Cytek Biosciences - Q1 2023
May 9, 2023
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good afternoon. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Cytek Biosciences first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, simply press star one one again. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Paul Goodson, Head of Investor Relations. Paul, please go ahead.
Paul Goodson (Head of Investor Relations)
Thank you operator. Earlier today, Cytek Biosciences released financial results for the quarter ended March 31st, 2023. If you haven't received this news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to [email protected]. Joining me today from Cytek are Wenbin Jiang, CEO, and Patrik Jeanmonod, CFO. 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 the federal securities laws, including statements regarding Cytek's business plans, strategies, opportunities, and financial projections. These statements are based on the company's current expectations and inherently involved significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated.
Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled Forward-Looking Statements in the press release Cytek issued today and in Cytek's filings with the SEC. This call will also include a discussion of certain financial measures that are not calculated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure may be found in today's earnings release submitted to the SEC. Except as required by law, Cytek disclaims any duty to update any forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or changes in its expectations. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast, May 9, 2023. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Wenbin.
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
Thanks, Paul. Welcome everyone joining our first quarter earnings conference call. On the call today, I will discuss our progress during the first quarter, including some of the headwinds impacting our top-line results, as well as our progress across our four key strategic pillars to drive growth. I will turn the call over to Patrik for a more detailed look at our financial results and an update on our outlook for 2023 before we open it up for Q&A. Starting with our first quarter results, we achieved $37.1 million of total revenue, representing growth of 6% year-over-year. This included approximately $3.4 million of revenue from the product lines acquired from Luminex. Excluding acquisition-related revenue, our organic revenue accounted for $33.7 million.
While we saw strong growth in Europe and APAC, with notable growth in China, we faced increasing pressures with our biotech and pharma customer base in the U.S. throughout the quarter, particularly at the end of the quarter. Among the factors affecting demand in the quarter were a marked slowdown in biotech funding, reduced spending among biotech and pharma companies, a decline in COVID demand, and the macroeconomic uncertainties resulting in longer sales cycles and delayed orders. Patrik will provide more detail on our financial results shortly. Based on our Q1 results, as well as these headwinds, we now expect full year revenue in the range of $205 million-$220 million, representing growth of 25%-34% over the prior year.
While our top-line growth this year will be slower than our previous expectations, we firmly believe the underlying demand for our Full Spectrum Profiling or FSP platform remains strong. We remain committed to driving growth and diversifying our revenue streams to continue our strong overall performance. We are taking proactive measures in this transition year to optimize our business operations in 2023 as we integrate the newly acquired business from Luminex with ongoing efforts to further our overall strategy. At Cytek, we take pride in our distinctive position in the industry as we offer customers a comprehensive end-to-end solution that includes instruments, reagents, software, and application offerings.
Our recent acquisition and partnerships have further strengthened our portfolio, allowing us to further stand apart in this field. Our comprehensive suite of products and services have continued to advance adoption of Cytek's Full Spectrum Profiling platform as the method of choice for cell analysis. Our core suite of instruments continues to see solid demand, in part because there is a large market of conventional flow cytometers waiting to be converted to our FSP technology. Whether it's ultra-high sensitivity needed to resolve more challenging cell populations, or ease of use, intuitive workflow desired for more routine analysis, Cytek's portfolio is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of all cell analysis, regardless of assay complexity. In addition, our expanding portfolio of panels optimized for use on our instruments will continue to advance FSP's adoption.
Our recent acquisition of the flow cytometry and the imaging business from Luminex will open new markets and applications. As I have discussed before, we operate our business according to four key pillars, each of which is integral to our long-term growth. These pillars, which are instruments, applications, bioinformatics, and clinical, lay out our roadmap for operating our business now and in the future with intentional and purposeful execution. Despite the challenges we faced in the first quarter, I remain confident that our daily work, aligned under these four pillars, executes on our overall strategy and will produce excellent growth over the longer term. Starting with instruments. During this quarter, we placed 96 Cytek instruments. Altogether, Cytek's installed base has now reached 1,766 instruments as of the first quarter of 2023.
