NEW YORK – Fulgent Genetics reported after the close of the market on Thursday that its fourth quarter revenues were up sharply year over year.
For the three months ended Dec. 31, 2020 the company reported revenues of $295.0 million, up 35-fold from $8.4 million in Q4 2019. The firm said it delivered 3.2 million billable tests during Q4, approximately 230 times the number of tests in the prior-year period.
Fulgent Chairman and CEO Ming Hsieh said in a statement that the fourth quarter capped a "transformational" year for the Temple City, California-based firm.
"The results we achieved were possible because of our differentiated technology platform built over the 10 years since our founding," Hsieh said. "While the majority of our business this year was from COVID-19 testing, we believe we have laid a very strong foundation for continued growth in the years ahead."
The company reported a Q4 net income of $166.3 million, or $6.16 per share, compared to a net loss of $296,000, or $.01 per share, in Q4 2019. Adjusted EPS for the recently completed quarter was $6.16, beating the average Wall Street analyst estimate of $4.05 earnings per share.
Fulgent reported that Q4 R&D expenses more than doubled year over year to $4.6 million from $1.8 million, while SG&A expenses almost quadrupled to $12.7 million from $3.4 million.
For full-year 2020, Fulgent reported $421.7 million in revenues, up 13-fold from $32.5 million in 2019. The firm reported processing 4.4 million tests in 2020, approximately 75 times more than the 59,000 tests it processed in 2019.
Although COVID-19 testing accounted for the majority of the revenue growth in the year, non-COVID revenues also grew 43 percent, the firm said.
On a call with investors, Hsieh specified that the 43 percent non-COVID growth was in the firm's next-generation sequencing business. Fulgent processed 72,000 NGS tests in 2020, compared to 59,000 in 2019, and expects to see more than 92 percent growth in 2021.
Fulgent management also said on the call that the firm is one of four companies awarded a shared contract worth up to $2 billion from the US Department of Homeland Security to screen agency employees for COVID-19. The contract extends for five years and is for indefinite delivery and an indefinite quantity of COVID-19 testing. Fulgent also expects to launch a pharmacogenomics test in 2021, and it anticipates expanding into Europe and Asia.
Fulgent's net income for the year rose to $214.3 million, or $8.91 per share, from a net loss of $411,000, or $.02 per share, in 2019. Adjusted EPS for 2020 was $8.91, beating the average Wall Street analyst estimate of $6.28 per share. The weighted average number of shares used to calculate earnings for 2020 was about 24.1 million compared to 18.7 million in Q4 2019.
The company's 2020 R&D expenses rose 78 percent to $11.6 million from $6.5 million a year ago. SG&A expenses for the year more than doubled to $30.2 million from $12.3 million in 2019.
Fulgent ended the year with $87.4 million in cash and cash equivalents and $344.4 million in marketable securities.
For 2021, the company expects revenues of approximately $800.0 million, an increase of 90 percent year over year that includes an estimated $70.0 million in revenues from next-gen sequencing testing and $730.0 million from non-NGS testing. The company also expects net income of approximately $380.0 million, or more than $12.00 per share, and non-GAAP income of approximately $12.50 per share for the year.
In Friday morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of Fulgent were up almost 4 percent at $88.82.