Earnings Call Transcript - TXG Q3 2021

Operator, Operator

Hello, and welcome to the 10x Genomics Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. My name is Charlie, and I will be coordinating your call today. I will now hand you over to your host, Eric Jaschke, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance to begin. Eric, please go ahead.

Eric Jaschke, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance

Thank you. Earlier today, 10x Genomics released financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2021. If you've not received this news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investors@10xgenomics.com. An archived webcast of this call will be available on the Investors tab of the company's website, 10xgenomics.com, for at least 45 days following this call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated, and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Additional information regarding these risks, uncertainties and factors that could cause results to differ appears in the press release to 10x Genomics issued today and in the documents and reports filed by 10x Genomics from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 10x Genomics disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events or otherwise. Joining the call today are Serge Saxonov, our CEO and Co-Founder; and Justin McAnear, our Chief Financial Officer. In addition, Brad Crutchfield, our Chief Commercial Officer, will be available for Q&A. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Serge. Serge?

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

Thanks, Eric. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. On today's call, I will start with an overview of our performance during the third quarter. Next, I will discuss the opportunities ahead and investments we are making in our R&D pipeline, global operations infrastructure, and commercial scale. Then I will hand the call over to Justin for a more detailed look at our financials, business trends, and our outlook for the remainder of 2021. Revenue for the third quarter totaled $125 million, up 74% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. Our team navigated the complexities in the current operating environment to deliver strong performance and drive continuous adoption of our products. We have strong demand across our Chromium instrument portfolio, driven by an enthusiastic reception to Chromium X, which we began shipping in August. We also saw continued demand for the Chromium Controller this quarter. Following last quarter's strategic price update, this platform now provides an entry point for a broader set of researchers new to single-cell. Moving to consumables. We saw increased demand across our single-cell portfolio this quarter. Whether based on measuring epigenetic programming, gene expression, proteins or the adaptive immune system, single-cell research is proving to be essential to truly understanding biology. Single-cell methods allow the standards for growing fraction of life science research and are becoming a central element of many new brand applications. There is a normal trend of research moving beyond exploratory studies to translational or disease-oriented studies featuring our products. This further validates our expectation of the promise and potential of our solutions to advance human health. For instance, in a very recent publication in Science, researchers used our single-cell products to identify and characterize the immune cells within the brain. It has been previously understood that the brain was immune privileged. However, researchers discovered monocytes and B-cells originating from skull and vertebral bone marrow and that exist separately from their peripheral counterparts. These studies show that the brain has access to a distinct and specialized population of immune cells, which has profound implications for how we approach a variety of CNS-related conditions. Many single-cell applications will become even more powerful with Chromium X, which enables routine million-cell experiments. Since launch, many customers are ordering high-throughput consumables while others are transitioning their standard throughput experiment with the Chromium X in the interim ahead of larger future studies. We're seeing interest in several areas, including functional genomic studies using CRISPR screens, in-depth cell aplasia, and large-scale immune receptor profiling application. While it's too early, interest aside, we look forward to the first publications featuring Chromium X in the future. Turning now to spatial. Adoption of Visium consumables remained strong this quarter and the publication cadence continues apace. There are now more than 150 preprints and publications featuring the Visium technology. Just as we saw in the early days of Chromium, these papers are validating the fundamental importance of Visium technology from uncovering true biology and are key to developing a spatial market. In a recent preprint, researchers conducted a multi-cohort study featuring a recently launched Visium process to investigate potential genetic markers expressed in the respiratory tract, which may help predict COVID-19 outcomes. This group identified a specific gene, IFI27, which when elevated is associated with the presence of a high viral load and outperforms other non-predictors of COVID-19 severity and respiratory failure. Findings like these show the importance of Visium in disease-related research and will be important in developing new diagnostic tools in the future. With the launch of Visium FFPE, we enabled for the first time true unbiased gene expression analysis in FFPE samples. With