These placements reflect our core strategy to achieve growth across the range of applications and the users, from entry-level to high dimensional cell analysis applications. This number does not include the installed instruments of Amnis and Guava product lines we acquired from Luminex, which add an install base of more than 7,000 instruments across more than 1,500 customers in over 70 countries. Over the longer term, we believe this installed base will eventually benefit from the placement and upgrade into our Northern Lights and Aurora platforms. We also believe this expanded installed base will provide Cytek with a receptive market for new instruments we intend to launch in future years that are based on Cytek's advanced technologies, augmented by the powerful technologies we have acquired from Luminex. The applications area includes our reagents and kits.
Here, we are actively collaborating with our partners to expand our reagents portfolio and develop application-specific kits, and we are making progress in both areas. Revenue from reagents and kits continues to be our fastest product growth area, highlighting the increasing demand for our offerings, which are focused on making the scientists' and the clinicians' job easier, faster, and more accurate. We are strategically investing in opportunities to grow, as exemplified by our strategic partnership with Bio-Rad Laboratories to expand our reagent portfolios and enhance high parameter panels on our cell analysis systems. The addition of Bio-Rad StarBright Dyes to our FSP platform, which we announced during the first quarter, provides a major advantage for researchers conducting multiparameter experiments, and we are excited about this ongoing partnership.
We also recently launched our 20-color acute myeloid leukemia AML panel, an effective and a sensitive flow cytometric approach for identifying and categorizing normal and aberrant cells, immunophenotyping, and evaluating measurable residual disease, or MRD, in AML samples. This new panel unleashed the power of our FSP technology, and it is built on the company's extensive experience pioneering and revolutionizing full spectrum flow cytometry to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the human immune system. Multiparametric flow cytometry assays are widely used in detecting and monitoring AML in drug discovery, translational research, clinical trials, and clinical diagnostics. Historically, on conventional flow cytometers, markers used for assessing AML are typically split into multiple tubes due to the limitation of detection channels, forcing the use of redundant markers and greater sample volume.
Our single tube 20-color panel for AML increases sensitivity while ending this wasteful practice. Enhancing laboratory operational efficiency by saving time and the labor for sample acquisition and the preparation, as well as preserving precious samples and eliminating the use of redundant reagents. By providing total solutions for specific application areas such as MRD, we are giving researchers and scientists new leverage to jump-start their discoveries and advance the development of life-saving therapies. Bioinformatics is our third strategic area. A key part of our bioinformatics strategy is enabling our customers to streamline their experiment workflow. Our Cytek Cloud product allows customers to design panels faster with a suite of full spectrum panel design tools and the ability to share panels with other Cytek customers. In addition, customers can convert the panels into experimental templates that can be used on any Cytek instrument with special flow software.
We believe providing these benefits to our users increases the attractiveness of our cell analysis solutions, drives demand, and creates loyalty among our users. Our Cytek Cloud product, launched late last year, was very rapidly adopted by many of our customers, and continues to receive growing customer interest. Turning now to clinical opportunities. Several of our products are approved for clinical use in both China and the European Union, where our most common sale for clinical applications is the Northern Lights-CLC system, accompanied by our cFluor reagents. As a reminder, we plan to submit our products for FDA clearance in the U.S., where we believe our powerful FSP platform, if approved, will bring enhanced diagnostic power and visibility to the benefit of patients by giving doctors a clearer and more detailed view of each patient's condition.
As in China and the EU, we believe the U.S. clinical market also represents an attractive long-term business opportunity for Cytek. Globally, our approach to the clinical and the laboratory developed test or LDT market, is being driven by customer recognition that our technology enables clinical labs to efficiently perform high-level multi-parameter immunophenotyping on small amounts of patient samples to identify new cell subtypes and the disease pathways. This approach provides the doctor with more refined and detailed insights into their patients' conditions. Because clinical samples are often difficult to obtain and are limited in amount, the ability of our system to give complete results with only one sample processed in a single tube, is important to patients, doctors, and the laboratories alike.
