencing systems, I'd like to give a brief over of where we are positioned in the three genomic application areas on which we focus. The first of these areas is microbiology, the one in which we first established the utility of our platform.

We are generally recognized as the goal standard for bacterial sequencing. Smart sequencing is unique and then it provides highly accurate complete genome assemblies along with detailed base modification profiles for bacterial genomes and associated plasmids.

This is allowed to return to generation of high quality reference grade assemblies that can now we generated at relatively modest cost. New species and strain sequences are now deposit into gene data banks on an almost daily basis.

As an example, the Public Health England, along with the Sanger Center, have released PacBio assemblies over 653,000 reference strains in their culture collection, the project that plan to complete over the next year or so.

The capabilities of smart sequencing have proven essential tracing the nature and source of complex hospital infection outbreaks, as I have noted in previous conference calls, and a recent paper in EmBio, the online Journal of the American Society for Microbiology, the authors examined the development of anti-viral drug resistance during treatment of the patient with persistent influenza A virus infection.

The authors know that they were able to reveal for the first time the complex interaction between multiple evolutionary process as they occur within an individual host. Resistant mutations appeared weeks before they became dominant, evolved independently and replaced in the new combinations by reassortment.

In the recent paper in Nature communications, scientists examined the phenomenon of phase variable gene expression in Haemophilus influenza, bacteria that are major cause of middle ear infections and pneumonia.

This phenomenon is controlled by base modification or epigenetic switches that effect antibody persistence, biofilm formation and immuno invasion. The authors noted that understanding the nature of this epigenetic switching by this and other infectious bacteria should aid in efforts to develop effective vaccines against them.

The second area of application focus for our technology is plant and animal genomics, an application which is accounted for roughly half the consumable usage of our customer systems over the last year. The recent Plant and Animal Asia Conference illustrated both current activity and future interest in using PacBio sequencing in this space.

This conference provided similar stories to the related conference held in the U.S. during January. With numerous presentations featuring smart sequencing of various plants, animals and their parasites in symbions. Attendance that our workshop held around the conference was equal to roughly half of the total conference attendance.

The ability to provide high quality denovo assemeblies of the genomes of these organisms is particularly useful in breathing programs that have high commercial value and national importance. The analysis of transcript isoforms of expressed genes in these organisms is also an important component of efforts to understand their biochemistry.

And a recent paper in PLOS1, the authors described the use of our IsoSec protocol to examine the expressed genes isoforms in a series of wood degrading fungi.

Their study showed that more than half of the genes in this organisms produced more than one transcript isoform, suggesting transcript diversity in this phyla has likely been underestimated previously due to lack of deep falling cDNA data.

Similar results were recently reported in the publication in the plant journal describing the study of a popular Chinese additional herb. The third area of application focus is Human Genetics; an application that is many respects our newest, fastest growing and eventually likely our largest.

This includes both the novel human genome assembly to elucidate structural copy number and single nucleotide variation, transcript isoform analysis, epigenetic analysis and targeted gene sequencing.

Highlights from the recent festival of genomics conference organized by Frontline Genomics, a non-profit organization with a mission of bringing genomics to the frontline of healthcare included examples of these applications.

The event with over 1500 attendees and over 100 speakers addressing topics such as genomic medicine and cancer genomics included a special half day track dedicated to long range sequencing shared by our Chief Scientific Officer, Jonas Korlach.

The long range sequencing track included talks from Chad Nusbaum from the Broad Institute, Mike Snyder from Stanford, Gustine from Yale, Rick McCombie from Cold Spring Harbor, and Sergey Koren from the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center. There were also talks given by industry representatives from Genentech and Roche.

Speakers detailed unique value of PacBio long range sequencing for a wide variety of applications for which smart sequencing is particularly well suited. It further described short read data does not provide adequate access to some of the most interesting part of genomes such as repeat pseudo genes, extreme GC regions and homo ploymers.

The common theme and takeaway from these presentations is that long read sequencing is essential for many types of human genome studies, it should be adopted more broadly as it's value continues to become more widely understood.

