All right. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining. Let's go ahead and get started. My name is Eve Burstein, no relation to Bernstein or Bernstein Research. I cover U.S. life science tools and diagnostics, and it's my pleasure to have Jacob Thaysen from Illumina with us today. Jacob, let me make sure we got this right. So joined Illumina as CEO in 2023 and previously served as the president of both the Life Science and Applied Markets Group and the Diagnostics and Genomics Group at Agilent, who reports tonight, incidentally. That's right. Glad you don't have to be there for it. Before that, he was the corporate vice president of R&D at Danaher, and he spent more than 16 years between the two companies. That's correct. All right. I got it. Great. Thanks, Eve. Thank you. Thanks for being here. I have a lot of questions, and I am excited to jump in. A quick reminder to you guys, the Pigeonhole app is open. Please submit questions. We want to make sure that we answer what's on your mind and not just what's on my mind. With that, let's get started. You've now been in your role for a little bit over a year. What are the things that you've accomplished in this time that you are the most proud of? How do you think the company is different from the way it was when you inherited it? Yeah, no, that's a really good question. Yeah, I think I looked it up the other day, and I think it's now 20 months. Time flies, and sometimes it feels like only maybe 20 days. Other times it feels a little longer than that. First and foremost, I'm excited to be a part of Illumina. I think it's a great company. It has had a fantastic history and being able to change how we think about genomics. I think the future is even bigger. We're just getting started, and the opportunity is vast out there. As you also said, there is a lot of things that have happened over the last 20 months I've been in the company. If I just step back and look a little bit about what I'm most proud of, I think number one, I continue to be proud of being a part of a super talented team and absolutely the most innovative team that we have in the industry, or even that I've ever worked with. I'm excited about that. Me, as a scientist, as a background, is excited to be a part of such a team. I'm also very proud of the team's ability to, as you said, we have changed a lot of things. We have been focusing on operational excellence, really challenging the way that we operate, the way we organized. I'm actually very pleased to see how comfortable the team has been to change themselves and change the way you operate to something that is even better. When you think about that, operational excellence always sounds like cutting costs. In my view, it is all about running a resilient and effective company. It is wrong when you just hire people in to run on wrong processes or unoptimized processes. If you have a problem, instead of fixing the problem, you just add more people to it. Changing the mindset over and saying, because before when we were growing very quickly, you just add more people to change the way you improve the way you operate. Now we continue to have discipline around actually challenging the things that we do and optimizing them to become even better. I think that is a big change in our philosophy. In the end, the only way in my world to be both successful on the top line and on the bottom line. In the end, this is what good companies are doing, and I think we are on a great trajectory on that. If you look at a few other things, I mean, the strategy we put in place this summer, I think, was very important for everyone in this room also to understand what is the model for Illumina going forward. Really starting to focus on what we call the highest insight with the lowest end-to-end cost, where we have been for the last many, many years focusing on driving down the cost of sequencing. Every time we have driven down the cost, there have been many more applications. That is kind of the elasticity logic in it. While I still believe in elasticity, the proxy was always to drive down the end-to-end cost. The only thing that mattered for a long time was the cost of sequencing because that was a dominant factor in the end-to-end workflow. Now we're in a different position where the cost of sequencing for many applications actually is not the driving factor of the cost of the workflow. We need to work much more on the end-to-end. We can talk more about that, but I think really it's challenging to change both how we think about it and how we talk about it internally, but more importantly, externally. That would be my last dimension that I'm very proud of is that I felt coming into the company, and maybe that's back to how I think we have changed this, that in a company that is so successful as Illumina and has such a strong position in the market as Illumina, it's also natural over time to get a little bit too much insight outlooking. You focus on what we are good at and expect our customers will follow. Some will call it complacent. I don't think that's the right word, but I think it's just you lose a little bit that customer intimacy because, yeah, we are the one you come to anyway. Really changing that in the company to really open up, have much deeper conversation and interaction with our customers on a day-to-day basis, inviting our customers in to have a deeper understanding on what we're working on to help them be successful out the gate and not just come and surprise them with new launches, I think has driven a completely different, at least from when I speak to customers, a different intimacy and thereby long-lasting relationship that I think is beneficial for running a successful company not only today, but also in years to