Earnings Call Transcript - FLGT Q1 2022

Operator, Operator

Good day and welcome to the Q1 2022 Fulgent Genetics Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Nicole Borsje. Please go ahead, ma’am. Thanks. Good afternoon and welcome to the Fulgent Genetics first quarter 2022 financial results conference call. On the call today are Ming Hsieh, Chief Executive Officer; Paul Kim, Chief Financial Officer; Dr. Larry Weiss, Chief Medical Officer; and Brandon Perthuis, Chief Commercial Officer. The company's press release discussing its financial results is available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website, fulgentgenetics.com. An audio replay of this call will be available shortly after the call concludes. Please visit the Investor Relations section of the company's website to access the audio replay. Management's prepared remarks and answers to your questions on today's call will contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements represent management's estimates based on current views and assumptions, which may prove to be incorrect. As a result, matters discussed in any forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results to differ from those described in the forward-looking statements. The company assumes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements it may make today to reflect actual results or changes in expectations. Listeners should not rely on any forward-looking statements as predictions of future events and should listen to management's remarks today with the understanding that actual events, including the company's actual future results, may be materially different from what is described in or implied by these forward-looking statements. Please review the more detailed discussions related to these forward-looking statements, including the discussions of some of the risk factors that may cause actual results to differ from those described in these forward-looking statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the previously filed 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, which is available on the company's IR website. Management's prepared remarks, including discussions of earnings and earnings per share, contain financial measures not prepared in accordance with Accounting Principles Generally Accepted in the United States or GAAP. Management has presented these non-GAAP financial measures because it believes they may be useful to investors for various reasons, but they should not be viewed as a substitute for or superior to the company's financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. Please see the company's press release discussing its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2022 for more information, including the description of how the company calculates non-GAAP income and income per share, and a reconciliation of these financial measures to income and income per share to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Ming.

Ming Hsieh, CEO

Thank you very much, Nicole. Good afternoon. And thank you for joining our call today to discuss our first quarter 2022 results. We had a very good start to the year in terms of financial results, as well as some exciting strategic announcements. I will cover some highlights from the quarter before turning the call over to our Chief Commercial Officer, Brandon Perthuis, to discuss products and go-to-market updates. Then Dr. Larry Weiss will provide an update on our CSI expansion strategy. Finally, Paul will cover our financial results and outlook in detail. Taking a look at our first quarter results, which again exceeded our guidance for both core and COVID revenue. Revenue totaled $320 million, down 11% versus $359 million in the first quarter last year and up 27% compared to the fourth quarter of 2021. We've delivered approximately 3.2 million tests in the quarter, up about 31% compared to the fourth quarter of 2021, though down from 3.8 million in the fourth quarter of last year. The volatility we have seen in total revenue is a direct result of the fluctuating demand environment for COVID testing, which was again strong in the first quarter but seems to have cooled off meaningfully in the second quarter. Paul will cover the breakdown between our core and the COVID business in more detail. But at a high level, our core business has grown 59% year-over-year to $25 million. We continue to drive strong profitability and generated $4.93 per share in GAAP EPS and $188.4 million in operating cash flow in the quarter. We're most excited about the strategic update we announced, which includes the recent acquisition of Inform Diagnostics, which closed just last week, and the opening of our new oncology lab in Southern California, which we announced today. As the demand environment for COVID-19 continues to cool off, our team is much busier than ever working on a growing number of initiatives that will drive long-term sustainable growth for our core genetic testing business. Brandon will cover our strategy around Inform Diagnostics in more detail, but this acquisition is our largest to date and creates meaningful expansion opportunities for Fulgent while adding to our topline from day one. There are multiple compelling strategic benefits of this acquisition, including the commercial infrastructure they have built to support a nationwide footprint, which gives us a seamless entry point to sell a full suite of Fulgent testing services, including the newly launched liver cancer liquid biopsy test. We've seen this acquisition as highly complementary to our existing test menu and sales force, and believe the investment can drive meaningful returns for our core business over the long term. The second initiative I would like to highlight is the opening of our new oncology lab in Southern California. This new lab gives us the opportunity to bring lab and oncology testing capabilities in alignment with CSI to our clients on the West Coast. We look forward to scaling our capabilities in cancer testing to our West Coast customer base. Dr. Weiss, who has been overseeing the integration of CSI into Fulgent, will also oversee the operation of this lab. These announcements are notable steps forward in our strategy to drive long-term sustainable growth in our core genetic testing business. A key element of the success of this strategy is our experienced leadership team at Fulgent who are executing on this vision every day. We've built a relatively lean, but extremely knowledgeable group of executives who have become instrumental to our success in execution. While the team has continued to grow in recent quarters, it remains a cohesive and highly effective group of leaders who are able to accomplish what they set out to do. Our rapid scaling of COVID testing during the pandemic is a prime example of the determination of our team. The acquisition and integration of CSI Labs is another notable proof point of our ability to execute successfully on our merger and acquisition strategy. I have a high level of confidence that our team will be able to effectively execute on the integration of Inform Diagnostics to drive outsized growth in our core businesses in the year ahead. We'll continue to look at additional M&A opportunities in science and technology that could contribute to our long-term growth. We recognize that the healthcare landscape has become even more attractive amid the recent market volatility and we will remain extremely well-capitalized to take advantage of these opportunities as they arise. The future looks bright for Fulgent, and I am very excited about the growing number of opportunities ahead to capitalize on in the near future. I now turn the call over to Brandon Perthuis, our Chief Commercial Officer. Brandon?

