Looking to usher in a more “predictable” year in 2026, Illumina is working with officials in China as it remains on the country’s Unreliable Entities List.
That’s according to Illumina’s CEO Jacob Thaysen, who spoke Tuesday at the sequencing company’s event at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
Illumina enters 2026 at a critical point, as the company continues to navigate choppy waters in terms of its China business and what is an unstable academic research environment in the U.S.
In March of last year, Illumina was barred from exporting its DNA sequencers to China after Beijing shut out the company in response to the Trump administration’s expanded tariffs on China-made products.
This began eroding Illumina’s China sales, stalling overall revenue in the two quarters from the ban. But, back in November, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said it would lift the export ban, though Illumina would remain on China’s Unreliable Entities List.
Thaysen was quick to point out at JPM that his company’s sales outside of China “are 97% of our revenue,” adding that he’s “very pleased with the progress of our team and general manager in China.”
“They have done a fantastic job to keep the business intact,” Thaysen commented.
Illumina execs “have also spent time in Q4 working with the Chinese officials to find a path through our current situation,” the CEO said.
Describing the “challenging year” Illumina faced, Thaysen said the “geopolitical situation has been the biggest impact of 2025, and I think we all hope that the situation in 2026 will be more predictable, but no matter what the situation, we are committed to execute [our plan].”
Illumina was also hit last year when the U.S. government announced it would slash the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by nearly 40% in fiscal 2026, cuts that could directly impact the company given that its DNA sequencing and array-based technologies are widely used by researchers in academic and government settings.
Future NIH research funding levels remain an open question. Back in November, an analysis revealed that the ongoing termination of NIH grants has disrupted at least 383 clinical trials, which collectively include more than 74,000 patients.
On this topic, Thaysen warned: “I still think we will see for the quarters to come that this will be a muted environment, so while we are optimistic [in the long term], we still think 2026 will be muted on the research in [the] academic environment.”
Like many companies at JPM, Illumina also revealed its preliminary, unaudited financial results for 2025. In the fourth quarter, sales hit $1.15 billion, up 4% year over year on a constant currency basis.
Ex-China sales, meanwhile, hit $1.1 billion for the quarter, up 7% from the fourth quarter of 2024.
For fiscal 2025, overall sales were flat at $4.34 billion but up 2% at constant currency when excluding China to reach $4.1 billion.