Top 10 Sequencing Companies

By 2022, the global next-generation sequencing (NGS) market has been projected to reach between $10.5 billion (BCC Research) and $12.45 billion (MarketsandMarkets), though a more cautious forecast envisions that market growing a bit more slowly, to $11.92 billion by 2024 (BIS Research).

Whatever the figure, there’s no doubt that the NGS market is expanding, driven by advancements in platform technology, increasing applications of sequencing, growth in partnerships and collaborations, increasing adoption of NGS among research laboratories and academic institutes, and the decline in the cost of sequencing.

That cost fell four orders of magnitude from $10 million at the end of 2007, to under $5,000 at the end of 2013. A year later, Illumina’s then-CEO Jay Flatley jolted attendees of that year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference by announcing the long-awaited $1,000 genome, in the form of the company's HiSeq X10 system. The pace of sequencing progress has quickened since then, with Illumina last year unveiling the NovaSeq, trumpeting the newer sequencer as potentially enabling a $100 genome.

Below is a list of 10 top sequencing companies, ranked by revenue—either companywide for companies entirely focused on the segment, or for companies with broader operations, figures for sequencing-related business segments. Each company is listed by name, 2017 revenues, and a short description of recent company activity, where the revenues were derived, or both.

Beyond the top 10 are numerous companies positioning themselves for future growth in sequencing. One example is Eurofins Group, which in June 2017 acquired GATC, a sequencing provider that generated about €20 million ($24.5 million) in annual revenue at the time of its purchase. Another example is bioMérieux, which partnered with Illumina to develop bioMérieux EpiSeq™, an NGS service for epidemiological monitoring of bacterial infections launched in 2015 as the first commercial system for using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) to monitor outbreaks in hospitals.

Also not included below are corporate giants—companies that provide workflow solutions around sequencing, though not sequencing technologies or services per se—and which do not break out sequencing revenues:

Roche in 2013 shut down the 454 Life Sciences business it acquired from CuraGen six years earlier but retains a Roche Sequencing Solutions (RSS) business focused on simplifying workflows and expanding assay menus. Last year, Roche launched AVENIO circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) Analysis Kits, a portfolio of three NGS liquid biopsy assay kits for oncology research. RSS is within the molecular diagnostics business area of Roche’s diagnostics division, which last year generated CHF 1.920 billion ($1.999 billion) in revenue.

BD (Becton, Dickinson, and Co.) provides NGS workflow solutions through its bioscience unit within the life sciences segment, for which BD has reported 2017 revenue of $1.139 billion. Last year BD launched BD Rhapsody, a single-cell platform for RNA-expression analysis whose benefits, the company said, included sequencing cost savings. 

PerkinElmer provides NGS workflow solutions through its applied genomics unit within its diagnostics segment, which finished 2017 with $678.5 million in revenue. PerkinElmer signaled increased interest in the NGS market in February when it acquired Australian-based RHS for A$25.2 million ($19.4 million), adding technologies that include DOPlify, a platform designed to provide cell-ploidy status of single cells and simultaneously cell mitochondrial DNA load using a range of different NGS platforms and workflows.