Brandon Perthuis, Chief Commercial Officer

Thanks, Ming. We have a lot of great things to talk about today. While we saw another wave of COVID-19 in the first quarter, which drove further cash generation, we remain diligent in our efforts to build upon our core business. We're pleased to recently announce the opening of our new cancer lab and the acquisition of Inform Diagnostics. Starting with the exciting news of our acquisition of Inform Diagnostics, Inform Diagnostics was founded in 1996 and has grown to be one of the largest national outpatient pathology laboratories in the United States, in large part thanks to the rigor of their quality, the comprehensiveness of their solution offerings, and the experience, expertise, and dedication of their professional staff. Inform DX brings expertise in hematopathology, anatomic pathology, and neuropathology, key service areas that complement our vision of becoming a one-stop shop for a wide range of healthcare specialties. Looking at the anatomic pathology business, we offer products in dermatology, guidance, urology, and breast. Each of these areas has seasoned subspecialty-trained pathologists on staff, which is a key differentiator and selling feature. The anatomical pathology sales team has approximately 20 sales managers spread throughout the United States, and no individual state contributes more than 10% to overall anatomical pathology sales, so we see an immediate opportunity to expand this team to further penetrate the market. In addition, one of the more exciting areas for us is the ability to cross-sell; for example, Inform DX has over 600 active GI clients, which are a focal call point for our new liver cancer liquid biopsy test. While we have built a specialized sales team to call on hepatologists in GI, the Inform DX sales managers have these existing relationships and can walk us through the front door. Other synergistic sales opportunities to Inform DX clients include hereditary cancer tests to their breast clients and molecular testing for UTI to their GU clients. These are just some examples. With the speed at which Fulgent can launch new products and services, we will be looking at other tests our accounts utilize that make sense, enabling us to increase our revenue per customer, as well as better serve our clients. On the heme side, this acquisition is a perfect fit for our oncology strategy. Inform DX currently has four heme sales reps, and we've already started expanding this with the addition of three new hires on the West Coast, with the intention of hiring more. We believe our current menu and turnaround time is very competitive. We will continue to launch new heme/onc services such as MRD and other heme panels. An additional area of synergy is around managed care contracting. Inform DX has done an impressive job of obtaining contracts that collectively represent over 300 million covered lives. These contracts layered on top of CSI strengthen our in-network coverage in most states. In addition, we believe the combined entity of Fulgent plus CSI plus Inform Diagnostics creates a unique multi-state laboratory offering and subspecialties that provide an excellent value proposition to managed care. We hope to be able to use this to build stronger relationships with existing payers and obtain additional contracts and relationships moving forward. Switching to our new liquid biopsy test for liver cancer, since launching the test late last year, we have made significant progress with our go-to-market strategy. This includes building out the sales team, enhancing consumer awareness, launching a redesigned website, publication of the on-core data, continued progress in the client clinical trial, and onboarding over 50 new accounts. We believe this shows enthusiasm for the test and represents execution by our new sales leaders and their team. The enthusiasm is understandable, considering the test has the potential to transform how we screen and diagnose patients for liver cancer, leading to improved patient outcomes. Changing the way medicine is practiced takes time, but we are excited to see the early momentum we have with our tests. Another area of focus moving forward will be to continue to grow our organic core business, specifically in pediatric testing. Fulgent has built one of the largest most comprehensive menus for pediatric genetic testing, now offering testing for over 5,700 conditions and phenotypes with over 19,000 tests. For many of these tests, we are one of, if not the only provider in the United States. This has allowed us to build a large national customer base, though we believe there is still work to be done to increase awareness across this customer base. Over the recent months, we've been building an inside sales team to help grow these accounts by focusing on the higher volume tests, such as exome sequencing and neurological panels. We believe we have the test menu and quality to drive additional volume for pediatric and rare disease testing. Over the next several months, we will be connecting with this customer base and educating them on the full breadth of our services. And as we bring CSI and Inform Diagnostics together, we can better serve these clients over time with in-network managed care contracts. On the sales team front, we have expanded in a big way, which we said we would do on previous calls. We now have a team of over 50 individuals segmented into five sub-specialties: pediatric and reproductive health, anatomical pathology, oncology, hepatology, and biopharma. These teams are currently functioning independently to ramp our recent investments in Inform Diagnostics and CSI. But there are clear synergies across the organization. We are beginning to take steps to cross-train and integrate the teams across common platforms to maximize efficiency. In just a few quarters, we've been able to transform our business in a significant way. Fulgent is now one of the largest providers of genetic testing and anatomical pathology services in the United States. We believe our investments have come at the right time and at the right price, and are set up for significant growth over the coming years. That said, we are still only at the very beginning of our story, as we continue to leverage our AI technology and execute on our post-COVID-19 strategy that will include additional investment in organic growth, M&A, and other strategic initiatives. We look forward to keeping our investors updated on our progress, and we appreciate their support. I'll now turn the call over to our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Larry Weiss. Larry?