Several recent publications have also highlighted the effectiveness of smart sequencing for generating more complete and accurate characterization of human genomes.

Scientist at SINI [ph], Cold Spring Harbor and other institutions published a paper in Nature methods describing the assembly of a diploid human genome using smart sequencing and genome maps to create the most contiguous comp free genome assembly ever made that is comparable to or better than other human assemblies, employee mixtures of fosmid and BAC libraries.

The study also reported calling a comprehensive set a structural variance and tandem repeats and facing these variance onto maternal and paternal alleles.

Scientists at the Bader College of Medicine published a paper in BMC Genomics presenting a thorough analysis of the structural variations found in diploid human genome with just 10X coverage of the genome using PacBio sequencing.

The researchers were able to identify more than 3X the number of structural variance, detected by other technologies demonstrating that long read data is ideally suited to calling this complex genomic elements. These and other recent studies highlighted significant value of performing whole human genome sequencing with PacBio.

They are illustrative of a growing number of similar PacBio sequencing projects in several countries. These types of results were instrumental in recent NIH funding announcements calling for more long read sequencing to improve the quality of human genome assemblies.

Shifting to some other recent activities, last month we entered into two important property lease agreements. Industrial partner which our current facilities are located has recently been acquired by a large high tech company, the plans to use the properties for its own long term expansion.

Under one of the new lease agreements, we are scheduled to receive financial incentives for our current landlord to vacate our existing space. These incentives should offset the cost of moving our operations to a nearby property just about a quarter of a mile away.

Our new building location will effectively provide us with about 20% more usable space overall which we are dedicating primarily to the expansion of our manufacturing operations.

The new building positions us well to accommodate anticipated growth as we drive deeper into the resource market, as well as expand in the clinical market with partner from Roche. This brings me to an update on the Roche collaboration.

As I mentioned earlier, we own $10 million from Roche in Q2 after achieving a second significant development milestone. We continue to be well on-track for delivering a sequencing system to Roche for the clinical diagnostic market for the second half of next year.

We now expect to be able to achieve another development milestone in Q4 of this year, and we expect to be in position to provide a more detailed update on this product development efforts later this year. That concludes my remarks. And I will now turn it over to Susan to provide more details on our financial results..

Susan Barnes

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon everyone. I will begin my remarks today with a financial overview of our second quarter that ended June 30, 2015.

I will then provide details on our operating results for the quarter and year-to-date with a comparison to the second quarter of 2014, and a year-to-date comparison to the first half of 2014 respectively. I will conclude my remarks with a brief discussion of our balance sheet and our July 24th 8-K filing related to our property leases.

Starting with our second quarter and year-to-date financial highlights, during the second quarter we recognized revenue of $24.9 million and incurred a net loss of $11.9 million. This brings our year-to-date total revenue to $42.6 million and our net loss to $32.1 million.

We ended the quarter with $72.7 million in cash and investments, $6.4 million lower than the $79.1 million reported at the end of the quarter and $28.6 million lower than the $101.3 million reported at the end of 2014. Turning to revenue, total revenue for the quarter was $24.9 million, a 118% increase over the $11.4 million recognized in Q2 of 2014.

Year-to-date, total revenue in 2015 is $42.6 million, up 85% over revenue of $23.1 million recognized in the first half of 2014. Breaking down the revenue, instrument revenue quarter-over-quarter was relatively flat with $4.3 recognized in Q2 2015 compared with $4.7 recognized in Q2 of 2014.

Year-to-date, instrument revenue was $11.3 million, a $1.3 million or 13% increase over the $10 million recognized during same period last year. Consumable revenue continues to be very strong, increasing 48% to $4.5 million for the current quarter, up from $3 million reported during the second quarter of 2014.

Year-to-date consumable revenue has increased 58% to $8.8 million in 2015 compared to $5.6 million in the first half of 2014. Service and other revenue increased 27% to $2.5 million in the quarter compared to $2 million in Q2 of 2014, and with that 30% year-to-date to $5.3 million from $4.1 million in 2014.

