It’s been a busy week for Illumina at the JP Morgan 2025 Healthcare conference, with the company revealing partnerships and investment participation. Finally turning attention to itself, the genomics company reported its preliminary Q4 and full-year 2024 results on 14 January with CEO Jacob Thaysen heralding a return to form in 2025.
Illumina’s Q4 revenue in 2024 was up 1% from the same period in 2023, totalling $1.1bn. Despite the positive end to the year, the company’s revenue for 2024 was down 2% from 2023, generating $4.33bn. The company had previously lowered its revenue guidance in August 2024 by 2%-3% due to weaker instrument demand, meaning the year-over-year decline was on the lower end of this range.
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Illumina underwent a series of significant business changes last year, including a spin-off of cancer test marker Grail in June and the acquisition of single-cell technology company Fluent BioSciences a month later. The company changes received a mixed reaction from analysts and its stock performance has wavered over the past year.
Shares in the Nasdaq-listed company initially opened 0.7% higher at market open on 14 January compared to a preannouncement market close. Shares in the company fell during the day to close 6% lower. Illumina has a market cap of $21.6bn.
Looking ahead to the 2025 fiscal year, the company expects constant currency revenue growth in the low single-digits, forecasting revenue in the range of $4.28bn to $4.40bn.
Speaking at the JP Morgan 2025 Healthcare conference in San Francisco, Thaysen emphasised Illumina’s human whole-genome sequencing platform NovaSeq X. Last week, the company announced a series of updates to the system to increase performance and advance data quality.
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By GlobalDataThaysen said: “We will return to growth in 2025 [and] the NovaSeq X series is key to unlocking more and larger sequencing projects and will drive the majority of growth in this year.
“The addition of multiomics and our increased focus on service, software, and data, will add further layers of growth as we move into 2026 and 2027. We are on track to [reach] high single-digit growth revenue and 26% operating margin for 2027.”
Bank of America Securities Stock research analyst Michael Ryskin said via a global research report that the strong placement of 91 NovaX units “represented the majority of the Q4 sales beat”.
The report added: “Illumina showed that NovaX pull-through was $1.3m per box in 2024 – well above our prior forecasts and indicating that NovaX utilisation is ramping well with their existing customers.”
Analyst scepticism
However, concerns were raised over a drop in placements of Illumina’s NextSeq systems last year. The company’s FY 2024 report noted that 2024 NextSeq shipments were down to 610 units, versus 885 in 2023, and around 1,200 in both 2022 and 2021.
Ryskin wrote: “While we knew NextSeq was likely slowing, this confirms some suspicions about Illumina losing steam in the mid-throughput part of the portfolio. This is likely attributed to some cannibalisation/share shift to the HT NovaX, but also mid-throughput competition from new entrants.”
The analyst affirmed caution on the company and did not change its 2025 estimate. The report concluded: “We reiterate our Underperform [rating] as Illumina continues to face structural/market challenges and the company no longer warrants a premium valuation.”
During the presentation, Thaysen was asked about what the new Donald Trump Administration in the US could mean for funding for academic and government customers, but the executive was coy about the sector in which Illumina operates.
“The areas that we are within, both genomics and also multiomics, are areas that actually likely will see increased funding [under the new administration].”
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research and could be in line for a major shakeup under Trump’s new government.
Illumina’s chief financial officer Ankur Dhingra said the geopolitical landscape is “a factor that we’ll continue to watch to see how it evolves with the new administration coming in, to see what actual policies actually get in place, and how they impact the business”.
Riding on the back of a successful Q4 2024, Illumina started 2025 with a series of business activities. The company entered a partnership with Nvidia this week, which will see them work together to harness next-generation genomics to enhance drug discovery and human health. Nvidia said that its technology on Illumina’s platforms will help make analysis and insights of the human genome more accessible to life science researchers and pharmaceutical companies.
A day later, Illumina participated in a funding round for electronic health record data company Truveta.
Washington-based Truveta received $20m from Illumina as part of a $320m combined round and is aiming to create the world’s largest and most diverse database of genetic information as part of a new programme.