Larry Weiss, Chief Medical Officer

Thanks, Brandon. As you know, oncology diagnostic testing is a major strategic area for Fulgent. As we focus our efforts on driving long-term, sustainable growth in our core business, we executed on a strategy in a meaningful way in August of last year with the purchase of CSI laboratories in Alpharetta, Georgia. CSI is a strong regional laboratory offering diagnostic services to a pathologist client base for both hematopathology and surgical pathology using immunohistochemistry, flow cytometry, cytogenetics, FISH, and single gene molecular testing. Using CSI as a model and a source of validation assessments, our goal was to build a state-of-the-art laboratory on the West Coast to offer diagnostic services to an oncologist client base, as well as to supplement CSI's test menu with next-generation sequencing somatic tumor offerings. Starting from literally empty walls, I am very pleased to announce that we have already been able to build a state-of-the-art laboratory in El Monte, California, which has been CLIA approved. The two labs will be complementary and not strictly duplicative of each other. While our Georgia lab has a pathologist client base, our new lab in El Monte will have a hematologist-oncologist customer orientation. The new laboratory includes about 25,000 square feet of wet lab space, including large R&D areas, as well as additional dry lab space for analysis and pathologist activities. We are currently able to offer immunohistochemistry, flow cytometry, cytogenetics, FISH, and single gene testing. We are actively validating and submitting a suite of next-generation sequencing tests for reimbursement approval, including tissue and liquid biopsy tests for both hematology and solid tumor specimens for assessment of tumors as well as detection of minimal residual disease. The new somatic NGS testing, in addition to Fulgent’s current capabilities in germline NGS testing, will also supplement both CSI's and Inform DX's test menu. As an aside, germline testing is already important in breast cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, pediatric cancer, and many others, and is included in many consensus guidelines for cancer patients. Our goal is to serve cancer patients and their families at all stages of their disease, early as well as late, and to become a meaningful contributor to revenue by the end of the year. I will now turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Paul Kim. Paul?

