Amid Strong Demand, Illumina CEO Sees Need for More “Tuck-in” Deals

Shares of San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]) climbed today by more than $7 a share, or roughly 10 percent, after the gene sequencing equipment maker posted quarterly results that exceeded Wall Street expectations. The stock was above $81 a share in heavy trading this afternoon.

Illumina reported its seventh consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth—driven by strong global demand for its HiSeq instruments used in genetic sequencing and related consumable supplies. The company also said it has acquired Advanced Liquid Logic (ALL), a Morrisville, NC-based company with proprietary microfluidics technology that uses voltage to manipulate droplets within a sealed microfluidic cartridge, also known as a “Lab-on-a-chip.”

In announcing the deal, Illumina said one of its goals is to provide customers with a holistic set of tools that can be used to quickly and easily analyze biological samples while minimizing the risk of errors and reducing hands-on time in the lab. With the ALL acquisition, Illumina said it will be able to automate high-throughput sample preparation for its lower-volume customers.

Financial terms were not disclosed, although Illumina CEO Jay Flatley indicated in a conference call with shareholders and financial analysts that Illumina is paying as much as $96 million in a combination of an upfront payment and milestones. “We’re not, at this point, disclosing what those milestones are, what the amounts are,” Flatley said, according to a transcript of the call prepared by the website Seeking Alpha.

Earlier this year, Illumina acquired prenatal testmaker Verinata Health for $350 million, and potential milestone payments of $100 million. Preceding that deal, Illumina acquired Cambridge, UK-based BlueGnome for an undisclosed sum.

In discussing the ALL deal yesterday, Flatley offered a general outline of Illumina’s acquisition strategy:

“We have been quite active in M&A and I think you’ll continue to see us do some of these tuck-in type of acquisitions, fewer of the moderate to large ones and some continued rate of these relatively small ones.

“We are looking at technology pieces that accelerate the development of our future platforms, obviously our platform plans go out three to five years, and we have really great expectations about where the

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.