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What this page is: Delvantic's full research page for Illumina Inc. (ILMN) — AI-driven forensic equity research: mechanical valuation models (DCF, EPV, anchored-PE, scenario) plus three independent AI lenses (Quality / Value / Sentiment). Everything below is rendered server-side; you are not missing content that requires JavaScript. All scores are predictions and research opinions, not financial advice.
Our current read (analysis of 2026-09-13): Designation Low · Gem Score -33 (−100…+100 Quality+Value blend) · Quality 17 · Value -66 · Sentiment 41 (timing only, not weighted) · Composite fair value $62.14 vs $224.99 at analysis
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profile-header/price-overview— company profile, live quote, market capextended-analysis— the core: three AI lens reads with findings, scores, and the analyst memofuture-predictions— our forward price-band predictionsmarket-narrative/ai-findings/gpt-critique— narrative context, cross-model findings, and an adversarial critique of our own analysis (near the end of the document)- Members-only sections (render as login gates for anonymous readers):
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Illumina Inc.
ILMN NASDAQIllumina Inc. is a global genomics and life sciences company that develops DNA sequencing and array-based technologies used to analyze genetic variation and biological function. Its products and systems support research, clinical testing, and applied markets across areas such as oncology, inherited and infectious diseases, reproductive health, and molecular diagnostics. Illumina also provides sequencing consumables, instruments, software, and support services that help laboratories generate, interpret, and manage genomic data. The company serves customers including academic institutions, genomic research centers, hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and clinical laboratories. Headquartered in San Diego, California, and founded in 1998, Illumina plays a central role in making genomic analysis more widely accessible for research and healthcare applications.
Price Overview
Price History (1 Year)
Revenue & Net Income Trend
| Period | Revenue | Net Income | Net Margin | YoY/QoQ |
|---|
Key Metrics
EPS (Diluted): 5.45
Total Equity: N/A
Shares: 156,000,000
Total Debt: $0.00
Cash: $1.42B
EBITDA: $1.08B
Total Debt: $0.00
Cash: $1.42B
Revenue: $4.34B
Revenue: $4.34B
Revenue: $4.34B
Total Equity: N/A
Tax Rate: 21.7%
Equity: N/A
Total Debt: $0.00
Cash: $1.42B
Current Liabilities: $1.59B
Long-Term Debt: $0.00
Total Debt: $0.00
Total Equity: N/A
Shares: 156,000,000
Shares: 156,000,000
CapEx: -$148.00M
Shares: 156,000,000
Stock Price: $224.99
Net Income: $850.00M
Industry Benchmarks
Income Statement (Annual)
Last updated: Aug 26, 2026 9:07am (18d ago)| Metric | 2022 | 2023 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $4.5B | $4.6B | $4.5B | $4.4B | $4.3B |
| Cost of Revenue | $1.4B | $1.6B | $1.8B | $1.5B | $1.5B |
| Gross Profit | $3.2B | $3.0B | $2.7B | $2.9B | $2.9B |
| Operating Expenses | $3.3B | $7.2B | $3.8B | $3.7B | $2.1B |
| Operating Income | -$123.0M | -$4.2B | -$1.1B | -$833.0M | $807.0M |
| Net Income | $762.0M | -$4.4B | -$1.2B | -$1.2B | $850.0M |
| EBITDA | $128.0M | -$3.8B | -$637.0M | -$479.0M | $1.1B |
| EPS | $5.07 | $-28.00 | $-7.34 | $-7.69 | $5.47 |
| EPS (Diluted) | $5.04 | $-28.00 | $-7.34 | $-7.69 | $5.45 |
Balance Sheet (Annual)
Last updated: Aug 26, 2026 7:30am (18d ago)| Metric | 2022 | 2023 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cash & Equivalents | $1.2B | $2.0B | $1.0B | $1.1B | $1.4B |
| Total Current Assets | $2.7B | $3.6B | $2.6B | $2.7B | $3.3B |
| Total Assets | $15.2B | $12.3B | $10.1B | $6.3B | $6.6B |
| Current Liabilities | $1.1B | $2.8B | $1.6B | $1.5B | $1.6B |