Paul Kim, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Larry. Revenue in the first quarter totaled $320 million compared to $359 million in the first quarter of 2021, well exceeding our original guidance of approximately $245 million. Billable tests in the quarter totaled $3.2 million compared to $3.8 million in Q1 of last year. The year-over-year decline was again due to COVID testing dynamics. The Omicron wave at the beginning of the first quarter created a tremendous demand for COVID testing early in the quarter. Now that's tapered off through the end of March and has since returned to much more normalized levels. Breaking down the revenue further, roughly $295 million came from COVID-19 testing in Q1, which exceeded our expectations. The revenue from our core business totaled $25 million, which also exceeded our guidance of $22 million and grew 59% year-over-year. As a reminder, our core revenue includes our NGS business, contributions from our China joint venture, contributions from CSI, and excludes NGS COVID testing from the CDC. As demand for COVID testing remains volatile and unpredictable, we continue to take a conservative stance on expected revenue from COVID testing. We remain focused on executing on our post-COVID growth opportunities, which include the integration of Inform Diagnostics, expanding the reach of CSI's capabilities, executing on additional investment and partnership opportunities, ongoing work on joint commercialization efforts, and growing the footprint of our international operations. Our ASP in the first quarter was $99, slightly lower than the $103 million we saw in the fourth quarter of last year. Our ASP has remained relatively stable over the last few quarters, fluctuating higher and lower as COVID testing has had its spikes. The cost for tests in the quarter was $24, slightly lower than the $25 in the fourth quarter of last year due to shoring up reserves and the write-off of some excess inventory year-end. Gross margin was 75.7%, down 370 basis points year-over-year and up 40 basis points sequentially. Turning now to operating expenses, total GAAP operating expenses were $40.6 million in the first quarter, up from $38.7 million in the fourth quarter of last year. Non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $35.5 million, up from $34 million last year. Our operating expenses increased primarily due to ongoing investments in strategic headcount across our organization and fees and services associated with our heightened M&A activity, along with additional credit loss provisions in accounts receivable due to the high revenues in the first quarter. Our non-GAAP operating margin increased 280 basis points sequentially to 65.1%. Our expense structure remains very lean, enabling us to drive significant profitability from revenue outperformance. That being said, our investments in people and business expansion will affect our operating margins in the near term. Ultimately, we believe these investments will drive extraordinary growth in our core business. We remain pleased with the consistent operating leverage we are able to demonstrate even through M&A. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was $213.5 million, compared to $271.9 million in the first quarter of 2021. On a non-GAAP basis and excluding equity-based compensation expense and intangible asset amortization, income for the quarter was $158.7 million or $5.08 per diluted share on 31.2 weighted average diluted shares outstanding. Turning over to the balance sheet, we ended the first quarter with approximately $1.1 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. We generated $188.4 million of cash from operations during the quarter, further adding to our cash balance. Now moving on to our outlook, starting with COVID revenues. As demand for COVID testing continues to taper off, we expect to see ongoing declines in our revenue from COVID testing. Our expectations for COVID revenue for the full year remain unchanged; we expect at least $480 million in COVID revenues for the year, inclusive of the $295 million we did in the first quarter. Let’s break that out into roughly $85 million in Q2 and $50 million each in Q3 and Q4. Clearly, revenue from COVID testing has been hard to predict amid volatile spikes and outbreaks, so we remain prudent with our expectations for COVID revenue contribution. Moving on to our core revenue guidance, which will include contributions from Inform Diagnostics as the transaction closed on April 26. We have continued to see strong growth across our organic business. While CSI and Inform Diagnostics will drive incremental growth, we expect core revenues to be approximately $180 million in 2022, representing growth of 94% year-over-year, which is slightly better than the guidance we provided during the announcement of the acquisition of Inform Diagnostics only a little over a week ago. With $480 million in COVID revenue and $180 million in core revenues, we expect total revenues to be approximately $660 million for the year. We expect there will be continued volatility with COVID testing and remain focused on executing our strategy to drive momentum in our core business. From a profitability standpoint, we remain focused on investing in our business to drive sustainable long-term growth. That being said, we expect to see meaningful pressure on operating margins in the quarters ahead as we integrate and further invest resources into our recent acquisitions. In addition, our conservative assumption of a dramatic decline in COVID testing demand will result in lower growth and operating margins relative to the record-high margins we experienced during the COVID crisis. Long-term, our foundational technology platform supports a strong margin profile, and we will continue to manage our spending with discretion to drive operating leverage. For the full year 2022, utilizing our 28% tax rate and share count of 32.4 million, we now expect non-GAAP income to be approximately $6 per share for shareholders, excluding stock-based compensation and amortization of intangible assets, versus our previous guidance of $7 per share. While the acquisition of Inform Diagnostics is accretive from an adjusted EBITDA standpoint and on a standalone basis, we are also anticipating heightened operating expenses due to integration costs associated with the transaction, aggressive investments in our organic business such as the build-out and sales ramp of our West Coast oncology lab, as well as lower gross margins as the mix of COVID testing decreases in the coming quarters. For the second quarter of 2022 specifically, we expect total revenues of $125 million. This breaks down into core revenues of at least $40 million, representing growth of 78% year-over-year. As I mentioned, we expect approximately $85 million in COVID testing. Our updated guidance is posted in our slides on our Investor Relations website, which shows a detailed breakdown of what I just discussed. Thank you for joining our call today.

