Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). And your first question comes from the line of Ross Muken - Deutsche Bank.
Ross Muken - Deutsche Bank
I wanted to dig in a little bit to your comment about the slowing in whole genome studies and the sequencing. Can you talk a bit about the dynamics there between obviously the need for content, but also the fact that some of the work is moving on direct to sequencing, or are you seeing some of the designs of studies change, so that the applicability is more so done on a sequencer than on a microarray-based platform?
Jay Flatley
We’ve seen tremendous growth in the micro-array business over the last few years, and the point we’re making is that we think the growth in that market is going to slow down. The market isn’t going to shrink. What we expect is that customers are going to be finishing up existing projects and maybe holding up starting of the next one until some of these new chip versions come out, and that’s going to start to happen over the next few quarters, so we do think this is a temporary phenomenon. With respect to moving over to sequencing, we are seeing great progress in expression applications moving over to sequencing. In fact, we’ve seen very high consumable rates and good increases in the consumables onto the sequencer. We’re certainly seeing things like methylation and chip seek moving over to sequencing applications, but we don’t see in any timeframe we can imaging genotyping moving to sequencing as a replacement technology, so we feel until sequencing gets to be well below $1000 that customers will remain focused on doing genotyping when the content is known and the targets they are trying to interrogate are very well known.
Ross Muken - Deutsche Bank
It was just an article I had read in the New England Journal of Medicine which suggested that certainly there is quite a bit of array work to be done, but it seems like a lot of the new projects that are coming along or the types of studies people are designing, there is a lot more interest given the high level of success on your platform that a lot of the new focus is shifting towards to the sequencing side.
Jay Flatley
There is certainly no question that the sequencing market is the fastest growing segment that we know of, so clearly dollars are flowing the next-gen sequencing in a big way. Maybe you could theorize that temporarily some of the dollars are going to be diverted from arrays into more sequencing projects, but we certainly don’t see at least as it pertains to genotyping that if you looked out in a timeframe greater than 6 months that that’s really going to be the case. Of course, in some sense, we’re indifferent to this shift because we’re the only company that has both technologies.
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