come. These things I'm successful about, I'm sure the team will come back and tell me about all the things I didn't remember to tell you. I mean, great separation and all that, but these are a lot of things that we have been proud of. I'm proud of being part of. That's a pretty good list. Yeah. Thank you. On the flip side, though, looking back, I'm sure this year has not played out the way you expected or the way that pretty much anyone has expected. Knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would have done differently, either as it relates to the macro environment or independent of the macro environment? Yeah, that's a good question. It's always easy to be the Monday morning quarterback here and look back and say, "What could have changed?" Clearly, I knew taking the job that this was, of course, a transformation I stepped into. A lot of change needs to happen, both from, as we talked about also a little bit before, the Grail decision that we had to make, but also how to get the company back to growth, how to improve the margins and so on, and thereby change the culture and the way we operate within the company. Coming into that, that I knew. What, of course, coming out of 2024, where we had put the strategy in place, we started to show execution and we started to show operational excellence that even in quarters where we did not grow, that we will continue to expand our margin, I think we started to show the world that our operating model was starting to play out. Now, granted, we still knew that the top line had to grow, but we also were very clear and transparent in our communication that that would be a part of the transition to the X. All that was, you can say we had actually achieved in 2024. Now we needed to really focus on execution. 2025 was an execution year in our mind going into 2025. I think you also framed it, that the card turned out the deck was stacked a little bit differently. I think the point just saying that in that analogy is that it does not really matter what happens. You have to play the cards that you get. The cards that we got, of course, was that in the beginning of the year, we were notified by the Chinese authorities that we were put on the unreliable entity list. There was also, of course, competition coming out. There were NIH funding challenges. Now, of course, also the tariff situation that everybody has dealt with. Clearly, a lot of unexpected challenges that we had to deal with. Obviously, you can choose to do two things. You can sit down and complain to the world that this was not something you were, it was not on your, it was not your fault and you should feel sorry for us. You can go and say, "Let's control what we can control." I think that we went very quickly in, and I'm very proud with the team also, is that we made some tough decisions during the last few months that we didn't anticipate that we had to make to really saying, "Look, these are the situations that is now being the hand we're being dealt. We need to deal with the China situation. We need to make sure that independent of what happened in China, we will still continue to execute on our strategy and our commitments. We made some choices to eliminate cost out of approximately $100 million this year and beyond next year's, which I think is now getting us back, at least from a P&L perspective, in a really good place. We also used the opportunity to shift around some of our priorities based on what we have learned from entries, from competition, and so on. The strategy had completely stayed the same. We truly believe in the end-to-end, highest quality insight with the lowest end-to-end, and that we will continue to focus on over the next period of time. Yeah, things are changing, and maybe they'll change tomorrow again. I think that's just the world we live in right now. What our commitment is that we will deal with what we can control. You mentioned that you shifted around priorities a little bit. I just picked up on that. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean there? What my philosophy is that when you sit down and look at a strategy and what the right strategy is for a company, you look at many dimensions. Just to make it very simple, you look at the opportunities out there and then the quality you have or the strength you have as a company. That should be the main part, of course, also culture of the team. Those would be the three parts that define what a good strategy is. I am saying in the end, what we believe was to really drive genomics to the next level and into multi-omics also by really focusing much more on the workflow, end-to-end and deep insight rather than sequencing and the sequencing consumables and box itself. The way you should always think about what changes your priorities, and you set the priorities accordingly. If there's a market headwind, if that makes you change the strategy, you had the wrong strategy out the gate. You should always change your priorities based on new information. Of course, a market headwind is new information. Competitive dimension is new information and so on and so forth. Clearly, all this requires you as a company to look at that new information saying, "What does it mean to you? And what would you do differently?" You would always, and it does not matter whether it is competitor or market or something else, or even new team members coming in with different types of strengths, you will adjust priorities after that. If you do not do that, you are not really listening to your own organization and to the market, and you are not responding thereby to the dynamic in the market. You need to do that as a company. It doesn't matter what the size you are. Okay. We've used the word strategy a lot. A question about your