Operator, Operator

And we'll take our first question from Kevin DeGeeter. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Kevin DeGeeter, Analyst

Hey, great, guys. Thanks for the comprehensive update. Maybe just can you talk about the continued sales force build-out, appreciate the update in terms of 50 reps. Just kind of really two questions; as we look towards the end of the year, how should we think about target, either headcount number or just sort of infrastructure build? And then with regard to kind of integration of the commercial team, should we think about that process as substantial and maturing through the balance of 2022 or really being a priority for 2023 and beyond?

Brandon Perthuis, Chief Commercial Officer

Yes, thanks, Kevin. It’s Brandon. The integration is ongoing and is a top priority right now. The acquisition of CSI and Inform Diagnostics has brought meaningful increases in headcount across our sales organization. So priority number one is to integrate them into the Fulgent system, get them on common platforms, and get them into the cohesive culture. We’re doing that in a very rapid fashion. That said, while the sales team has grown significantly, we now have a much larger total addressable market than we've ever had before. The sheer number of call points for some of these new markets we've been able to enter both through organic expansion and M&A is tremendous. I don't think we have a right-sized sales team, so to speak; I think there's tremendous opportunity for us to continue to increase that. But in typical Fulgent fashion, we'll do it the smart way, using the methodology we've always had to grow responsibly. But like I said, the total addressable market that we now have is big, and we're looking forward to optimizing productivity out of the existing sales team and leveraging those cross-selling opportunities. The team is coming together to work collaboratively to serve these clients, but long-term, it's going to continue to grow, Kevin.

Ming Hsieh, CEO

Yes, adding to Brandon's comments, with the strong current financial and product and service capabilities, we are attracting a lot of new sales talent to our organization. We're receiving many inbound calls indicating it's a good time to join us. We will announce new hires as we continue to recruit through the quarter.

Kevin DeGeeter, Analyst

No, great, thanks for that. And I appreciate the update on Helio Liver. I mean, I guess my question there, though, is really: what is the most meaningful near-term metric to think about predicting ultimate commercial traction? I think you called out around 50 new accounts, but what sort of recurring metric should we look for the company to disclose to track progress there?

Brandon Perthuis, Chief Commercial Officer

That's a good question, Kevin. As I mentioned in the call, we're trying to change the way the coalition practices medicine, especially in the hepatology space for liver cancer, where there's been no change in the way medicine is practiced in a very long time, right? So they have their protocols and procedures. Now we know the test we have is a significant improvement over the standard of care. But that doesn’t make it easy to change their thought process, so they have to hear it a lot. We're proud of the fact that we've onboarded 50 new accounts, and that's kind of what we're tracking right now. I think near-term, meaning in the next few quarters, I would like to see us begin to track volume and utility. More importantly, the volume would be the positivity rate. We know from early data that we have detected liver cancer that was previously undiagnosed by the standard of care. Going forward, we want to track volume and the utility of the test by monitoring the positivity rate for ultrasound and early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma.

Ming Hsieh, CEO

But Kevin, adding on to Brandon's comment, this is regarding oncology centers. The physicians do recognize that this is a good test; they acknowledge that we're in the leading position to provide better diagnosis and cancer screenings. While we see that we're gaining traction from these physicians regarding the liquid biopsy test, they are also interested in our full range of gene products and services. This gives us a solid entry point for these physicians to explore our offerings and provides them with a one-stop shopping experience for their test selections.