And finally, as described in our Q1 earnings call, we recognized $10 million of revenue in Q2 as a result of achieving a Roche development milestone; we also recognized $3.6 million of amortized revenue associated with the $35 million upfront payment that we received from Roche in Q3 2013.

Roche related revenue recognized this quarter was $11.9 million higher than in Q2 of 2014, and year-to-date was $13.8 million greater than that recognized in the first half of 2014.

The year-over-year incremental increase thus includes the $10 million milestone received in the current quarter, and a $1.9 million quarterly increase of amortized revenue of the $35 million upfront payment from Roche in 2013 The revised amortization reflects the increased certainty of the estimated development time.

We generated a gross profit of $14.5 million in Q2 of 2014, representing a gross margin of 58%. This was up $3.1 million of gross profit and 27% gross margin recognized in Q2 of 2014. Year-to-date gross profit was $20.4 million representing a gross margin of 48% compared with 2014 year-to-date gross profit of $5.8 million, a gross margin of 25%.

Gross profit for 2015 have increased over 2014 levels, primarily as a result of the Roche milestone revenue in Q2 and the revision of the quarterly revenue associated with the Roche contract It should be noted that product revenue, product-related gross profit decreased by $1 million quarter-over-quarter, primarily as a result of $900,000 inventory reserve taken in the current quarter.

The reserve was an outcome over a normal quarterly assessment of excess inventory on a 12-month look forward basis. Moving to operating expenses, total operating expenses in the second quarter of 2015 were $25.9 million, $4.5 million higher than the $21.4 million incurred in Q2 of 2014.

Year-to-date, operating expenses increased 21% to $51.1 million from $42.3 million in 2014. Much of the increase in 2015 resulted from higher compensation expenses related to a 10 % increase in headcount year-over-year, and an increase in non-cash based stock compensation.

Non-cash based stock compensation increased $900,000 quarter-over-quarter and $1.8 million year-to-date 2015 over 2014. Breaking down our operating expenses, R&D expenses in the quarter were $15.1 million, $2.7 million higher than the $12.4 million of expenses incurred in Q2 of 2014.

Year-to-date R&D expenses were $29.5 million, a $5.3 million increase over the $24.2 million of expenses in 2014.

The expense increase in 2015 was a result of higher compensation related expenses, including non-cash compensation, as well as an increase in consulting, product development and regulatory costs associated with building a product to serve the clinical diagnostic market.

R&D expenses this quarter included $1.2 million of non-cash stock-based compensation expense, a $400,000 increase over Q2 of 2014. Sales, general and administrative expenses for the quarter were up $1.8 million from a year ago. In Q2 2015, we incurred $10.8 million in expenses compared to $9 million in Q2 of 2014.

Year-to-date SG&A expenses increased $3.5 million to $21.6 million in 2015, up from $18.1 million in the first half of 2014. The increases of expenses in 2015 was related to higher compensation expense and contractual fees associated with receiving payment for acumen of the second quarter – second milestone of the Roche agreement.

SG&A expense for this quarter included $1.8 million of non-cash stock-based compensation expense, up $500,000 from $1.3 million recognized in Q2 of 2014. Also, in the area of other income and expense in Q2, we recorded $600,000 from net other expense, primarily related to interest expense associated with debt that we took on in Q1 of 2013.

Year-to-date, our net other expenses have totaled $1.4 million. Ben will provide further guidance on our ongoing expense rates later in the call.

Now turning to our balance sheet, as I mentioned at the beginning of my comments cash and investments decreased to $72.7 million at the end of second quarter this is the $6.4 million decrease during the quarter.

Our cash use primarily reflects our Q2 net loss of 11.9 million plus 4.3 million of non-cash related stock compensation expense and depreciation expense along with a reduction in both inventory and accounts receivables balances as compared to the end of Q1. Inventory balances decreased $1.5 million in the quarter to 12 million at the end of Q2.

Accounts receivable decreased 1.3 million in the quarter to 4 million at the end of Q2. As a final note, on July 24, we filed an 8K describing our entry to three separate agreement related to the plan relocation of our operations within the City of Menlo Park.

