The competitor paragraph from the Illumina annual report
follows--this may be apples and oranges. Illumina looks
like a pure tool company, Perlegen on page 53 of the s-1
specifially gives three "proprietary diagnostics for patient selection".
Anyhow, fun to poke around and compare marketcaps and
stuff. ILMN has really run these past couple years...
Competition
Although we expect that our BeadArray products and services will provide significant advantages over currently available products and services, we expect to encounter intense competition from other companies that offer products and services for the SNP genotyping and gene expression markets. These include companies such as Aclara Biosciences (acquired by ViroLogic), Affymetrix, Agilent, Amersham Biosciences (acquired by GE Corp. and now named GE Healthcare), Applied Biosystems, Beckman Coulter, Caliper Technologies, Luminex, ParAllele Bioscience (acquired by Affymetrix), Perlegen Sciences, NimbleGen, Sequenom and Third Wave Technologies. Some of these companies have or will have substantially greater financial, technical, research, and other resources and larger, more established marketing, sales, distribution and service organizations than we do. In addition, they may have greater name recognition than we do in the markets we need to address and in some cases a large installed base of systems. Each of these markets is very competitive and we expect new competitors to emerge and the intensity of competition to increase in the future. In order to effectively compete with these companies, we will need to demonstrate that our products have superior throughput, cost and accuracy advantages over the existing products. Rapid technological development may result in our products or technologies becoming obsolete. Products offered by us could be made obsolete either by less expensive or more effective products based on similar or other technologies. Although we believe that our technology and products will offer advantages that will enable us to compete effectively with these companies, we cannot assure you that we will be successful. |