Visium, we're bringing the world of high-content genomics and tissue-based analysis together. The additional FFPE capabilities now unlock much more of the translational opportunity, and even as FFPE has attracted many new translational researchers to 10x, we continue to see strong interest in Visium fresh frozen within the discovery and research community. It's clear that Visium is now the established leader in spatial discovery research. Yet, this platform remains very early in its life cycle. We continue to support adoption in spatial analysis. We have hired a new team of dedicated tissue support specialists, and they're using customer feedback to optimize experimental protocols, enhance current products, and develop new products. And as part of our focus on advancing the field of spatial biology and ensuring our customer success, we convened our first annual spatial symposium last month. Those events showcase how leading researchers, including members of the 10x Genomics clinical translational research networks, are harnessing the power of Spatial Transcriptomics to reveal new biological discoveries. Now before we turn to our longer-term opportunity, I want to share a few thoughts on the current operating environment. We have a very collaborative relationship with our customers, and we believe this gives us a unique perspective into new trends in some of the emerging complexities we are seeing in the marketplace. While labs are largely open, many of our customers continue to navigate second-order COVID-related challenges that are affecting productivity. Some are readily apparent such as COVID-related operating protocols, supply chain constraints, and labor shortages that reduce staffing levels and formal and informal training opportunities. Others are more subtle. For example, COVID has impacted the ability of the research community to connect, collaborate at conferences, and share best practices. This interconnectivity helps the proliferation of new technologies such as single-cell and spatial tools. While we expect these challenges to persist into 2022, we remain confident in the strength of our market, demand for our products, and the long-term opportunity we have ahead. We believe there are well over 100,000 labs globally available to 10x, and two-thirds of them could immediately leverage our existing portfolio to advance their science. To date, we have penetrated less than 10% of these labs pointing to a substantial opportunity to bring additional labs into the 10x ecosystem. Additionally, we believe there is a long runway for growth to increase usage within our existing customer base as many customers currently use our products for just a fraction of their research. Finally, our products have helped to expand the amount of funding available to researchers by increasing access to broader and to larger brands as single-cell is increasingly becoming the standard for publication. We have made great strides in realizing this opportunity. We have established a broad base of installed instruments representing a firm foundation for future growth. To date, there have been more than 3,000 publications featuring our products. In one of the central learnings from all these papers and perhaps the greatest revelation over the last several years of biological research is a pervasive cellular complexity that underlies just about every biological system. It turns out that every tissue harbors much greater diversity of cells and cell types than we have thought, all of them interacting with each other in a complex interplay of massive gene expression networks. Furthermore, the focus of my single-cell research has recently moved to understanding the implications of the cellular complexity on disease and treatment. I believe the implications of this is still very much underappreciated. To understand biology and make progress in addressing disease, we need to measure biological samples with single-cell context. We expect that in the future, all tissue samples, whether for basic research or for clinical diagnostics, will need to be analyzed at single-cell resolution and at large scale. Since the early days of 10x, this business has driven our investment priorities, beginning with our Chromium platform, which is the established leader in single-cell analysis. We see similar opportunities for spatial biology. And just as with Chromium, we're making substantial investments in our Visium and forthcoming future platforms to fulfill this potential. From the beginning, we have focused on developing a broad set of durable and differentiated capabilities that we believe will transcend any particular product and continue to fuel our growth and success over the long term. Moving forward, we expect to accelerate our investments in three key areas: first, in R&D to develop more breakthrough technologies and market-leading products; second, in our global operations to deliver differentiated products, fortify our supply chain, and anticipate future growth; and third, in scaling our commercial organization globally to enable our growing customer base and expansion into new customer segments. Let me provide more detail on each investment priority, starting first with R&D. At 10x, we're intently focused on innovation. It's core to what we do. Since inception, this culture of innovation has yielded a strong cadence of technological advancement and product development, launching over 20 pioneering products and resulting in a broad intellectual property portfolio of over 1,200 patents and patent applications. This velocity of innovation, development, and execution is a testament to the incredible cross-functional talent we have cultivated. To date, we