In a very concrete way, our plan to have our technology adopted in the clinical market is expected to mirror the success we had beginning 60 years ago when we revolutionized the research market with full spectrum technology. Our full spectrum technology was rapidly recognized as the gold standard for research use. We plan to establish it as the standard bearer for clinical applications in the future. As these benefits become better known in the clinical communities in China and Europe, we believe our platform will have accelerated acceptance as the standard against which other clinical diagnostic approaches are judged. If the comments of one of our European clinical customers are any indication of our success in this area, we are making great progress here.
They said, "We can better define normals by being able to use more markers in a single tube, maintaining full correlation between all markers." Beyond the instruments, our kits and the reagents are also gaining importance in clinical applications. The 20-color panel for AML I mentioned a few minutes ago, is a powerful new product for supporting diagnostic studies, clinical evaluations, and the patient stratification, in addition to being used as a research tool for the development of new drugs. We expect it will have strong uptake. All of us at Cytek are gratified that we are making such important contributions to the practice of clinical research and medicine. This is part of our mission that drives us to manufacture high-performing products and to develop new technologies that will enhance the lives of the patients and doctors who depend on our contributions.
Regarding peer-reviewed publications that include our technology, we are pleased to report that during this quarter alone, there were 145 peer-reviewed publications mentioning Cytek, bringing the all-time number of publications to 1,152. This remarkable achievement speaks to the momentum of our platform and validates the importance of our offerings to the scientific community. We remain committed to advancing scientific research with our innovative products. As an example of how significant some of these research efforts are, in one paper published in Nature, researchers at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute identified a therapeutic strategy for stopping metastatic cancer relapse. In the second Nature publication published to longevity, scientists discovered conditions in which T cell replication does not stop after a fixed number of divisions, suggesting a research direction for extending human lifespan.
Another paper was recently accepted into the clinical section of the journal Cytometry, which used a three-laser FSP instrument running a 31-color panel, and it reinforces what we have been reporting to you about the importance of Full Spectrum Profiling in immunology and the running samples in only one tube. The abstract of this paper states, "Immune monitoring of patients on a single-cell level is becoming increasingly important in various diseases. Due to the often very limited availability of human specimens and our increased understanding of the immune system, there is an increasing demand to analyze as many markers as possible simultaneously in one panel. full specturm flow cytometry is emerging as a powerful tool for immune monitoring." Finally, I would like to spend a moment to discuss our progress with the integration of Luminex flow cytometry and the imaging business.
As we have shared, the Luminex flow cytometry and the imaging business provides important contributions to our technological abilities, product range, customer base and commercial reach. Although we are now only a little more than two months into the integration process and still have some key steps ahead of us, we have completed several important milestones already. From a commercial perspective, we have cross-trained all of our commercial personnel on the technologies new to them. That is the Amnis and the Guava products to Cytek employees and the Cytek products for our new team members from Luminex. These programs include all sales, technical application specialists and service personnel, and provided lessons on each other's marketing programs, product demonstrations, customer training and other areas. In addition to cross-training, we launched a cross-selling plan targeted at Cytek FSP, Amnis, and Guava products.
The integration of our service teams will take a bit longer due to the technical training required, but we have established a target date in the third quarter for the completion of that integration. From an operations perspective, we are making good progress on business system integration, manufacturing transition, and the product harmonization. Over the medium term, we have set three milestones regarding the acquisition. The first milestone is focused on accelerating sales of Amnis products with growth of approaching Cytek's corporate average sales growth rate by penetrating Amnis into the existing customer base. This includes targeting half of the 1,000 Aurora customers to purchase at least one Amnis unit over the next three-five years, potentially generating approximately $200 million in additional revenue. The second milestone is evaluating Guava's cost structure within the next six months to determine future product development plans.