strategy. Clearly, a lot of things have changed in the last year. You just said if you have to change your strategy when the market conditions change, it was the wrong strategy. I'm guessing I know the answer to this. Just very simply, you said in your Q1 earnings call that you are continuing to execute on that strategy to deliver high single digits revenue growth and 500 basis points of margin expansion by 2027, excluding the greater China region. Should we take it to mean that all of these headwinds, including all of these headwinds, that is still intact? Exactly. Yeah. We went out this summer and presented that with the focus on the highest quality insight with the lowest end-to-end, that we still believe that there is a lot of room to grow. We actually believe that Illumina will be a very strong growth company going forward. We also felt like, look, we also recognize that our growth over the past year, past few years, has not been where we wanted it to be. We need to show also the world that we can start to step into growth again before we commit to even more. A big, you can say, the strategy on the commitment was to saying, "We will step into growth again." The way to do so was driven by three dimensions. Dimension number one is the transition on the X. As you know, we launched the X a few years ago. With that, we took down the cost and the price of sequencing substantially again. We reduced two-thirds of the price point. When you do that, you actually have to have 100% more volume in order actually to just make up top line. We see that elasticity moving, but we also see that customers are still transitioning towards the X. That is why we see the growth is coming back because we continue to see a lot of volume out there. Of course, also when you transition, you also see some price erosion. What we were also out explaining is that when we start to have 50% of the revenue, we have more than 50% of our, I think we have approximately 65% of our volume sitting on the X, but we have still less than 50% of the revenue, which we expect to happen here to get to that, what we think is a very important point here in the second half of this year. When you get that, growth is going to be easy because the denominator is very different than before. Therefore, we see that growth will come now based on we are finishing up that transition work here over the next period of time. Thereby, 2025 will be stronger growth and 2027 will be even stronger growth just based on the transition we are going through. On top of that is that all the fantastic NPIs that we're coming with. In this summer, we primarily spoke about our single cell and our proteomics, but now we also have talked about spatial Constellation, five-base genome that we all believe is going to help on the top line also. That will add probably another points on top of. The main point will still be the transition to the X, at least over the next few years. We will start to add the new product introduction that will drive growth even further. We're excited about that. We truly believe that's still in the model. The margin expansion is, of course, helping or coming also along with the growth. We also recognize that with the chances we would have with China and the margin chance we would have, we had to do something more. That is why we accelerated some of the cost reductions that we did this year. With all that, that is why we feel comfortable that we are still on track to deliver on our commitments. One of the pushbacks that we often get from investors when we're talking about that transition, one of the concerns we hear is, yeah, volume growth has been great, but it's been great because there's been this price discount. That's what's catalyzing it. As people transition, that volume growth will slow down. How do you respond to that? I think I'm a numbers guy, a data guy also. I can look at our own numbers and see customers that have fully transitioned and how they behave. We can see that the volume continues to grow for these accounts. We think that we have a lot of evidence to show that that will continue. We, of course, also in that space too. Data doesn't tell you the whole story. You also need to speak to your customers and speak to what is happening and what their expectations are on the market they are entering into. From those conversations, especially in the clinical space, let's start there, we continue to see that there's a lot of opportunities in that. I mean, you saw most of our, many of our customers actually did upgrade for this year, that the guidance. Also moving into multi-omics, which is requiring substantially more sequencing going forward, that with these end-to-end solutions we have for these applications, we will continue to see a lot of growth there. We feel very comfortable that the volume growth will continue. Now, what we also have said and what we have modeled out is that if you looked at the volume growth that has happened over the last few years, it has been elevated over where we expect it to be long term. I think it has been sitting in the 30-40% volume growth over the past few years. In our model, we are saying longer term, it should probably be more in the mid 20% growth of the volume. That we feel is a more steady state perspective. We also expect that there will be some price decline on that. Maybe right now we are modeling that in the mid teens. With that combination, you will end up in high single digit growth. I think it's certainly the case that there's a lot of excitement about sequencing applications and people want to sequence a lot, but you need money to do that. Let's talk about the end market. Obviously, one of the pressures on your LRP is the outlook for academic funding. Research is 50-ish percent of your