have deep expertise across a wide range of disciplines from biology, chemistry, and micropolitics to hardware engineering, data analysis, and software development. This talent is supported by a robust product development infrastructure focused on integration across these diverse disciplines. Our foundational strength is truly differentiated by 10x, and this integrated core capability is essential for developing the breakthrough products and technologies in our pipeline. Looking ahead, we plan to increase our investments and build out R&D capabilities across our three complementary platforms. With Chromium, we have executed an ambitious product roadmap we have outlined over the last two years, and we plan additional enhancements in the future to increase access and improve visibility. This includes our new fixed RNA profiling kit for Gene Expression, which we expect to launch in early 2022. This product addresses a key request from customers and adds flexibility to the Chromium workflow. By allowing researchers to fix their samples at tissue collection, our customers will be able to optimize how they progress through their experiments by aggregating samples over time or collecting samples from distributed sites. Visium is much earlier in its lifecycle, and we're excited about its rich product growth pipeline. Next year, we will go through Hi-Plex protein analysis of Visium and antibody oligo technology, yielding true multiomics. We also expect to launch our site-assisted instrument to automate the process of applying Visium to tissues mounted on standard glass slides. This will enable researchers to access additional FFPE tissues upon our existing tissue handling protocols common in pathology cores. Lastly, with Visium HD, we will enable true single-cell resolution on our Visium platform. While other high-resolution spatial analysis technologies are often limited in their ability to offer Hi-Plex measurements, Visium HD will access the entire transcriptome across the entire tissue sample at single-cell resolution. We believe this product will represent the single best platform for spatial discovery and for spatial research, and we intend to bring it to market next year. Moving to the second area of focus: we're making substantial investments in our global operations to deliver differentiated products, fortify our supply chain, and support the long-term growth trajectory of the business. Since the beginning, we have had a tight relationship between our operations and R&D teams. We believe this is essential to our rapid speed of innovation and ability to develop highly differentiated products. We are proactive in managing our supply chain and continually evaluating our ability to source key components. We also recognize that when you invent technologies that the world has never seen before, you often have to invest in novel manufacturing capabilities to go along with that. For instance, with Visium HD, we developed a new proprietary approach for manufacturing microarrays, which enables smaller features and single-cell resolution on our Visium slides. We are incorporating this technology into our existing manufacturing capabilities to support Visium HD upon launch. We believe initiatives like these are essential to supporting our growth in our new product roadmap. Progress thus far in 2021 has been encouraging as we continue to be vigilant in light of emerging challenges in the global supply chain. We remain on track with the development of our new manufacturing and operations facility here in Pleasanton, and just last month I was able to visit our new state-of-the-art manufacturing commercial hub in Singapore. We expect to accelerate our investment and grow our global footprint as we move into 2022. Finally, moving to our commercial organization, we remain intensely focused on providing a superior customer experience. We have built a best-in-class commercial team, and our ability to sell and support diverse high-content genomic technologies is unmatched within our industry. We plan to build on our momentum and continue to scale our organization to effectively enable and engage our customers globally. We're also adding customer support specialists with deep technical expertise in areas such as tissue analysis, automation, and bioinformatics. These team members will help ensure that our customers are successful in designing and executing their experiments as we add to our product lineup and access new customer segments. We have made great progress so far this year, and we remain on track to meet our current goals for 2021. Stepping back, we started the company with the premise that improving human health requires an exponential increase in our understanding of biology and that the main challenge to understanding biology is its enormous complexity. To address this complexity, we set out to build technologies to measure biology at the right resolution and at massive scale. We catalyze single-cell resolution, which over the last few years revealed that cellular heterogeneity is a pervasive feature of all human tissues. We unequivocally see a future where every tissue should be analyzed with single-cell from spatial context, and we're developing our three complementary platforms, Chromium, Visium, and in situ to deliver precisely that future whether for basic science, professional research, or clinical diagnostics. There is a vast set of opportunities ahead, and we will continue to develop the global scale multi-disciplinary capabilities and advance technologies needed to accelerate the mastery of biology and advance human health. With that, I will now turn the call over to Justin for more details on our financials.