Guava's microcapillary technology is an attractive asset, its potential integration with the Northern Lights platform could provide access to a new untapped customer base. Lastly, Cytek aims to convert existing three-laser Guava users to the Northern Lights platform as part of the strategic integration goals for [Sunday] three. We look forward to updating you on our progress. While we expect modest revenue contributions from the acquisition this year, as a reminder, we think that the real value of this acquisition will be realized in the longer term in three primary areas. Most importantly, there are a number of new products we will introduce that represent a combination of the technologies available on each platform. Next, there are significant cross-selling opportunities we will leverage with the integrated sales teams.
Finally, we expect a significant improvement in the efficiency and the growth margin of our service organization with the addition of our new highly trained and experienced team members from Luminex. In all, once again, I'm pleased with the progress our team has made this quarter as we navigated some challenges on the macro front. We remain focused on providing a complete cell analysis solution to our customers. We look forward to continuing to provide our novel FSP platform, complemented by Luminex products and the technologies to these customers as they push the bounds of scientific discovery and the clinical progress. With that, I will now turn the call over to Patrik for more details around our financials.
Patrik Jeanmonod (CFO)
Thanks, Wenbin. Total revenue for the first quarter of 2023 was $37.1 million, a 6% increase over the first quarter of 2022. As Wenbin mentioned, this included approximately $3.4 million of revenue from the products and services acquired from Luminex Corp. As a reminder, the agreement closed on February 28th, meaning that we recognized four weeks of revenue from these product lines in the first quarter. Organic revenue, excluding the acquired products and services, was $33.7 million, a decline of 4% compared to the same period of 2022. Keep in mind that our 2022 revenue was particularly strong, posting 44% growth over the prior year and setting a high bar to achieve growth this year. Our organic revenue was impacted by a few key factors.
The slowdown was driven by longer sales cycle and delayed ordering from our biotech and pharma customers, which we believe was due to increased conservatism arising from macro uncertainties in the funding environment, a decline in bioprocessing activity, higher interest rates, and other factors. The slowdown in the U.S. was offset partially by better performance in all of our markets outside the U.S. A number of our ex-U.S. markets grew in the high double digit, with China growing in the triple digit as a percentage of revenue. We are pleased with the significant improvement in gross margin in our service business. Revenue from our academic customers grew in line with our expectation during the quarter. On a constant currency basis for the quarter, revenue was $38.1 million, an increase of 9% over the first quarter of 2022.
Gross profit was $21 million for the first quarter of 2023, an increase of 4% compared to a gross profit of $20.2 million in the first quarter of 2022. Gross profit margin was 57% in the first quarter of 2023, compared to 58% in the first quarter of 2022. Adjusted gross profit margin in the first quarter of 2023 was 59% compared to 60% in the first quarter of 2022. After adjusting for stock-based compensation expense and amortization of acquisition-related intangibles. Operating expenses were $33.2 million for the first quarter of 2023, a 47% increase from $22.5 million in the first quarter of 2022.
The increase was primarily due to expenses to support continued growth of the business, including further investment in R&D, sales and marketing and G&A, with increases in headcount and personnel-related expenses, costs related to the acquisition and infrastructure services to support the growth of our overall operations. Research and development expenses were $10 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2023, as compared to $8 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2022. Sales and marketing expenses were $11.1 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2023, as compared to $7 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2022. General and administrative expenses were $12.1 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2023, as compared to $7.5 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2022.
Some operation was $12.2 million this quarter, compared to a loss from operations of $2.4 million for the first quarter of 2022. Net loss in the first quarter of 2023 was $6.8 million, compared to a loss of $2.2 million in the first quarter of 2022. Adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter of 2023 was -$2.5 million, compared to +$1.9 million in the first quarter of 2022 after adjusting for stock-based compensation expense. Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments were at $299 million as of March 31, 2023. Turning to our guidance for 2023.