revenue. I know that's not all academic. Some of that's pharma, but that's under pressure as well. If I just think back to your strategy, you shared that you expect the market here to grow 6% long term. This year, you also lowered your guidance for the U.S. academic and government market by 15%. Correct. Two-parter. One, do you think that academic growth ever gets back to that 6% that you expected? And two, if so, do you think it's feasible to get back there in the next four years? Yeah. So let's look at first and foremost how we think about our markets and how we see how we split our clinical versus academic research. Academic and research is that more than 50% today is clinical and less than 50%, so 45% is in the academic research space. You have to look at that saying half of our revenue, approximately half, is from Americas. Then you're down to less than 25%. Half of that is exposure to academia. You're sitting there between 10-12%, maybe in that order, maybe plus minus in that range that is exposed to where we see the real chances right now in our age. If you then look at, that's kind of the exposure to that market. If you look into that particular part of the market, yeah, I mean, there's no doubt right now with the chances or with the new administration coming in, want to set the new agenda. There's clearly a part of the grants that is being challenged right now that sits in one specific segment of the grants, but there are other grants that actually flows very nicely. I think that and we see that in the genomic space. Some of the agendas or the focus areas that the new administration have clearly also require a lot of sequencing to understand better autism and other things that they are really focusing on. I think the overhang right now is less so the actual grants, but the uncertainties. Uncertainties is always challenging. As soon as we have certainty, it's much easier to navigate the system both for our customers, but also for us. I think within the next maybe over summer here that the uncertainties will dissipate a little bit. That's my hope. We are not planning for that in our new guides. We expect that the market will be subdued actually all the way through 2025. If I also look at it and saying with the new tools we're coming out with, with the new solutions we're coming out with, both from proteomics for single cell, for spatial, what we do in Constellation for the five-base genome that will open up a whole epigenetic market, I think there's a lot of opportunity even within the grant money to shift that where I think there will be priorities. Thereby, I do think that in our specific area, I think that there will be growth opportunities going forward. I cannot predict today whether it is going to be a 2026 or 2027 event, but I do think that there will be a lot of investment. I am not only talking U.S., but globally into the areas that we are addressing with multi-omics going forward. If you look into the pharma space, yeah, it certainly has some uncertainties also about, especially here in the U.S. with pharma. Some of the products that we are very excited about, the Perturb-seq and aspects of that, is something that has a big focus on pharma because it can really change the way they think about drug discovery and thereby reduce their time to market. Even though overall pharma might be challenged, I think you will still see Perturb-seq and some of the other things, big huge cohort programs that will get a fair share of the available funding because there is a lot of opportunities to not only understand diseases, but also reduce your time to market. I have a lot of questions about your innovation and your products coming up, but let's stick on the end markets and just take through them a little bit. We have to touch on China. I know you said in your Q1 earnings call that we spend too much time talking about it. Absolutely. I know it's only 5% of your revenue. I apologize. Just one question. We were surprised to hear you say on that call that you're still working with the Chinese government to try to come to a resolution that doesn't include an outright ban of Illumina instruments. Is there really a chance that your revenue doesn't go to zero there? Have those odds improved at all as trade tensions seem to have eased a bit? If China is missing from the picture in the future, does the high single digits top line growth in your LRP still hold? Yeah. As I said, we spent a lot of, many of you spent a lot of time on discussing China. I think you should, I am pretty sure you do that with all the other companies in this industry. You should probably not spend too much time on talking China with us these days. I mean, it is less than 5%. As we said, we did the cost reduction also to make sure that fundamentally China is now on upside from a P&L perspective as how we see it. We actually think we are in a really strong position independent on what happens in China. Our key focus is continue to drive to our high single digit and 500 basis point improvements besides China. Should China actually come back, that will be an upside to a lot of that. Now, let's talk a little bit about China. I mean, first of all, most we do we would love to stay in China. We think that even though it's challenging right now, the size of China, the population of China is clearly going into a direction where more genomic testing from a healthcare perspective will be needed. We think that's an attractive market to be in. Who knows how the world looks like in five years from now. Being in China, therefore, I think is going to be, could be a long-term attractive environment. Will that be in the next five years or next, I don't know, but I think it's important to keep the optionality, so to say. That's one element. The more