Justin McAnear, CFO

Thank you, Serge. Total revenue for the 3 months ended September 30, 2021, was $125.3 million compared to $71.8 million for the prior year period, representing a 74% increase year-over-year and an 8% increase quarter-over-quarter. The current operating environment remains complex with many of our customers continuing to grapple with the ongoing effects of COVID-19, specifically the reinstatement of COVID-related operating protocols. In recent months, second-order COVID effects have emerged. These include supply constraints and critical plastics and reagents essential to our customers, and labor challenges reducing staffing levels and training for new investigators. We believe these second-order COVID effects impacted our customers' ability to efficiently perform their experiments and subsequently impacted our consumable revenue for the third quarter. We expect these impacts to persist into 2022. In spite of this challenging environment, we saw solid demand for both consumables and instruments this quarter. Consumables revenue was $106.1 million, which increased 75% over the prior year period on a continued demand for our single-cell and spatial consumable products. Instrument revenue was $17.1 million, which increased 77% over the prior year period on the back of the impressive launch of the Chromium X Series instruments. Service revenue was $2.1 million, which increased 30% over the prior year period. Moving now to regional results. Revenue for the Americas was $70.2 million, increasing 66% over the prior year period. EMEA revenue for the third quarter was $25.8 million, increasing 67% over the prior year period. Finally, APAC revenue for the third quarter was $29.2 million, increasing 110% over the prior year period. Turning to the rest of the income statement. Gross profit for the third quarter was $100.8 million compared to a gross profit of $57.4 million for the prior year period. Gross margin for the third quarter was flat year-over-year at 80% as the impact of product mix was offset by a decrease in accrued royalties related to the Bio-Rad agreement in line with our expectations. Total operating expenses for the third quarter were $116.7 million, a decrease of 5% from $122.7 million for the third quarter of 2020. The decrease in operating expenses was primarily driven by lower in-process research and development expenses as compared to the third quarter of 2020, which included a $40.6 million charge resulting from the acquisition of CartaNA. This decrease in operating expenses was partially offset by increased personnel-related expenses, including stock-based compensation, increased costs related to materials, facilities and technology to support operational expansion, and increased marketing expenses related to conferences and seminars. R&D expenses for the third quarter were $54.6 million compared to $30.1 million for the third quarter of 2020. The increase was driven by $15 million of increased personnel-related expenses, including stock-based compensation, a $5 million increase in expenses related to lab materials, supplies, and equipment, and the $2.9 million increase in expenses related to IT and facilities. SG&A expenses for the third quarter were $62.1 million compared to $51.5 million for the third quarter of 2020. The increase was driven by $15 million of increased personnel-related expenses, including stock-based compensation, $2.5 million of marketing expenses, and a $2.3 million increase in expenses related to IT facilities, partially offset by a decrease of $8.9 million of outside legal expenses. Operating loss for the third quarter was $15.9 million compared to a loss of $65.3 million for the third quarter of 2020, primarily due to the impact of lower in-process research and development expense. This includes $26 million of stock-based compensation for the third quarter of 2021 compared to $13.8 million for the third quarter of 2020. Net loss for the period was $17.2 million compared to a net loss of $65.8 million for the third quarter of 2020. We ended the quarter with $600.4 million in cash and cash equivalents net of restricted cash. The decrease in cash from the prior quarter includes the impact of increased capital expenditures related to our global operational expansion and a portion of our payment to Bio-Rad as part of the settlement agreement. We expect elevated CapEx moving forward as we continue to scale our global operations. Now turning to our outlook for the remainder of 2021. We believe that we remain on track for a strong finish to the year. We now expect our full-year 2021 revenue to be $490 million to $500 million, representing growth of 64% to 67% over full year 2020. Thus far in the fourth quarter, the operating environment remains complex. Our customers are continuing to experience supply constraints in critical plastics and reagents and labor challenges impacting staffing levels and training of new investigators. While we believe that these issues are ultimately temporary, it's likely they will persist into 2022. These challenges are not unique to our customers, and we are seeing additional constraints in obtaining certain key components for our products and R&D activities, such as electronic components, tips, and other plastics and reagents. While we have been proactive in managing our supply chain and to date, have not experienced any material impacts, there is an increasing amount of downside risk related to global logistics and supply chain, and current supply constraints may limit our revenue upside in the near term. Despite these temporary challenges, our velocity of innovation and pipeline of new products remain unmatched, and we are continuing to invest aggressively in our commercial and operations teams. Our prospects remain strong, and we have incredible conviction in the long-term trajectory of the business.