As Wenbin shared, our expectation for the full year 2023 revenues now fall into a range of $205 million-$220 million, representing overall growth of 25%-34% over full year 2022. This is comprised of revenue from our organic business in the range of $180 million-$190 million. Representing growth of approximately 10%-16% over the full year 2022 revenue, and a total of $25 million-$30 million of revenue contribution in 2023 from the business acquired from Luminex. This assumes no changes in the rate of foreign exchange, as well as some continued delays in order due longer sales cycle from biotech and pharma customers in the U.S., as Wenbin mentioned.
While our typical seasonal pattern is for revenue to be skewed towards the back half of the year, in 2023, we are expecting that pattern to be even more strongly apparent due to the effects of integrating Amnis and Guava, as well as macro factors affecting the U.S. economy. With that, I will turn it back over to Wenbin.
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
Thanks, Patrik. As always, I want to start by thanking our team at Cytek for their dedication and drive as we execute on our mission to deliver our complete cell analysis solutions to a broad range of customers. It is their excellence, hard work, and the shared belief in our important mission that drives our progress. Cytek is in a fortunate position with many opportunities. We are in a strong position financially, continue to see solid demand, and are committed to remaining profitable on an annual EBITDA and a net income basis, as well as achieving our long-term growth targets and objectives. Our solid balance sheet underpins the strength of our company and provides important strategic flexibility to take advantage of opportunities as they may arise.
We have significant opportunities ahead to convert the large existing base of conventional flow cytometers to full spectrum, to expand our products into clinical use in the U.S., to accelerate the growth of our still new sales order, to create new products from our recent combination with Amnis and Guava, to drive sales through an expanded customer base, and to make our overall company more efficient and profitable as we scale in size and the product offerings. We believe Cytek is particularly well positioned to address these opportunities given the power of our advanced technologies, the strength of our capital base, the growing awareness of Cytek among customers in the marketplace, and the extraordinary talent of our employees. We will now open it up for questions. Operator.
Operator (participant)
Thank you, Dr. Jiang. Yes, at this time, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask question, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, simply press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from David Westenberg with Piper Sandler. David, your line is open. Please go ahead.
David Westenberg (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Hi. Thank you very much for taking the questions. I'm gonna squeeze in a few here because I think a lot of people are on a lot of different calls tonight. Anyway, can I just maybe ask about the placement numbers here? Your placement numbers miss me by more than the implied revenue beat. Are you at least getting, you know, maybe traction with, you know, the Aurora placements? You know, can we make any kind of inference in terms of like, what the, you know, potential for selling more reagent to that customer in 2023 and 2024 and beyond? I have a few more here.
Patrik Jeanmonod (CFO)
Maybe I can take the first question, Dave. Thanks for asking. Looking at the instruments, placement, we sold 96 last quarter after it was about 116, so we are down on almost all the categories. But at the same time, we've seen, to your point, an increase in reagent revenue. The increase in revenue coming from reagent is actually very positive.
David Westenberg (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Okay. Let me ask a few more here. Can you talk about maybe the penetration rate of full spectrum flow cytometers here? I mean, I think there, you know, as you've noted, there is a slowdown in placements. I mean, I still think that you have, you know, the best-in-class technology here. You know, maybe are we getting, in your opinion, maybe a little bit more mature market? Are we hitting an air pocket in terms or is this more of an air pocket in terms of market conditions? I'll ask a couple more.
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
I think we can take a look at the split of our customer base that include academia and pharma biotech, also international. I think as indicated, our international sales have done very well, especially China, and actually the market is leaning more toward our high end of the Aurora and the sales orders. Our academia is as expected doing okay, and I think it meet our expectation, put it this way. It's the pharma biotech that's below our expectation, but it doesn't mean that business is lost. It just takes longer time for them to come back to place orders. They become more conservative. Cited, because of our business, right? They are heavily leaned toward more actually kind of third month kind of behavior for each quarter.