important element right now is that many of our customers actually want us to, our Chinese customers. I had the opportunity to sit down and speak to some of our Chinese employees and Chinese salespeople here recently. They confirmed that and it was very clear that many of their customers want us to stay there. They see us as the ones with the highest quality. It is not only in clinical, also many research customers want us there. They see Illumina come out with a lot of innovations. They feel very comfortable or they feel very committed to what we have done over the last few years and also what we will do in the future. I think certainly a lot of customers want us to stay there. It is also very clear right now with the current situation where we are not able to place instruments that if that does not change, obviously we do not have a future in China. Therefore, I think it's our job, it's my job to go and try to change those odds. Thereby having the conversations with the right regulators, both in both countries actually, I think is what our job is to see whether we can improve the current situations. We will continue to look from different angles to get that done. Clearly, could this be dealt with in a potential Chinese-U.S. trade agreement potentially, but that is a little bit out of our hands. We're trying again to, with the cards that have been dealt, we're trying to control what we can control. That is have the conversation, ensure that there's no misunderstandings between why we are in the situation and continue to prove our commitment into China. Then we'll see what happens. Should we not be able to get back and have a normal business in China, we've already taken care of, as I said, from a financial perspective that we can continue to deliver on our long-range plan. To the level that we were not anticipating in the original long-range plan with China, we're not anticipating China actually to contribute to growth. In that sense, you can argue without China it's going to be a little bit easier. All right. We can turn to one of your end markets. It is much bigger. Clinical, 55% of your revenue. It was particularly strong for you in Q1. You had good X placements. You had good mid single digits growth in consumables. I will speak for investors. I think they worry that even if today's tests are not moving off of Illumina machines and will not move off of Illumina machines, tomorrow's tests could, future tests could. At some point, we see a sign of that and there will not be a lot of warning. A couple of questions related to the clinical end market. First, back in your virtual investor day and your strategy, you estimated that low double digit market growth would underpin your expected high single digit company growth. Low double digit in clinical. What share of future clinical tests do you think you need to maintain to still be able to hit those numbers? Let me address the first thing. I think investors worry too much. Why I'm saying that is that, look, I mean, especially the clinical customer base needs a customer they can rely on for the years to come. They have built a lot of their capabilities. They have built a lot of their assets, a lot of infrastructure around our platform, both the sequencing, our sample prep, but also informatics backbone. Just shifting that out because there's a new shining object that comes in and promising maybe a little bit better pricing, but a little bit different feature is, I think customers recognize also we're spending a lot of money on innovation. The commitment from Illumina is they will continue to innovate. You might get a better pricing for a specific assay, but now you need a completely new infrastructure in your laboratory, maybe a new pipeline, maybe new sample prep. Now you need to have added people on top of that to run that separately from all your other things. The only thing for that is to reduce pricing a little bit. The next few years, as I also mentioned, we're coming out with a lot of innovations. There's nobody in the industry that will match us on the innovations coming out. Our commitment is that if you buy into our solutions, you will also be a part of our innovation roadmap. We will share with you what is coming up and we will make sure you differentiate it. I can guarantee you that, and you can see historically, nobody that made a decision going with Illumina has ever regretted it, even though they could maybe get a little bit different pricing out the gate. We committed. We will make sure we hit also the price point that is needed to be successful in this industry. We will make sure that our customers will always be more differentiated than anyone out in the industry. I think that is a commitment that we have. I think that is based on our history and what we have done. Look, will there be customers that decide to move over? Maybe there will be. That is their choice. Again, we will welcome them back when they realize they made a mistake. If not so, we will make sure all the others are very competitive versus those customers. I think that's how we think about it. I think that competition is great. It keeps us all up. It keeps us focused. I think a big part of my job description is to worry about everything that can happen to the company and deal with it. That's what we're doing. Fair enough. All right. Let's talk about some of this innovation. I've got some questions. I've got a question on Pigeonhole about innovation that I'm going to stick in here too. Just a reminder to everyone here, you can submit questions and we'll lob them over. Obviously at AGBT this year, you shared this innovation roadmap. It gives visibility much further out into Illumina's pipeline than you usually share, than you have historically shared. Let's start