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

Thanks, Justin. Before we open the line for questions, I want to thank the 10x team around the world for their drive, passion, and intense focus on our mission. They're doing profoundly important work, and their ongoing commitment and dedication are both impressive and inspiring. As we look ahead, the vast opportunities before us are both clear and compelling. The answer to humanity's most pressing health challenges will be found in understanding and mastering biology. We are early in this journey and fully expect 10x to lead the way in pushing forward to the frontiers of scientific knowledge. With that, we will now open it up for questions. Operator?

Operator, Operator

The first question comes from Tejas Savant of Morgan Stanley.

Tejas Savant, Analyst

Just one quick question for me, for you, Justin. In terms of the bump in the guide at the midpoint, I was just curious as to what's driving that? Was it an improvement month-over-month on the COVID front? Or was it more related to the consumables on some of these newer Chromiums and the workflow starting to ramp? Or is it just all instrument upside because the instrument number did come in materially higher versus our estimate?

Justin McAnear, CFO

Thank you, Tejas. There are several factors influencing our guidance and updates. In this case, we are deploying more instruments than initially planned. A significant number of instruments were shipped in Q2, and we also observed strong demand in Q3 for both the Chromium and the launch of the Chromium X Series instruments IX and X together. The demand for instruments is primarily driving this outcome.

Tejas Savant, Analyst

Got it. And then a quick one on margins here and Visium as well. So first on Visium, in terms of the FFPE launch surge, can you give us some color on sort of the month-over-month momentum? Do you think there's customers who are sort of pushing out a purchase as they wait to perhaps evaluate the HD launch in early next year? And then on the margins, Justin, can you share some color on what you're baking in for inflationary pressures and some of the increases in freight costs and so on as you look to 2022?

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

Yes. So I'll go first. Thanks, Tejas. So on Visium FFPE, the product is following an adoption that's very typical of our products where there's initial pent-up demand, then people work through kind of getting up to speed on the product, and then it sort of grows from there. So it's going well. It's going according to our expectations. As far as HD and its effect on our customers, yes, there is some. People certainly anticipate the arrival of Visium HD. Not sure like I wouldn't, at this stage, call it a massive effect, but it is there. It's something we're definitely hearing fairly consistently.

Justin McAnear, CFO

Tejas, as far as margins going forward, we aren't guiding anything for 2022 at this time. We are seeing pressure from suppliers on price increases. Our primary concern right now is to make sure that we have the right amount of supply secured. But depending upon how we choose to handle things on pricing on our end, we'll share future information on our margin outlook going forward when we share 2022 guidance on our next call.

Daniel Arias, Analyst

Serge or Justin, on the operating environment, this is probably a tough question to answer, so apologies in advance. But just given that it feels like COVID is going to be around to some degree or another for a while, and to your point, you're expecting the headwind to carry into 2022. I'm just curious to get your thoughts on the threshold that we should think about for you guys or the factors that are most important in order to sort of have COVID go from something that needs to be called out to something that's just sort of background noise again to what you have broadly across the space? Any thoughts there would be really helpful.

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

It's a challenging question to answer, considering there are several factors involved, none of which we would classify as primary effects. Instead, they are a mix of secondary effects, which can be quite subtle. Currently, there is a significant focus on the supply chain, particularly the availability of reagents and plastics for our customers. This is relatively easy to monitor, but it's just one of many factors at play. It’s difficult to specify any individual criteria. We need to look at all these factors collectively, and we expect that gradually, conditions will improve at some point in the future.

Daniel Arias, Analyst

Okay. Thanks for that. And then can I just ask one about maybe the ordering labs that you're seeing for the X system? Are they orders that are generally coming from the high-end users that are doing a really large experiment today? Or are you starting to see some trickle in from sort of the standard single-cell crowd that are maybe buying ahead of what they need? I'm just kind of trying to understand the upselling potential that you see here in the near term.

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

Yes, I think it's mostly the latter. We are witnessing customers from the high-end market purchasing X, whether they're directly using high-throughput kits or planning to buy them. Our customer base is quite varied, including completely new clients eager to adopt the right technology, as well as existing customers who, once they have budgets, are looking to future-proof their investments and anticipate spending in the future. So, we definitely see activity across the board.

