2022 Sequencing Market Share – Same As It Ever Was (For Now)

Since 2022 saw an explosion of new competition in the sequencing market, I thought this would be a good time to review the market share breakdown for the various players. This should serve as a good reference point going forward to see what kind of impact all the new players will make. Rather than relying on market reports, I generate my own estimates based on stated company revenues and stick as closely as possible to sequencing instruments and reagents (see below for details and caveats).

Given the annus horribilis Illumina is having, you’d be forgiven for thinking the new entrants are eroding their customer base and that long reads are taking over. But Illumina is still holding court with just over 80% of the market.

Here are the revenue #s:

Major takeaways:

• MGI hasn’t had an impact yet. This isn’t too surprising as they weren’t able to sell non-CoolMPS systems in the US until the start of 2023.
• New entrants haven’t had an impact yet. Singular Genomics managed to sell just five systems in 2022. Element Biosciences hasn’t had to report their revenues as they aren’t public, but I'm guessing they shipped about 15 units in 2022 (four shipped by 6/2022, 50 orders by 6/2023). Ultima Genomics and PacBio’s Onso aren’t on the market yet, so nothing to report there.
• Long reads have grown slowly to just about 7%. This is in contrast to the claims from some enthusiasts that long reads are “taking over” and market reports like this gem that claims the “long read sequencing” market was $1.5B in 2022 (the most charitable thing I can say is they must be using a different definition of “market” than I am). A big shift that the long read market has seen is that ONT has overtaken PacBio. Can the Revio reverse this or is PacBio doomed to play second fiddle to ONT?

Methodology:

The first thing to note is I’m focused on revenues rather than something more abstract like “number of samples” or “amount of sequencing data”. Revenue numbers are much easier to estimate and much more straightforward. Next, as much as possible I tried to limit the revenues to that of sequencing instruments and sequencing reagents and de-emphasize other platforms, services, and library prep kits.

• Illumina = stripped out services and microarray (couldn’t get solid numbers from 2022, so I used percentage breakdowns from 2021)
• Thermo = ok, this one is a total guess and I’m likely being generous at $300M. They probably make plenty of revenue from sequencing assays, but I’m really trying to focus on instruments and the “juice” that runs them. Any better estimates on this would be much appreciated. Help me make a better estimate with my "wisdom of crowds" Twitter poll.
• MGI = I used the reported sequencing revenues which strips out lab automation
• Oxford Nanopore - I went with their LSRT (life science research tools) numbers which I believe strips out COVID testing. It must strip out a bit more, but I’m not exactly clear on what that might be.
• PacBio = the easiest of the bunch - I just used everything they reported.
• Element = nothing officially reported, but I estimated ~$4M in revenues based on 15 units shipped in 2022 (a guess) and a small amount of reagent pull-through.
• Singular = another easy one - I just used their total revenues (from all 5 instrument sales)
• Other = I’m ignoring a number of little Chinese companies as their sequencing revenues are nearly impossible for me to track and they’re likely pretty close to $0. Also, I put GenapSys back into the “development” column, so nothing from them.