with that. I'd imagine that some of the choice to share that roadmap was to try to keep customers from jumping ship to competitors, right? You want to kind of paint the vision of what's coming down the pike. Is that fair? How has early access feedback been so far? Do you have any examples of this strategy working? Yeah. I think I would formulate it very differently, saying that I think my philosophy is really to make sure you share as much with your customers. You want to stay close with your customer. You want to make sure that they understand what is coming so they can be successful. In the end, it is about making sure that your customer is always successful. Especially when innovation is moving fast, especially when many of our customers are highly dependent on the innovation that is coming out with us, it is the right thing for us to do to share what we have as early as possible so they can plan for that. You can see that both for clinical customers and academic. The academic customer needs to know it early so they can write the grants to get the money for those new technologies coming out. The clinical customer needs that to prepare for the next assays and the next improvement they want to do. Not sharing that with our customers is not really customer-centric. I felt that coming back and saying we want to be much more customer-centric is essential. If we would not do that, we would not be customer-centric. I think that is just a key pillar in the strategy about our customer-centricity. Has that played out? Yeah, absolutely. We have a wonderful place also in our campus that we can invite our customers in and have meetings. They can meet our whole R&D team and our marketing team. We will sit down with many of our customers for a full day and then share our roadmaps, many details that we have not shared also in the free market here also, but also hear what they are working on. That is the great dynamic that will happen, that you share more with each other. We will learn both feedback on whether our innovations actually fit or whether we should adjust that so we have early insights on what we should do differently. We also see what our customer wants to do so we can make sure that our next level of innovation can actually address that. I enjoy that a lot. I think you see that is driving a completely different customer intimacy than we had before. We look at the actual innovations where I think just to mention Constellation that we have talked about a few times, which is this new way of using short read to actually get also what we would call long read insights. We have seen a tremendous interest from customers. They are super excited about that, both from customers that want to use that eventually for clinical applications, but also in the research environment where they see this can actually make a big change and a big insight that have not been available before. Just to mention one, I think the five-base genome with the epigenetic insights where you have a very simple workflow and suddenly get what we call the five-base, which means that really getting the epigenetic or methylation insights on top of the normal base pair now will open up for understanding epigenetic even more. You will see in the clinical space, you will see many more customers adding epigenetic insights into their assays, but you will see in research that fundamentally we truly do not understand epigenetic and the epigenetic insights that will impact our health and potentially healthcare. I think, and of course, it was too complex, it was too costly. The informatics workflow was too complex. We have to compare data from two different workflows. Now we will streamline all that. I think you will see, and there's been a lot of interest to get access to this, just to mention two of them. A couple of follow-up questions on Constellation. First, clearly one of the benefits of it is that it has improved the structural variant performance versus standard library prep. How much of the typical long-read landscape do you think this technology could actually take? Yeah, we think it can actually take a lot, especially for we start in human, but the technology is agnostic to species. You can go also in meta and other places. I think there's a lot of opportunities that I think our first focus will be resequencing. Probably not de novo in the beginning, but I don't think that necessarily that we will be held back on that. Our focus is, of course, on more the resequencing application, which is in the end the biggest market. We will see that and we are excited about that. That will be the first entry point. I know there is, for example, for applications into where you want to go into the NICU and you want to do fast sequencing to get insights into a newborn to understand what is actually happening if there are some concerns about a disease or concerns about the newborn. Usually, in order to get a good analysis, you need both the child and the parents. You need trio. First of all, you have to do three times sequencing. Secondly, it is not always that both parents are available for sequencing. What you can actually do with Constellation is that you only need the child or the patient itself and you can get all the right information out because you have phasing also available. That in itself is going to differentiate. I know there is now competition claiming they can do the fastest sequencing. True, but they still have to have three times sequencing. They still need to have the patients and the parents available. With Constellation, you have very little sample prep. It is easy workflow, so it is easy to do. You only need the patient to get it. I think actually if you look at true turnaround time, getting access to the patient and the parents