Our plan move includes the entry to 11 year lease for a new larger facility which will allow work force and manufacturing capabilities, the relocations for [indiscernible].

Agreement with our existing landlords increased provisions for rent abatement through September 2017, it also includes four separate $5 million payments attached [ph] by our overtime and exchange for our opting out of two five year lease extension options we held on our current property.

We believe that that rent abatement of 20 million fees that we collect from our existing landlord should offset the cost we expect to incur in developing and moving into our new facilities.

As a final note both agreements are contingent on the attainment of use permits for the new facility and both we and the new landlord and reserved the right to terminate the lease agreement should the permits not be obtained the September 30, 2015. This concludes my remarks on the financial results for the quarter.

I would like to turn the call over to..

Ben Gong

Thank you, Susan. I will providing an update to our 2015 financial forecast. Starting with revenue as we saw this past quarter our quarterly revenue comparisons have varied due to the timing of revenue we recognized for achieving growth milestones.

In Q3 of last year we recognized $10 million in milestone revenue but we’re not expecting to report milestone revenue during this third quarter as results our Q3 revenue will likely be lower this year compared with last year. However as Mike mentioned earlier we’re expecting to achieve an additional growth milestone before the end of the year.

As a result we’re increasing our revenue forecast for the year expecting, annual revenue growth of at least 40% which is up from our previous forecast of at least 25% growth.

Moving on to gross margin, as we anticipated and mentioned in last quarter's call our Q2 gross margin was higher than usual as a result of $10 million in milestone revenue we recognized. For Q3 we expect to record a more normalized gross margin that is in the mid-30s.

For the fourth quarter we expect to record higher gross margin again reflecting additional milestone revenue. Our operating expenses in Q2 were also in-line with our expectations.

Our growth in operating expense this year stems primarily from a higher investment in product developments and regulatory related costs as we prepare to provide products to Roche for the clinical market.

We expect our operating expenses to continue at about the current run-rate for the remainder of the year leading to approximately a 15% growth in operating expenses over last year. 3% to 4% of the increase is expected to be result of an increase in non-cash stock compensation expense.

As a reminder our operating expenses include non-cash stock compensation expense and depreciation expense together amounts to approximately $4 million for the quarter.

With regarding cash usage as we have mentioned previous calls we expect to maintain a balance of cash and investments of at least $50 million through the rest of this year representing at least a year's worth of cash on hand and with that we will open the call to your questions..

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And our first question comes from Tycho Peterson of JPMorgan. Sir, your line is now open. .

Unidentified Analyst

This is Steve [indiscernible] for Tycho. First just on the Roche milestone, can you give us any color on what triggered this expected early recognition and then how should we think about the timing of the fourth payment..

Ben Gong

So we’re getting closer to the achievement of the next milestone and with that at a certainty that’s the reason why we’re giving a heads up to it at this time. Again we’re expecting to achieve that milestone in the fourth quarter..

Unidentified Analyst

And then just on BJI you mentioned last quarter that they are contemplating placing additional unit orders so can you just give us some additional color on the conversations that are going on with that customer?.

Mike Hunkapiller

While I'm not going to detail our discussions there, we have placed the first instrument into their labs.

It's relatively early, it's been there fairly short period of time and as they get themselves trained on the use of it and get a better sense of their anticipated revenue stream from their service business than we will collectively proceed accordingly..

Unidentified Analyst

And then lastly just on are there any updates on the RainDance collaboration in terms of timelines or milestones?.

Mike Hunkapiller

Not that we’re giving publically at this point, no..

Operator

And our next question comes from Amanda Murphy of William Blair. Your line is now open..

Amanda Murphy

So I had a question on, I know you’re not giving backlog metric per say but I think you did have a decline vis-à-vis Q1 in terms of instruments revenue, so I'm wondering if you can just give a perspective on I guess without asking you to quantify the backlog kind of what that looks like maybe policy as we go forward, and then separately again maybe this is a difficult question to answer but thinking about kind of what's going on with Roche you know at a high level what that due to your instrument revenue over the longer term here?.