This quarter particularly is because of the situation we all know about. So really the third month has failed to meet our expectation with those commercial customers in the pharma and the biotech as they become more conservative. So that's basically what's happening right now.
David Westenberg (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Got it. Maybe I don't know if you'd like to dwell into that because I don't think that, you know, the entire concept that biotech, small biotech, you know, Danaher, you know, said it on their call that they're, you know, rationalizing spending. We all know that they can't get kind of the funding that they want here, you know, from closed capital, you know, structure capital markets environment. Sorry, it takes a while to get that out. But, you know, I think U.S. pharma-based customers is, you know, what is that? Maybe a quarter of the customers.
Is there any chance that maybe some of the other customers, you know, as we go into the further into the year, can kinda make up for some of that slack here? I mean, academic is not necessarily as dependent on these cycles. you know, as we see the back half of the year, is there upside for maybe they don't need to cut out the spending considering biotech still needs to spend on their R&D projects for later stage programs. Any color there would be helpful.
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
No, exactly as what you have indicated, and it just takes longer for them to come back with order. Not necessarily means they will never come back. Indeed, we have seen this already and as we get into the Q2. That's basically what we'll put it over there like this. Yeah.
David Westenberg (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Okay. Actually, you know what? I'll hop off right now, and then I'll hop back in and ask a few more. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Standby for our next caller. Our next question comes from Tejas Savant from Morgan Stanley. Tejas, your line is open. Please go ahead.
Edmund Tu (Equity Research Associate)
Hey, guys, this is Edmund on for Tejas. Thank you for taking my questions. I just wanted to dig a little deeper in what you were saying in terms of the pharma biotech headwinds in the U.S. in the quarter. Is there any sort of bifurcation between some of the mid-cap biopharmas here versus some of your larger biopharma and pharma companies? And are your expectations for... I know you're saying that the orders are gonna take a little longer, but will this trend be normalized by the year-end, or is this something that may bleed a little longer into 2024?
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
Indeed, actually, there are some difference between the large pharma and the small pharm or biotech. Based on the data we have analyzed, in fact, a small pharm biotech has a kind of steady coming down over the last few quarters, but the big pharma actually has a sudden rapid effect, which is impacting what we are seeing right now. On the other hand, and we don't think the business is lost. They will still come back once the situation stabilizes, as I said, mentioned earlier, and we are already seeing this trend right now. It's going to take a longer time to close this year than what we normally see.
Edmund Tu (Equity Research Associate)
Got it. Then, Patrik, I think you mentioned a steeper second half SKU. I was wondering if you could put that into context relative to your prior expectations, I believe is about 43%-57% for the year.
Patrik Jeanmonod (CFO)
Yeah. With that statement, I think we're gonna be closer to a 40%-60%, 61%, 40%-60%. We see more skewed towards the second half as, to your point, as the trend normalize. Assuming also the economy doesn't fall apart, I think that's the expectation at this point. Yeah.
Edmund Tu (Equity Research Associate)
Got it. Great. Just touching real quick on your bill and hold arrangements and the trends that you can see. Are the levels still elevated in this quarter or has it normalized to more normalized levels? Can you comment on the level of bill and hold?
Patrik Jeanmonod (CFO)
Yeah. We still have, as I mentioned, last year, we'll continue to have some bill and hold. I think this is a part of the business process. The expectation is that maybe going forward, that will come down a little bit, but it still is present in Q1 of this year.
Edmund Tu (Equity Research Associate)
Of roughly what percent of the revenue?
Patrik Jeanmonod (CFO)
We have about a little less than $6 million in bill and hold over the revenue number.
