Pacific Biosciences of California NASDAQ: PACB reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $39 million, roughly flat from $39.8 million a year earlier, while announcing an immediate leadership transition and lowering its full-year revenue outlook amid a slower-than-expected rollout of its new multi-use sequencing chemistry and continued funding constraints in academic and government markets.
Christian Henry stepped down as president and chief executive officer and will remain on PacBio’s board while serving as an advisor. Mark Van Oene, who previously led the company’s R&D operations and commercial organization, succeeded Henry as president and CEO effective immediately.
“My priorities will be directly built on this foundation,” Van Oene said, citing plans to scale the company’s clinical-market approach globally, expand adoption of its SMRT Next chemistry and support larger sequencing projects.
Revenue mix and instrument placements
Consumables revenue rose 6% year over year to $20.1 million, supported by growth in PacBio’s installed base and clinical customer utilization. Shipments to clinical customers increased 67% from the prior-year period and represented a mid-teens percentage of total consumables shipments, according to Van Oene.
Instrument revenue declined 9% to $12.8 million. Chief Financial Officer Jim Gibson said the decrease reflected a lower average selling price resulting from customer mix, including lower-priced strategic Revio placements, as well as fewer Vega system shipments.
- PacBio sold 20 Revio systems during the quarter, compared with 15 a year earlier.
- It sold 26 Vega systems, compared with 38 in the prior-year quarter.
- Cumulative shipments reached 366 Revio systems and 200 Vega systems.
- Sixty percent of second-quarter Revio placements went to new customers, while 45% were part of multi-instrument orders.
- Eighty-one percent of Vega shipments went to new customers.
Van Oene said the majority of Revio placements during the quarter were to clinical accounts. He also said PacBio is seeing public health laboratories adopt Vega systems, including for wastewater testing and other applications outside traditional high-throughput whole-genome sequencing.
Regional performance was mixed. Revenue in Europe, the Middle East and Africa increased 52% to $14.4 million, driven by clinical customers moving from pilot programs into routine production, growing Vega demand and a strategic multi-system Revio placement for a national genomics initiative. Americas revenue was $17.6 million, down slightly year over year, as uncertainty around NIH and broader academic funding affected capital purchases. Asia-Pacific revenue declined 45% to $7 million, reflecting the completion of a population sequencing program, funding headwinds and lower consumables demand during customer workflow validation.
SMRT Next rollout and clinical strategy
The company highlighted the global rollout of its SPRQ-Nx, or SMRT Next, chemistry for Revio. The chemistry allows customers to use each SMRT Cell up to three times, increases throughput per run and lowers the U.S. list price of a 20x HiFi human genome to $345, a 30% reduction from PacBio’s prior Spark chemistry, Van Oene said.
More than one-third of PacBio’s installed base adopted software supporting the new workflow in June. The company expects more than half of its installed base to opt in by the end of the third quarter and the vast majority by year-end. Customers are currently validating the multi-use workflow and working through existing reagent inventories, leading PacBio to expect consumables growth to gain momentum later in 2026.
Van Oene said PacBio expects the SPRQ-Nx transition to continue through the third quarter, with consumables usage beginning to scale toward the end of the year. The company also plans to launch SPRQ-Nx chemistry for Vega in late August, increasing output to up to 90 gigabases per run while reducing DNA input requirements.
PacBio cited recent publications supporting long-read sequencing in clinical diagnostics. Van Oene said a June 13 article in The New England Journal of Medicine reported 96.4% concordance between long-read genome sequencing and standard-of-care testing in rare disease diagnostics. In the study, long-read sequencing improved or refined diagnoses in 3.4% of cases, while standard testing identified variants missed by long reads in 0.2% of cases.
The company also referenced a Nature Genetics article discussing “near-perfect genome sequencing” and a preprint from the HiFi Solves Sub-fertility Consortium in Asia-Pacific. PacBio said those findings reinforce its view that long-read sequencing can support a broader shift toward a single, more comprehensive testing workflow.
Margins, restructuring and revised outlook
Second-quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 36%, down from 38% a year earlier. Gibson attributed the decline to compute cost inflation, lower manufacturing volumes and $1.1 million in costs related to moving Vega manufacturing in-house. PacBio expects Vega manufacturing transition costs to conclude by the end of 2026.
Non-GAAP operating expenses declined 3% to $56.1 million. The company reported a non-GAAP net loss of $41.9 million, or $0.14 per share, compared with a loss of $40 million, or $0.13 per share, in the prior-year quarter. PacBio ended the quarter with approximately $236.9 million in unrestricted cash equivalents and investments, down from $279.5 million at the end of 2025.
The company recently initiated a reorganization that will reduce its workforce by about 40 employees. Van Oene said the changes integrate marketing more closely with the commercial organization, particularly around clinical customers, while reducing management layers. He said key R&D platform projects were not affected.
For 2026, PacBio reduced its revenue outlook to $155 million to $165 million. It now expects non-GAAP gross margin of 35% to 37%, non-GAAP operating expenses of $215 million to $220 million and year-end cash of approximately $175 million to $185 million.
Gibson said the company expects the restructuring to reduce 2027 compensation and related expenses by approximately $15 million to $20 million. PacBio also expects another $15 million to $20 million of annual savings after it moves beyond development spending on its high-throughput platform. However, the company now expects to reach cash-flow breakeven in 2028, compared with its previous expectation of the end of 2027.
About Pacific Biosciences of California (NASDAQ:PACB)
Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc develops, manufactures and sells high-performance DNA sequencing systems for genetic and genomic analysis. The company's proprietary single-molecule, real-time (SMRT) sequencing technology is designed to enable long-read sequencing, offering high accuracy for applications such as de novo genome assembly, transcriptome characterization and structural variation analysis. Pacific Biosciences markets a suite of instruments, including the Sequel and Sequel IIe systems, alongside reagents, consumables and data analysis software to support a range of life science research.
Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Pacific Biosciences has expanded its global reach by serving academic institutions, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and government research centers across North America, Europe and Asia.
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