Oxford Nanopore Technologies plc

We've seen some continued advancement in Pfizer's obesity programmes.

We've seen strong operational progress from companies like Oxford Nanopore recently, and our portfolio companies collectively raised more than 540 million of third party capital during the first half.

Probably also worth saying we've continued to develop our private capital platform alongside the balance sheet, which is strategically important to us over the long term, gives us additional firepower to support our most promising companies as they scale while creating opportunities to generate management fees and performance fees for our shareholders.

So that sort of overall combination of NAV growth, cash realisations, external validation and platform development is exactly what we're looking to deliver.

And of course, we remain open to exceptional opportunities should they arise.

On Oxford Nanopore, they made, I would say, encouraging progress in the half and, and has performed strongly since the period end from a share price point of view.

Um, as you can see from the slide, and m-many of you will have tracked this directly, revenue was at a hundred and seventeen million, which is about a twelve percent growth at constant currency.

Um, a big, big thing for us was the fact that gross margin increased by, um, four hundred basis points to sixty-two percent.

And there's been a, a, a bit of an increase in the value of our holdings since the half year of about twenty-six million, uh, but we remain very focused on that sort of operating thesis and the route to sustainable profitability.

Delivery against that should also create more attractive monetization opti-options for us over time without pre-judging the timing of those.

On the wider portfolio, uh, don't worry, I'm not gonna go into all of these in detail, but I think the, the, the central message from this slide is breadth and the fact that the progress was not confined to Pfizer or Oxford Nanopore.

Um, Quantum Motion, Quantum Circuits, uh, Oxa completed major funding rounds.

And so there's lots and lots of links between our previous podcasts.

No, the science is coming together because, you know, things like Oxford Nanopore, that came out of chemistry departments, revolutionised biology.

You know, Sonia was saying you can now look at whole genomes of many different organisms and now, you know, even start to do these comparisons and look at structural differences across the genome and these things called... called pan genomes.

So, you know, and starting to understand the genetic variation, how genetic variation turns into differences between species in, you know, and that relates to kind of, as you say, colossal and the fact that they're trying to make a pigeon with a big beak.

It was, I don't want to say unfortunate, it was a very fortunate sort of solution that it sort of ticked all the boxes.

We're hoping to sort of mitigate that by running on a different type of sequencer, an ONT, Oxford Nanopore.

Potentially we can sequence slightly deeper, but what we might end up doing is having a look at a broader picture.

rather than a deeper picture of what's going on, all the subtle nuances within the population, having a look at the major groups of that insect community, rather than this deep, dark picture of what's going on within a community.

And

then my last question, maybe a little bit deeper for the folks that do sequencing.

You mentioned you're using the Oxford Nanopore.

Thinking about the saltwater aspect of this, Is the nanopore, does that work better for something like this because it can use, say, shorter reads? Or, like, is that a useful...

But I know they sold a bunch.

Yeah, so you still have to separate what the short read technologies that are Ultima, Illumina, Element, BGI, you know, there are a number of really good short read technologies that are out there in the high throughput market that are competing for that market versus the native long read technologies, which is really PacBio and Oxford Nanopore.

And so the native long read technologies in my mind are still very differentiated from the short read technologies.

We just haven't had the high throughput to really get into some of those applications yet.

It's the 31st of August, 2026, and I'm joined today by my co-host, John McEwan.

In this week's episode, we'll be discussing Volix, Next, Goodwin, Prudential, Oxford Nanopore, and our US company of the week is NVIDIA.

John, should I start us off with the first of our three debuts this week? Yes, Volex.

Who are they and what are their results? So, I should say Volex and Goodwin, they were both suggested by a friend of the show, Pat, who will be on the next two episodes for interviews.

all right at the very least it's a business i've totally forgotten about so it may as well be a debut

okay okay

so oxford nanopore first or second debut so for anyone who's not familiar with the business they have developed a new generation of nanopore based sensing technology this is all from their website Our first products enable the real-time, high-performance, accessible and scalable analysis of DNA and RNA.

Our technology is used in more than 125 countries to understand the biology of humans and diseases such as cancer, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses and whole environments.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies missed consensus on top-line revenue, but, uh, delivered a massive beat on the bottom line.

Revenue came in at $116.7 million, up 12.3% on a constant currency basis, but that was short of the $122.28 million estimate.

Yeah, but they absolutely crushed the profitability metrics.