Fluidigm is a life science company that develops and distributes instruments and chips for genomic analysis and X-ray
crystallography applications. The company owns a disruptive and scalable integrated fluidic circuits (IFC) technology.
This technology enables the execution of thousands of experiments in parallel in nanoliter volumes, and facilitates
implementation of experiments with a complex design.
On December 3rd 2010, Fluidigm announced that it had refilled with the SEC to raise up to $86M in an initial public
offering. Since its inception in 1999, Fluidigm has incurred ~$200M in operating losses. While profitability in the
foreseeable future is unlikely, Fluidigm has strong revenue potential given its recent product revenue growth, deep
intellectual property portfolio and growth of its target markets.
Fluidigm targets an attractive market mix: mid-throughput mid-plex quantitative PCR (qPCR) market in the short term
and the emerging digital PCR (dPCR) market in the long term. In the next few years, Fluidigm revenues will be driven by
basic research and AgBio customers expected to scale gene expression and genotyping experiments currently
performed by qPCR, and to develop novel dPCR protocols. In 5+ years, the main opportunity will be for molecular
diagnostics (MDx) applications. This report reviews the market sizes, segments, growths and trends of Fluidigm’s end
markets (qPCR, digital PCR, MDx). We review historical data and forecast market size from 2010 to 2015.
Our experts believe that IFCs faces strong competition from other technologies including array-based technologies (e.g.,
Luminex, Wafergen), multiplex qPCR and competing dPCR technologies (e.g., LIFE’s Cytonix, Raindance, QuantaLife,
Inostics, home-brewed emulsions). This high competitive intensity is expected to make it challenging for Fluidigm to gain
widespread adoption in academia. In addition, given the currently challenging basic research funding environment,
Fluidigm may face indirect competition from next generation sequencing as scientists divert their genomics funding
toward this disruptive technology. While some of Fluidigm’s sample preparation products may benefit from growth in the
sequencing market (~$700M growing at ~20% p.a. for the next 3-5 years), this gain may not offset lost in sales from its
main product line.
In the last couple of years, Fluidigm has started to address the lack of content for IFC chips, which has been one of the
company’s key issues since inception. Fluidigm may benefit from collaborations similar to its partnership with
SABiosciences to develop differentiated assays, and additional alliances such as developed with AgBio companies and
Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics. This strategy may help broaden its current product portfolio and installed base,
estimated at ~300 instruments.
This report is a high-level due diligence of Fluidigm divided in three sections: (1) Review of Fluidigm’s offering
benchmarked to current technologies. (2) Forecast of the qPCR, MDx and dPCR markets targeted by Fluidigm by end-
users (Academia, BioPharma, MDx and other applied markets). (3) SWOT analysis of Fluidigm. This report does not
forecast Fluidigm’s future revenues or take a stance on its attractiveness as an acquisition target. |