and all that and analyzing all that data, it is going to be much faster and much more simple to do it on Constellation. Just to give one example. Speaking of this very limited sample prep, you guys wrote in a blog post that your first application of this technology is human whole genome sequencing, but that multiple future applications are under evaluation. Could there be a world where this on-flow cell sample prep makes its way to many other workflows and many other sequencers? Yeah, I think that certainly this is opening up a completely new universe. I think first and foremost, what I'm more excited about than just saying for a lot of different workflows, I think adding the five-base genome on top of that, so also have epigenetic information in is something that should excite a lot of people and is something that is on our roadmap. We will definitely also be working on that. We look at other applications. Remember, I mean, no sample prep and really just a few minutes sample prep. On-flow cell sample prep sounds super exciting. We actually had Constellation as what is now called Constellation working a long time ago. We decided, but we did not understand that we could actually see this proximity read that we could actually get the structural advances. We started working on it because we wanted to eliminate workflow. What holds us back a little bit is saying, look, for most applications, you actually are looking at there is the NICU application and others where you want to look at one and you need to do it immediately. For many other applications, you're likely going to use automation anyway because you are running batches. You're running a lot of genome at the same time. Are you actually going to sit and manually do that? You can still, of course, run the automation very, very efficiently. I think the verdict at that point of time was that just focusing on flow cell sample prep is not enough to make a big differentiating. You also need something else. That is where the proximity read came in, which has changed everything we thought about that. I think we need both elements on it and not just looking at one element. I mean, there are so many ways to simplify workflows. Automation is clearly a part of that. We should be thinking about that also. For spatial and connected multi-omics, you said early feedback here has been really positive. Can you just say more about what's been really resonating with customers? Given that your commercial release will not be until 2026, what are the things that you're still working on and seeking feedback on at this point? Yeah, so let's just quickly take a step back and look at multi-omics itself. And where we're excited about the whole multi-omics world is that multi-omics, there's nothing new about that. You can always have taken a proteomics assay from an immunoassay and combine that with NGS inside and maybe do another one for looking at a different mode. But the fact that you can now run it all on one platform and one software pipeline and fundamentally also a similar sample prep makes this first and foremost very simple to do. Secondly, it allows you to run on one platform, which also means it's the same sample and you don't have, and thereby that's so you have consistency and standardization around that. You also, and we have developed the software which allows us to look at the different modalities in the same software and actually combine them and compare them with each other. You do not have to go to 10 different software and try to find out how you all get it together. We have the visual, that is a part of the Parse acquisition that we now have, that software that can look at both genomic, well, DNA, RNA, epigenetic, and so on and so forth, all in the same and look at the different elements. Also all the way to spatial. That is what excites us, that we have the power of putting it all together. Let us zoom in again and look at the spatial and just look at it as a standalone, saying that in reality, spatial has been way too expensive to do so far, meaning that there has been excitement about spatial. If you look at it, if you look at the papers, it might be one or two or three samples and it might be one or two millimeters by one or two millimeters they are looking at because it has been very expensive and you are only looking at a part of the whole transcriptome. We wanted to change that. We were looking at it and thinking if Illumina has to step into that, it can only be that we can really revolutionize this area. What we felt was going to be important is to true science, you need to hit a price point where you can run hundreds of samples instead of one or two samples to get the statistically relevant number in order to actually see whether from a clinical perspective, a clinical trial perspective that you have enough. I think at least if not 100, then at least in the 40-50-60 samples, you need to do that. We wanted to address that. We also wanted to look at the whole transcriptome at the same time with and looking at each cell, make sure you could look at each cell, which is also very difficult to do. Finally, if you really want to look at real samples, you need to look at much bigger tissue types and samples. The tissue now is actually you can look to a whole slide and we can sequence that and we can do spatial image of a whole slide. You can decide to have one tissue sitting on it. You can decide to have multiple tissues sitting on it. I think that combination of the right price point with the right resolution, looking at the whole transcriptome and of course with the ability to look at large tissue is something that is very unique and I think is something that is going to change how we think about spatial going forward. You talked about some