Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DNA) Q3 2024 Results Conference Call November 12, 2024 5:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Megan LeDuc - Manager, IR
Jason Kelly - Founder, CEO & Director
Mark Dmytruk - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Tejas Savant - Morgan Stanley
Matt Sykes - Goldman Sachs
John Kim - Bank of America
Mark Massaro - BTIG
Jacquie Kesa - TD Cowen

Megan LeDuc

Good evening. I'm Megan LeDuc, Manager of Investor Relations at Ginkgo Bioworks. I'm joined by Jason Kelly, our Co-Founder and CEO; and Mark Dmytruk, our CFO. Thanks, as always for joining us. We're looking forward to updating you on our progress.

As a reminder, during the presentation today, we will be making forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our filings with the SEC to learn more about these risks and uncertainties.

Today, in addition to updating you on the quarter, we are going to provide updates on our path towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven as well as customer progress in our cell engineering business and our latest H5N1 offerings.

As usual, we'll end with a Q&A session, and I'll take questions from analysts, investors and the public. You can submit those questions to us in advance via X at #GinkgoResults or e-mail investors at ginkgobio.com.

All right. Over to you, Jason.

Jason Kelly

Thanks, Megan, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. We always start with our mission of making biology easier to engineer here at Ginkgo and similar to last quarter, we continue to focus on three key objectives.

First, we want to reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven while maintaining a cash margin of safety. And we ended this quarter with $616 million in cash and no bank debt and have already exceeded our cost-cutting target for 2024. In other words, we've hit the target we're trying to hit by the end of the year. At the rate we were dropping costs, that makes for a nice cash margin of safety, in my opinion.

Second, while we cut costs, we need to keep serving our current customers and adding new customers. I'll dive into this in the strategic section, but I'm very happy about achieving the $9 million technical milestone with Merck that we just announced this morning. That's a great indication of Ginkgo delivering R&D solutions to blue chip customers in biopharma.

Finally, we want to grow our revenue in solutions while also expanding into selling tools. And I'll cover this more on the strategic section, but we're excited by the traction we are seeing in our newly launched data points business with a couple of recent wins with top 25 biopharmas that are new customers to Ginkgo.