Michael Ryskin, Analyst

This is Mike Ryskin standing in for Derik. Justin, I have a question for you to begin with. I understand there are many factors affecting the instruments number, but could you provide some clarity on placements or ASP as it came in, particularly in relation to the third quarter compared to the second quarter or previous years? This would help us refine our model, considering the various factors affecting ASP and the mix coming in.

Justin McAnear, CFO

The average selling prices have increased due to the product mix. Most of the instruments shipped this quarter were the regular Chromium Controller, Chromium X and IX, with Chromium Connect making up a smaller portion. With the inclusion of Chromium IX and Chromium X, and also Chromium Connect, our average selling price is currently above approximately $60,000. We will provide more details on individual placements and the specific placement numbers when we report year-end. Overall, we are placing more instruments than we initially expected at the start of the year.

Michael Ryskin, Analyst

Okay. That's really helpful. And then maybe another quick one on the X and IX sort of following up on Dan's question just now, I think. Anything you're seeing in terms of cannibalization or sort of how people are incorporating those instruments relative to Chromium or relative to the Connect? Just thinking about how that could translate into utilization trends down the road as the installed base gets bigger?

Justin McAnear, CFO

And so for Chromium IX and X, the primary instrument for most customers to order would be the X, and the IX really provides an opportunity for them to help future-proof against the needs that they might have in the future to run high throughput. And as far as looking at usage for the X now, we can look at orders of high-throughput kits and how that attachment compares to the Chromium X orders and also look at the medium-throughput kits as well. And what I can share right now is that we've got some customers that are ordering high throughput that have a need for high throughput, and that's helping to drive demand for the X. And then we have other customers that have ordered a Chromium X and are using it with medium throughput and some are existing customers that are replacing their Chromium Controller with the Chromium X, getting their experiments up and running on that in anticipation of a future need for high throughput but are using medium throughput today.

Patrick Donnelly, Analyst

Justin, maybe another one on the kind of go forward. Obviously, intra-quarter, you guys came out and sounded a little softer coming out of August. Clearly, things have improved quite a bit in September, October. I guess can you just talk through the moving pieces? I mean, it seems like the numbers themselves for 4Q are above expectations, your tone, and maybe suggesting that there's just mixed things. But just kind of curious how you're feeling about the environment? What the real puts and takes are? I mean, obviously, supply chain stuff and COVID seem like the biggest overhang, but it doesn't seem like an overly conservative number. So you guys must be feeling pretty good. So I just want to talk through that a little bit.

Justin McAnear, CFO

Sure. There's definitely an increased amount of risk overall in the supply chain above and beyond what we've seen in the past. And so that's a concern going forward. There's the impacts of COVID that we've talked about on basically lab efficiency of our customers. And then the second-order impacts of them being able to get materials that they need to run experiments and also having the labor available in the lab to execute running the experiments, and we've seen customers impacted by that. And so really, that's an impact on our consumable revenue overall. Now as far as instruments go, instrument budgets, capital budgets are flush right now. Demand for instruments remains strong. And looking back at Q3, we had a launch coming up for Chromium X. The month of August was lower than we expected, and we hadn't yet moved into where customers were making the final decisions on X or not. And so we had a light month in August. And then there was upside in September, primarily driven by instrument shipments. And so that's the best that I can describe it. And then going forward, as we look at Q4, I think that we're still going to have those headwinds on consumable revenue for the reasons that I mentioned. There's the risk around the supply chain, which we are doing our best to manage that effectively and mitigate that risk. But the demand for instruments remains strong. And overall, taking all of that into account, we feel good about where we've updated our range, and barring anything completely unusual, maybe a standstill in supply chain or something like that, we feel good about where we're going to land. In general, the ramp-up for new customers is taking a bit longer for the reasons we've discussed. Additionally, we are attracting more new customers due to changes in the pricing of the regular Chromium Controller and the introduction of the X. Overall, this process is slower.

Bradford Crutchfield, CRO

Yes. In general, customer sentiment indicates that many are growing weary of the current environment. However, there's a positive shift as people return to in-person interactions with colleagues and customers, which highlights what was lost during a completely virtual mode. Overall, this is a positive development. There's significant focus on the science, and many of the initiatives we've undertaken have sparked considerable interest. As Serge noted, we've faced some challenges related to the finer points of the ecosystem surrounding the usage of our products and how customers find reassurance and motivation from one another, but we are managing through it. Nonetheless, many are cautious about being overly optimistic, as changes can occur rapidly.