of the promise of spatial and how much data it generates. A question from the audience that came up, I think very much related to amount of data. Can you speak about the opportunities and threats to the bioscience R&D process presented by AI tools and how can Illumina capture value implementing AI? Yeah, so first and foremost, I'm a big believer in that you need, I mean, in order to really drive science, but also in the clinical, the whole technology stack from an informatics perspective is needed. And actually, even though it sounds exciting, I think very few companies and very research environments actually want to spend their precious resources in building pipelines that we have hundreds and hundreds of people doing in their daily lives. What we present and what we can do together with the DRAGEN and all our interpretation is much stronger than really any individual science or company can do. I think you see more and more customers shifting over. We see both large research institutes, but also large medical academic centers, all the way to commercial customers that are shifting over to our technology stack. We're not only providing that. We see with the big data, as you're talking about, both for Perturb-seq is one example, but also for spatial and others. You need both, of course, the end-to-end workflow to ensure you hit the right price point to address it. You need the right technology stack from informatics to being able to have the compute power and interpret the data. You also need to analyze the data. That is where AI, there is so much data coming out that without the right AI capabilities, it is going to be very difficult for any customer to really get insights. We have allowed now with our NVIDIA relationship also, we have giving access so you can get the NVIDIA tools that we can build foundational models. We have also more than 40 people in the company that work on these foundational models and AI capabilities to really build out those toolsets to make it very simple to provide insights to our customers going forward. We definitely believe there's a huge opportunity here and it's something that you need all these components, the right workflow, the right cost structure, the right informatics tech stack, and of course AI to really capture that. I don't know any other company in this industry that has the capabilities or the power to do so than Illumina. We're coming up on time. Maybe one or two questions. If you have any others, please throw them into the queue. I have a question. Investors were definitely pleased to see conviction from the company when they put the share repurchase program into place. They were particularly pleased to see that conviction from you personally with a recent open market purchase. Ankur, who was not able to join us, had the same thing. I'm not trying to get too nosy about your own personal financial decisions, but what prompted you to make those additional share purchases and why now versus a few months ago? Yeah, why now is that there needs to be an open window. Of course, we were making some changes to the board and so on that kept us in a situation where it would not be inappropriate to purchase stocks. As soon as we could here after the open window started, I felt that this is probably one of the best investment decisions I've ever made in my life. I think that our stock is now trading at a point where there's a lot of upside and especially what we also are committing to the long-raise plan. Both Ankur and I felt that this was a great time to get in and we were very excited that we had the opportunity to go in and purchase at the price point we could. Excited about that. Maybe last question. You think that the stock was underappreciated, was undervalued. Why do you think the market is undervaluing it, and what do you think is going to have to change to unlock that value? Yeah, look, I mean, I think there's no doubt with, as we go back to this analogy about the cards we've been dealt, that there's been, there's of course a lot of uncertainties right now. There's been a lot of challenges that have been coming our way, including China, the NIH, the tariffs and so on and so forth, that I understand why some investors think that there's too much uncertainties on this stock. What we're trying to position here is that first and foremost, we have conviction in what we do. We are making the swift decisions to make sure that we will, whatever happens, we will make the right decision and make the very quick decisions to continue to ensure that we can grow both our top line and bottom line. I think we are, as we talked about, the long-term opportunity in this space is vast, but also the clarity in our algorithm and getting to high single-digit growth is intact and primarily based on the transition to the X that continues to drive as we expected. The new innovations we're coming out will just continue to drive additional growth. We feel like, yeah, there's a lot of uncertainties. Yeah, I mean, there are of course competition that would like to be a part of this also, but there's nobody out there, as I mentioned before, that have such an ecosystem, such a moat that Illumina have and such a commitment to continue to innovate and help our customers to be successful and make sure that the customer that continues to desire to work and decide to work with Illumina will be very, very competitive in the space. We will commit to that both short term, but particularly also long term. As I mentioned before, there's nobody that's really ever regretted deciding that they went with Illumina. We'll make sure that that's also the case for the future. Fair enough. All right, I think we're out of time. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate having you here.