Edmund Tu (Equity Research Associate)
Got it. Turning to your FCI acquisition and the Amnis platform, I was just wondering what are some of the strategies you have in place to drive this conversion, and what has the initial feedback been? Looking more specifically, trying to understand how the two platforms will work together in a research workflow. Is the idea here researchers can leverage the FSP platform to quickly narrow down to a smaller subset of cell populations of interest and then perform downstream analyses on the Amnis with imaging capabilities?
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
Yeah. In fact, I think the overlap lab here is more related to the pharma collab during the early discovery stage, right? The imaging provides some additional information with regarding to the cells and look also the inside, the cell to cell interaction and inside cells. Those are the extra information which typically phenotyping won't be able to provide. This is where we see opportunities since especially with regarding to our five laser Aurora customers, mostly heavily clustered towards that type of applications. We feel the Amnis will add on top of what we have provided to help our customers or researchers to understand and more of the discovery they are engaging with.
Edmund Tu (Equity Research Associate)
Got it. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from Matt Sykes at Goldman Sachs. Matt, your line is open. Please go ahead.
Evie Kozlowski (Equity Research Associate)
Hi, this is Evie Kozlowski on for Matt. Thanks for taking my questions. Just wanted to ask what's baked into your guide in the base business for the rest of the year in terms of biotech funding and instrument demand? Like more specifically, how much of the back half recovery is from synergies with the acquisition versus a macro recovery?
Patrik Jeanmonod (CFO)
Yeah. The back half, obviously the most of the recovery is gonna be, I mean, actually it's gonna be twofold. It's gonna be along with the added Guava and Amnis products. It's gonna be also much stronger activity on the academic side and obviously also the expectation that the biotech pharma comes back or the trend improves in the next coming months. We've already seen some early signals for that. We're hopeful that the second half of this year will actually provide us with the increased revenue that we expect.
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
Yeah, just to add on top of that. Right now, our sales funnel is still very, very strong, very powerful. We feel it might take longer time to close, eventually it will come.
Evie Kozlowski (Equity Research Associate)
Okay, great. Yeah, that's really helpful. You kind of touched on it, but what does your instrument backlog look like, with other names in our coverage citing less visibility in recent quarters? What kind of visibility do you have on new orders for the rest of the year?
Patrik Jeanmonod (CFO)
We don't really break out backlog information. Although as Wenbin just mentioned, we have a funnel, which is the open order level activity. We track that funnel on a daily, weekly basis, and our funnel is up compared to last year. We have a fairly good understanding of what's coming ahead of us, yet we have less. What we don't know is how fast customer will turn an order into a PO.
Evie Kozlowski (Equity Research Associate)
Okay, great. Thank you. That's it for me.
Operator (participant)
Thank you very much. Stand by. Our next question comes from Steven Mah with TD Cowen. Steven, your line is open. Please go ahead.
Steven Mah (Senior Equity Research Analyst)
All right, great. Thanks for taking the questions. A lot of ground already covered, so I'll just have a few different questions. On the Luminex revenue, it looks like you raised the guide from used to be $20 million, I think, for 2023 to $25 million-$30 million. Were you seeing similar macro headwinds on the Amnis flow cytometer platform? I'm just trying to square away the difference between, you know, lowering your organic guide and then raising the Luminex guide.
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
Yeah. Put it this way, during the last two months, as we continue on with this integration, we start to understand more of the Luminex product. When we first provided our early guidance, we were kind of optimistic with regarding to converting Guava customers into our Northern Lights platform. Now we realize Guava has some special features which actually is going to take a longer time for Northern Lights to implement. That means that part of the business is not going to convert that quickly. It will happen, but it's gonna take a longer time. Because of this, we have lowered the organic part of the business forecast, but in the meantime, we have kept a certain business with Luminex, which we originally intended to terminate.
Now we are going to continue. That was part of the reason why the Luminex business forecast has gone up.
Steven Mah (Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay. You know, that, all right, that makes sense. When do you think the integration and tech transfer will be completed for the Guava microfluidics to Northern Lights?