Kevin DeGeeter, Analyst

That's great. Thank you, Ming. I'll get back in the queue. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

We'll take our next question from the line of David Westenberg. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

David Westenberg, Analyst

Hi, thanks for the question. Congrats on some strong numbers here. There's a lot of earnings going on, so sorry if I missed this, but it looks like on the guide you added $5 million just in the last two weeks, which is pretty impressive. Can you walk us through the core business differences? Did you find that Inform is generating more revenue than you anticipated? Or is it maybe just a heating up of business trends that you've seen in the last two weeks?

Brandon Perthuis, Chief Commercial Officer

Yes, thank you for noticing that we raised our guidance even within the course of a week. The reason why we increased guidance is the strength of our overall core business; it has nothing to do with Inform Diagnostics. The outperformance we had was for the first quarter. We initially anticipated doing about $22 million in revenue during the quarter; however, the actual numbers came in a bit north of $25 million. Combining the momentum that we're seeing within our core business, in addition to the contribution from Inform DX, we feel very comfortable with achieving at least $180 million in core revenues this year.

David Westenberg, Analyst

Got it, appreciate it. And Paul, I got another one for you. You mentioned some commentary around ASPs going down with a decrease in COVID testing relative to your prior guidance. Can you walk us through, maybe quantitatively, what we're looking at in terms of gross margins in the subsequent quarters? I mean, Q2 and Q3, I think of as being maybe COVID-light. I wouldn't think there's any impact there, but can you walk us through the implied gross margin impacts?

Paul Kim, Chief Financial Officer

Sure. I'll talk about gross as well as operating margins. We made a very conservative assumption about COVID testing demand because, quite frankly, nobody can predict what the virus is going to do. So we're anticipating in Q2, Q3, and Q4 a drastic drop-off in terms of COVID testing demand. We are also taking into account a greater mix coming from our core business. Along with this, we're heavily investing into our operations and facilities; the opening of the oncology lab is just one example. When you combine these conservative assumptions and mix changes, we're anticipating gross margins to be at our historical levels of between 50% and 60%, depending on which quarter you're looking at, and if we have higher COVID revenues, our gross margins, everything else being equal, will slightly be higher. That's the gross margins. As for the operating margins, I've discussed the heavy investments we're making in our facilities and across all departments of the company. We expect to see an increase in R&D spending, but proportionately less due to the foundational technology that has so much efficiency and leverage behind it. We expect to have the highest amount of operating expenses in sales and marketing. As Brandon talked about the size of the sales organization, and Ming made some comments on sales and marketing, you will see heavy investments that we're making in hiring a wide variety of new personnel. The aggressive investments we are making, doing M&A, along with our stock buyback program, all these efforts we believe will enhance shareholder value.

David Westenberg, Analyst

Got it? No, thank you very much. And actually, that's a good segue to my last question here on M&A. Can you talk about the timing in terms of M&A? Do you anticipate doing it this year? And you mentioned the stock buyback program? Is there a kind of expiration date on making an acquisition, or would you consider moving to stock buybacks? How do we think about capital deployment from here on out, recognizing that Inform Diagnostics really only was $170 million near a billion dollars in cash?

Paul Kim, Chief Financial Officer

I'll make a few comments, and I'll turn it over to Ming, who can talk about the philosophy of enhancing shareholder value. We believe all these options we have open to us give us a unique opportunity to address the market and set the pace for how we want to penetrate certain areas. It gives us the flexibility to hire and invest in our business. If you look at the M&A landscape, the valuations of the assets we've been monitoring are aligning with the business prospects we’re willing to pay. So from an approach standpoint, we think that we will be busier than ever, and the success we're seeing is making the team more excited about engaging with these targets. But I'll turn it over to Ming, who can discuss our cash usage philosophy, including M&A and organic investments. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, David, for the question. I think, as stated in my remarks during this discussion, I focus on Science and Technology. I believe Fulgent has tremendous benefits in this market with our existing AI technology team. We want to be the leader in this area; it brings us to the forefront of digital pathology. Using the AI technology, we can amplify our existing team, but the addition will focus on adjacent areas in science and technology that will provide a significant differentiator for us, leveraging our platform, insurance payer infrastructure, and national sales team to penetrate more deeply into the market and stand out among our current competitors, elevating us to a new level and generating better value for our margins and our shareholders.

David Westenberg, Analyst

Thank you, Ming. Thank you, Paul. Great job on the quarter.

Paul Kim, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Dave.

Operator, Operator

At this time, there are no further questions. This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.