Ben Gong

Yes the second quarter revenue was lower than the first quarter, but we have said in the past we’re subject to some quarterly fluctuations as to deciding of when things get installed. So that’s just unfortunately that the condition that we live in.

We’re not giving detailed color on the backlog, instead what we’re doing is continuing to provide guidance on the revenue growth and what we’re trying to do there is at least give you some sort of sense for the trend of the business.

We increased the revenue guidance for 25% growth to 40% growth admittedly it's lot has to do with us expecting to get some milestone revenue in there, but embedded in there obviously is the continued product and service revenues that we’re expecting in the balance of the year..

Susan Barnes

Right, and I will just say Amanda it's sometimes it's better to look at the year versus the quarter so if you look at the year-to-date we’re at 13% up from last year to-date.

So because again when we did talk about bookings you saw last year we did a five and a 16 and they are just too choppy of the small numbers that we really feel that they are giving pattern where it's giving you guidance until the revenue we feel a better metric of our business..

Mike Hunkapiller

Yes overall not counting the Roche revenue, we’re up almost 30% year-to-date so that gives you a better sense of what the product run-rate is here. I think relative to Roche, I mean obviously we and Roche are making substantial investment in the clinical diagnostic sequencing arena.

So one might expect that we both anticipate substantially return from that. As I’ve said we probably give you a little more clarity on where we’re with the overall Roche program in our next conference call.

Amanda Murphy

And maybe just a reminder on the relationship with [indiscernible] I mean that’s on the clinical side but do you have in any way to port over whatever you maybe working on the Roche onto the research side, maybe just remind on the sort of the structure of the contract from that perspective..

Mike Hunkapiller

Well we’re developing for them a version on our technology that will go through regulatory approval eventually, for them to sell into the clinical diagnostic arena obviously that’s our technology, they will be our distributor into that space and so we have freedom to use what we develop from a technology perspective and type one [ph] technology into our markets.

As we said we retain all rights outside of clinical human in vitro diagnostic. So any other markets with that technology are open to us before direct distribution..

Amanda Murphy

Okay and then I guess just last one and I'm assuming the uncertain no, given the guidance I think it's basically excluding it sounds like you sort of still expect kind of the similar performance but is it the right way to think about it the relocation you know it's not going to impact your manufacturing capacity or anything like you know in terms of our modeling going forward?.

Ben Gong

Two different questions, I think you had in there but I will take the latter one first so, relocation that’s not going to happen this year Amanda because we have to basically as Susan mentioned do some improvements to that building and we have literally the next two years to execute on that move from our current property to the other property.

The first part of your question had to do with I'm going to interpret as a breakdown of revenue and we’re not given specifics on the breakdown but we’re as Mike said we’re seeing growth in the business of 29% year-to-date on the non-Roche business so that’s a pretty good indicator of our business..

Susan Barnes

I will just add for the capacity increases, the power of both the install base and the amount of penetration into this continue to be very strong numbers for us. So we’re excited that we will have some more breathing room in the manufacturing facilities going forward..

Mike Hunkapiller

As was pointed out in a couple of presentations, one of the main reasons for the relocation from our perspective independent of our current landlords for the space and the whole industry that we’re located in is to be able to increase our manufacturing capacity..

Operator

And our next question comes from Drew Jones of Stephens Incorporated. Your line is now open..

Unidentified Analyst

This is Jared [ph] actually in for Drew.

Just a quick question on kind of just generally speaking, how you’ve seen reorder trends being going in the quarter and kind of what segments that this trends were coming from? First I will start off saying that the consumable revenues which is in the ways sort of I think of that as reorder isn't very robust and that’s been growing very well on just same store sales perspective was one way to look at that.

And then in terms of existing sites or in additional systems, we continue to engage in or engage with I should say existing customers to buy additional systems without being too specific on them..

Susan Barnes

And I think as we said we have microbial, we have plant and animal and we have human. Some of those are through service providers and as their volume increases and we do see demand for more capacity on that unit. So those result in future purchase dialogue going on..