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

I recently visited the field for the first time in a long while, and I wanted to share some impressions. Meeting with customers was fantastic, and I was glad to see people again. There is strong enthusiasm for the products and applications, particularly in single-cell research. I've heard that customers are planning to scale up their studies and starting new ones, with fresh faces entering the ecosystem, particularly around clinically-oriented research questions. This all provides a positive outlook on the fundamentals. However, there's also a challenge with service frictions and their impact on the ecosystem, which is a new aspect I haven't tracked before. Many new customers are being trained on single-cell techniques by experienced users, who are helping them in the lab and providing guidance. This collaborative nature is crucial for scientific progress. Unfortunately, much of this interaction has decreased over the past 15 months. We need to understand the implications of this change, as it's impacting the growth of new technologies rather than just restoring previous activities. While labs are functioning well again, we need to monitor this situation closely. The eagerness to conduct research is evident, but it's important to acknowledge these underlying challenges.

David Westenberg, Analyst

Can you talk about the enthusiasm for not shutting down? Regarding the projects or funding that are being accessed, are you seeing a new environment for research grants post-COVID and the initiation of projects that seem unlikely to be postponed again, or is there still some hesitancy among your customers?

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

Yes, I'm not completely confident in my assessment due to the limited sample size. There's some hesitation present. On one hand, people are eager to advance science, but on the other hand, there are various constraints that didn't exist before, such as supply chain issues and labor shortages. Many experts in single-cell research have left their labs, which complicates coordination for sample arrival and the execution of experiments and analysis, making everything more challenging.

Justin McAnear, CFO

Yes. David, maybe I'll add just another side. I think for a while there, there was this thought of a lot of research dollars are going to be shifted to COVID-related research, and that little level of uncertainty. And I think what we've seen maybe in the last two quarters is the realization that a lot of those insights have already been determined. And so what we see now is a lot more customers now projecting a future where they're back to their research; they can see where their grants are. And generally, there is less money that's specifically earmarked for COVID research and back to sort of general improvements and understanding of fundamental biology, which is kind of where we come in.

David Westenberg, Analyst

Got it. That was all really helpful. Can you talk about maybe some of the sub-cohorts for Chromium X? I know you've said in the past this is the top 10% of customers that use it. But any thoughts to what sub-cohorts might be like the first order? And kind of what I'm getting at is, is this really a service provider first? Or maybe is this the core lab first? I mean, is there certain geographies first? Just trying to see how that launch cycle might play out? And I'm done after that, of course.

Bradford Crutchfield, CRO

David, I’ll address that. We anticipated this would unfold as you mentioned, but it truly spans a variety of sectors. Generally, all our customers, including those in pharmaceuticals and academia, have adopted it broadly, particularly those who felt they really needed it and were engaged in actual experiments. They also purchased the HD kit. Additionally, there are others who are interested in some of the telemetry and connectivity features and are exploring how they can incorporate that into future applications. Overall, it has proven to be widely applicable, but there’s clearly a focus on the HD kit to drive complete performance.

Daniel Brennan, Analyst

High level on spatial. Can you just walk through a little bit on the competitive environment there? Obviously, you've got one notable public company, but there's a handful of private companies as well that are coming up. So just maybe it's a fairly large market we're early, but just kind of what are you seeing there in terms of the competitive landscape and how we're faring?

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

Yes. Over the past year, there has definitely been a rise of many smaller companies entering the in situ technology space. This trend is expected as the market potential has become quite evident. However, these companies are still in the early stages of their ambitions and their actual market presence. We take competitors seriously, but also recognize that this is a nascent stage, and we will concentrate on our own strengths, particularly in innovation and customer experience. We are investing in our in situ platform and the Visium spatial platform, and we feel very optimistic about their future development and market positioning. Overall, I am confident about our progress and what we can expect moving forward.

