Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (DNA) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-02-25 21:22:28 ET

Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (DNA)

Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call

February 25, 2025, 17:30 ET

Company Participants

Joseph Fridman - Director, Communications and Corporate Affairs

Jason Kelly - Founder, CEO & Director

Mark Dmytruk - CFO

Jason Kelly - Founder, CEO & Director

Conference Call Participants

Jason Lai - Morgan Stanley

Evie Kslosky - Goldman

Mark Massaro - BTIG

Brendan Smith - TD Cowen

Matt Larew - William Blair & Company

Presentation

Joseph Fridman

Good evening. I'm Joseph Fridman, Director of Communications and Corporate Affairs here at Ginkgo, where it's my fifth year. During that time, I've had the pleasure and the privilege of working with our Investor Relations team. usually behind the scenes of these earnings calls. And so it's exciting to be supporting you today in this more front-facing role. I'm joined by Jason Kelly, our Co-Founder and CEO; and Mark Dmytruk, our CFO.

Thanks, as always, for joining us. We're really looking forward to updating you on our progress today. As a reminder, during the presentation today, we will be making forward-looking statements. These involve risks and uncertainties. And -- so please refer to our filings with the SEC to learn more about these risks and uncertainties, including in our most recent 10-K. .

Today, in addition to updating you on the quarter and the full year results, we're going to provide updates on our path towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven as well as customer progress in our cell engineering business across both our services and tools offerings and the latest offerings in our biosecurity business.

As usual, we'll end with a Q&A session, and I'll take questions from analysts, investors and the public. You can submit questions for that to us in advance via X, please tank your post with the #GinkgoResults or e-mail us or in boxes investors@ginkgobioworks.com. I'll be checking that throughout the call. All right. Over to you, Jason.

Jason Kelly

Thanks, Joseph, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. We always start with our mission of making biology easier to engineer. And similar to last quarter, our focus for that mission is on these 3 key objectives.

First, we want to reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven while maintaining a cash margin of safety. And we ended this quarter with $562 million in cash and no bank debt and significantly exceeded our original cost-cutting target for 2024. And -- you're going to see this reflected in a dramatically reduced level of cash burn in Q4 versus Q3. And I'm really happy to see this. A cash margin of safety is what protects can go from having to raise capital in conditions that aren't favorable, and we want to keep our cash war chest large while reducing cash spending and expanding our sources of revenue. This is a simple strategy, right?

Like just drive the cost down and keep expanding, and we executed on it really well in the second half of 2024, and we will keep pushing on it in 2025. That is not changing.

Second, while we cut costs, we need to keep serving our current customers and adding new customers. Q4 saw us achieve a record number of technical milestones in a single quarter, showing our team's ability to continue to deliver great new science for our customers. I'm really proud of that delivery across the team. Finally, we want to grow our cell engineering revenue and continue to expand our tools offerings, which I'm going to talk a lot more about in the strategic section.

Okay. I'm excited to get into all of that. But first, I want to hand it over to Mark to discuss the financial results for the quarter....

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