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
I think basically the, We are right now going to spend the next six months, to really understand more of the Guava, understand the features which understand their customer needs, for those, Guava then, make a decision how we are going to adapt or adopt certain of the features and so integrate those type of feature into Northern Lights so we can support the Guava customers with the Northern Lights platform.
Steven Mah (Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay, great. Yeah, thanks for the color. Then, moving on, to your Bio-Rad partnership, using their StarBright Dyes. Do you have any timing on when that product is gonna launch? If you're able to disclose, how does the revenue share work with Bio-Rad or are you just using the Bio-Rad reagents as sort of like an OEM type of arrangement?
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
The process here is we qualify and then integrate that Bio-Rad dyes into Cytek's portfolio. In fact, they are going to be sold as Cytek cFluor reagents. In that process, there are certain work that needs to be done internally from our operations side, but it's happening, but We should start to see the outcome results during the second half of the year.
Steven Mah (Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay, got it. I'll sneak in the last one for Patrik. I know, Patrik, you had a lot of questions on the, on the U.S. and pharma and biotech softness and, you know, you mentioned the heavy back-end cadence. You did mention that, you know, there was a couple of points or trends that you're already seeing. I'm just wondering if you could provide us with any colors on some of these things which are giving you confidence on a strong back half of 2023. Thank you.
Patrik Jeanmonod (CFO)
Yeah. The couple trends that we're seeing is, first, the funnel activity remains fairly strong, so we're very pleased with that, across all the regions, most notably in the U.S., so that's very positive. That's a key element and, that's gonna support the second half.
Steven Mah (Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Okay, thank you.
Operator (participant)
Stand by for our last question. That comes from David Westenberg again from Piper Sandler. David, your line is open.
David Westenberg (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Hi. Thank you for taking the follow-up. I just wanna confirm in terms of competitors in full spectrum flow cytometry. there's really not still any formidable competitors. you know, I just wanna confirm that. you know, are you seeing anything in, you know, in terms of patents or announced products that, you know, you would consider, you know, a little bit more of a threat?
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
Uh.
David Westenberg (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
That's the question.
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
First is, I think as we all know, a full spectral profiling technology has already become the gold standard of the industry. We all believe, I think nobody's questioning that the future is not gonna be spectral-based flow cytometry, right? Cytek is the leader in this technology, and I'm sure today many other companies are working towards this and very likely they are going to have products coming along. In the meantime, Cytek as a leader, we are continuing to invest to make sure we stay ahead, keep our leadership positions. We are very comfortable. We are very confident, and that we will continue to be the leader for the years to come.
David Westenberg (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Gotcha. Okay. You know, kind of a follow-up to my previous question here. Just I know you don't give long-term growth guidance and, you know, this goes back to whether or not this is an air pocket or if you see, you know, maybe you hit some certain sort of penetration rate in the, in the flow cytometer market. You know, as we look at, you know, 2024, 2025, 2026 is, you know, I mean, I'm guessing this is definitely a double-digit grower, but, I mean, any thoughts in terms of, you know, growth rates, you know, in out years compared to what we've seen, you know, guidance this year organically, and you know, what we've seen historically?
Are we still that 30% grower?
Wenbin Jiang (CEO)
You know, put this way, okay? As the company continues, as our base starts to become larger, it's going percentage-wide, it may be smaller, but the absolute number is going to be still very impressive, right? The 30% of last year is not going to be the 30% of this year. It will be very different from the next few years. On the other hand, we feel as a growth company we will be very comfortable to stay ahead, continue to keep 15%-20%, the kind of growth range. We don't feel any problem. On the other hand, of course, 30% is always something we are trying to achieve, as your base becomes so large, right? You have to be realistic.
David Westenberg (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)
Really appreciate all the follow-ups. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
That does conclude our Q&A. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. It concludes the program, and you may now disconnect.