Daniel Brennan, Analyst

I would like to inquire about the topic that was mentioned earlier in the call, specifically regarding the potential for reducing prices and expanding the total addressable market for a single cell. Could you provide some insight into how much additional market opportunity this could create for you? Also, is there any concern about needing to lower prices, particularly regarding how this might affect your existing customers who require higher throughput?

Serge Saxonov, CEO and Co-Founder

Yes. To clarify, when customers consider pricing, the crucial factor is the cost of the experiment, specifically the consumable price that influences many adoption decisions. We have not reduced the prices of our consumables or core reagents, although they may increase. Instead, we have lowered the price per data point while making high-end experiments more costly. This means you spend less per sample, but overall, you may end up spending more by running additional samples or more cells. These are the product configurations we've recently introduced. The aim is to capture more of the high-end market while providing a pathway for new users to enter the ecosystem. For newcomers, we've released a lower throughput kit, which has a higher cost per data point but a lower cost per experiment. This is not intended to cannibalize higher-end research or our existing customer bases; rather, it allows new users to enter or helps current customers experiment with new studies before moving on to standard kits. We anticipate that this approach will continue to support both segments effectively.

Matthew Sykes, Analyst

Maybe just going back to the gross margin for a second, Justin. You obviously talked about the lower crude royalties from the Bio-Rad litigation, but that was offset by the shifting product mix. Could you maybe give a little more details on the various puts and takes in that product mix shift in terms of specific products or the details you can provide?

Justin McAnear, CFO

Sure. Most of our new products generally have slightly lower gross margins compared to our existing consumable products. As products like Visium contribute more to overall revenue, they can reduce gross margins a bit. However, the larger impact comes from the instruments, where the Chromium Connect, Chromium IX, and Chromium X have lower gross margins but higher revenue compared to the Chromium Controller. As these products make up a larger share of our total revenue, they will contribute to a slight decline in gross margins.

Matthew Sykes, Analyst

Got it. Thanks for that. And then just maybe following up on one of Pat's questions earlier just about the lag from the new instruments in terms of consumables. I mean, obviously, positive commentary on instrument placements. But as we kind of think about it, including the supply chain constraints with your customers, is it fair to assume that lag might take a little bit longer because you add the new instruments ramp-up plus the supply chain constraints, if we assume those persist into '22, as you said?

Justin McAnear, CFO

I think so. I think that's reasonable. I think that when you look at some of the impacts that we're seeing, what we're calling the second-order COVID impacts, it's impacting growth more so than it's impacting the more stable part of the business or with the more stable part of the customer base. And so I do think that's reasonable to assume that.

Ruizhi Qin, Analyst

This is Julia on for Tycho. Apologies if any of these questions have already been asked as my line kept dropping, so you may have addressed this already. So starting on supply chain, do you guys see any impact on customers being unable to get Illumina flow cells to run their single seq experiments, just given that was a pretty high-profile development during the quarter? And how do you guys contemplate that in your 4Q guide?

Justin McAnear, CFO

So Julia, this is Justin. We previously mentioned that some customers are having difficulty obtaining critical reagents necessary for their experiments. This issue is part of their workflow and has been discussed in various reports. We have observed this situation and considered it, along with many other factors, when providing guidance for the rest of the year. While it was a consideration, I wouldn't classify it as the sole or most significant factor. It was certainly something we took into account.

Julia, Analyst

Got it. That's helpful. And then last quarter, I think you had 100 incremental instrument placed due to what customers perceive to be a one-time promotion. But now that the price cut on Chromium Connect is permanent, how much durable elasticity did you observe in 3Q?

Justin McAnear, CFO

When we examine the Q2 results, we see a combination of early purchases and the acquisition of new customers at a different price point. Reflecting on Q2, the significant factor was the early purchases from customers already in the buying process. In Q3, we experienced strong demand at the new price point, particularly since we shifted some demand from Q3 into Q2. Additionally, the reception following the launch of Chromium X was very positive. Comparing quarterly revenue from instruments, there was a slight increase, essentially remaining flat. Q3 remained robust compared to a strong Q2. Since revenue was flat and the Chromium X and IX had higher price points than the Chromium Controller, it can be inferred that we placed fewer units in Q3 compared to Q2.

Operator, Operator

There are no further questions on the lines at this time. So this concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.