Unidentified Analyst

And then also just I know it's still early days but BGI, but given kind of the recent leadership change at the company is there going to be any impact felt that you see going forward with the relationship..

Mike Hunkapiller

We don’t see any change in our relationship due to that..

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And our next question comes from Bill Quirk of Piper Jaffray. Your line is now open. .

Bill Quirk

I guess first question is instrument ASPs that if you mention something or Susan has mentioned something in your prepared comments I'm afraid I missed it, were they up down year-over-year..

Mike Hunkapiller

They were within the normal fluctuation I would say so again built into the fluctuation in revenues is both the quantities I guess in normal geographic sort of mix.

So geography by geography I think it was probably not too different than anything we see in the past but you’re always going to see some fluctuations in ASP just because of the [indiscernible] mix..

Susan Barnes

Right, and we do see a little bit obviously if everyone else does that when you do anticipate or get a unit from Europe, you’re not making quite as noise as we most of our Europe, other than the UK or denominated euros, so those elements are sometimes that’s way in the quarter but it's really advance, are you going through a Asia distributor or you’re doing direct United States or direct in Europe..

Mike Hunkapiller

And Europe I don’t see why it's been favorable over the last 12 months..

Bill Quirk

So it's safe to say that from the geographic standpoint they have I guess more place from outside the U.S.

this quarter, is that reasonable to say?.

Mike Hunkapiller

I don’t know that there is materially different sort of mix but again these are the numbers are small so any even single changes on the mix of how many in each can make difference but I'm not sure that it's -- we’re struggling with it probably because I don’t even think I calculated this..

Susan Barnes

And if you look at it more the other way which is we have had Europe at a higher last year than you have this year, that is shifted with our large geographic mix change but just some of the dynamics because you’re in a lot of not large giant numbers..

Bill Quirk

And then, maybe one more growth question, so just thinking about I guess into 2016 maybe commitments once you complete this projects in terms of instruments purchases and if so would you expect to see any of those in 2016?.

Mike Hunkapiller

Well to the latter the answer is yes, because many of them we shift they pay for it. We have shipments obviously and we have said we plan on being providing them systems for diagnostic market by middle of next year.

So, I won't go into too much detail in terms of the agreement, it's been in trial in the past but they will give us a binding commitment over a period of time a new forecast system that they will put in place and if there is not sufficient working towards that forecast then there are issues associated with what our rights are with that.

So the answer in one sentence is yes. But it will vary from year-to-year what that number is..

Operator

And our next question comes from Jonathan Abodeely of XLCR Capital. Your line is now open..

Jonathan Abodeely

Just one question on the long term throughput goals for your system, can you just provide some current thinking around some of the current throughtput objectives and maybe the leverage that you’ve at your disposable as the chemistry software hardware has increased the throughput? Thank you..

Mike Hunkapiller

Well the answer is all of those and few other things are included in the levers. So our stated goal which we have had each of the last three years going into this one the fourth has been to increase our throughput by a factor of four every year and that remains our goal and moving our goal, getting an extra year I suspect.

The levers are chemistry in terms of [indiscernible] piece of that is analyzed, a lot of it is in sample prep and allows one to generate longer pieces of DNA to start with. A lot of it is in software in terms of cutting down on the amount of coverage that one has to have in order to have a certain level of accuracy.

Others can come and being able to load a larger number of DNA fragments into one SMRT cell [ph]. All those things have leverage in terms of the system throughput and we are working all of them simultaneously..

Operator

And I'm showing no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Mike Hunkapiller for closing remarks..

Mike Hunkapiller

So in closing we remain steady fast in our commitment to bringing the unique advantages of our smart technology and products to our customers in the scientific community in general.

We believe the smart sequencing provides the industries most completed picture, genome due to it's superior performance in sequencing accuracies and uniformity of coverage, extremely long read lengths and ability to characterize DNA-based modifications.

We are still very early in adoption cycle for SMRT sequencing, but it is becoming even more clear and we have a very large potential for building PacBio's business. Thank you for joining us and we look forward to talking again in three months' time..

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes today's program you may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day..

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