23andMe Holding Co. (NASDAQ:ME) Q1 2024 Results Conference Call August 8, 2023 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Katie Watson - Vice President of Communications

Anne Wojcicki - Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder

Joe Selsavage - Interim Chief Financial and Accounting Officer

Kenneth Hillan - Chief Therapeutics Officer

Conference Call Participants

David Lebowitz - Citi

Gaurav Goparaju - Berenberg Capital Markets

Operator

Hello, and welcome to 23andMe’s Fiscal Year 2024 First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the prepared remarks, there will a question-and-answer session.

I would now like to turn the call over to Katie Watson, Vice President of Communications at 23andMe to lead off the call. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Katie Watson

Thank you. Before we begin, I encourage everyone to go to investors.23andme.com to find the press release we issued earlier today reporting our financial results for the first quarter. A replay of today's webcast will also be available on our Web site for a limited time within 24 hours after the event. Please note that certain statements made during this call regarding matters that are not historical facts, including but not limited to, management's outlook or predictions for future periods, are forward-looking statements. These statements are based solely on information that is now available to us. We encourage you to review the section entitled forward-looking statements in our press release, which applies to this call. Also, please refer to our SEC filings, which can be found on our Web site and the SEC's Web site for a discussion of numerous factors that may impact our future performance. We also discuss certain non-GAAP measures. Important information on our use of these measures and reconciliations to US GAAP may be found in our earnings release. Joining us on our call today are Anne Wojcicki, our Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder; and Joe Selsavage, our Interim Chief Financial and Accounting Officer. Kenneth Hillan, our Chief Therapeutics Officer, will join us for Q&A.

I'd now like to turn the call over to Anne.

Anne Wojcicki

Thank you, Katie. During our first fiscal quarter of 2024, we continued to make progress on advancing our therapeutics business and executing on our consumer strategy by providing additional customer value and expanding our product margins. 23andMe concluded the exclusive drug discovery phase of our GSK collaboration in July and we now look forward to opportunities to work broadly with a number of therapeutics partners to enable genetic based drug discovery. The collaboration was a large success combining the unique skills, resources and scientific expertise of both companies to generate more than 50 therapeutic programs. We will continue to advance the number of ongoing programs, both collaboratively and independently. 23andMe is now focused on partnering with multiple therapeutics companies for target discovery. During the GSK partnership, we validated the enormous potential for 23andMe to aid with therapeutics discovery and we feel confident in our ability to work both independently and with a number of partners going forward. We are now actively pursuing new opportunities with pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Details on future collaborations will be shared as available. With the end of our GSK drug discovery period, it was important for the company to reassess our overall therapeutic strategy and resourcing. Over the last five years, we have built a large infrastructure to support the work of the collaboration, and we recognize the need to right size and realign the business to set us up for long term success. Based on this, today, we significantly restructured our therapeutics organization, which included a reduction in workforce. 71 employees or nearly 50% of our therapeutics organization were impacted. To remind our investors, in June, we announced that we reduced the size of the consumer and G&A team by 9%. Overall, we have reduced headcount by nearly 200 people since April 1, 2023.