| Long-Term Debt | — | — | — | — | — |
| Total Liabilities | $4.5B | $5.7B | $4.4B | — | — |
| Total Equity | $10.7B | $6.6B | $5.7B | — | — |
| Retained Earnings | $5.5B | $1.1B | -$19.0M | -$1.2B | -$392.0M |
Cash Flow (Annual)
Last updated: Aug 26, 2026 9:07am (18d ago)| Metric | 2022 | 2023 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operating Cash Flow | $545.0M | $392.0M | $478.0M | $837.0M | $1.1B |
| Capital Expenditure | -$208.0M | -$286.0M | -$195.0M | -$128.0M | -$148.0M |
| Free Cash Flow | $337.0M | $106.0M | $283.0M | $709.0M | $931.0M |
| Acquisitions (net) | -$2.4B | -$85.0M | -$29.0M | -$81.0M | -$10.0M |
| Net Debt Issued / (Repaid) | $988.0M | $991.0M | $0 | $1.2B | $495.0M |
| Dividends Paid | — | — | — | — | — |
| Stock Buybacks | $0 | $0 | $0 | -$116.0M | -$742.0M |
| Net Change in Cash | -$578.0M | $779.0M | -$963.0M | $79.0M | $291.0M |
Growth Trends (YoY %)
Last updated: Aug 26, 2026 9:07am (18d ago)| Metric | 2023 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue Growth | +1.3% | -1.7% | -2.9% | -0.7% |
| Gross Profit Growth | -5.8% | -7.7% | +4.3% | +0.3% |
| Operating Income Growth | -3,297.6% | +74.4% | +22.1% | +196.9% |
| Net Income Growth | -678.0% | +73.6% | -5.3% | +169.5% |
| EBITDA Growth | -3,057.0% | +83.2% | +24.8% | +324.8% |
Deep Analysis
Risk : Reward — upside vs downside from this company's own quarters
Computed 2026-09-12 02:02A +1σ run of quarters pays -79%; a −1σ run costs 91%. Ratio -0.9:1 (μ 2.2%, σ 5.6% , 16 pairs).
Older method (repeat-worst-quarter): -0.9 : 1
| Case | Growth | Margin | Fair value | vs price ($224.99) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bull — recovery | +6% | 21.1% | $47.81 | -79% |
| Base — stabilizes | +4% | 18.4% | $39.76 | -82% |
| Bear — keeps slipping | +2% | 15.6% | $32.57 | -86% |
| Stress — last quarter repeats | +0% | 9.2% | $20.60 | -91% |
| Upside — a +1σ run of quarters (v2) | +8% | 20.2% | $48.12 | -79% |
| Stress — a −1σ run of quarters (v2) | -3% | 10.6% | $20.46 | -91% |
Narrative Economics
market-narrative step).
Growth Outlook
Analyzed 2026-08-26 09:16The question every valuation on this page silently assumes: is this company likely to grow? Judged forward — the business, its category, the world — against what's already printed.
Claude Reading
Looking at the raw quarterly tape first: revenue has moved from $1.08B (Q3 2024) to $1.16B (Q2 2026) — call it ~7% cumulative over seven quarters, or roughly 4% annualized. That's not "decline," but it's not a growth stock either. Net income is genuinely lumpy — Q3 2024's $705M NI on $1.08B revenue is clearly a one-time item (likely GRAIL divestiture accounting), and stripping that out, TTM NI is roughly $825M on $4.49B revenue, an 18% net margin. FCF at $931M annual on a $34B market cap is a 2.7% yield. That's the honest starting point: a mid-single-digit-margin-expander with flattish top line trading at ~36x FCF.
The synthesis verdict of $57 fair value is aggressive to the downside and I think overstates the case. A $57 target implies ~10x FCF, which is what you'd pay for a declining commodity business — but Illumina still runs 66% gross margins, has a genuine installed-base moat in NovaSeq consumables, and just posted 17.9% net margin in the most recent quarter with sequential revenue acceleration ($1.09B → $1.16B, +6% QoQ). The DCF is likely assuming perpetual low-single-digit growth and no re-rating on clinical/MRD adoption. That's a defensible bear case but not the only case. Conversely, the "platform-monopoly" narrative premium is real and the market-forces model is right that 40x P/E on -1.8% revenue CAGR requires a growth inflection that isn't in the tape yet. PacBio and Oxford Nanopore are closing on long-read; BGI is a geopolitical wildcard. The bull needs clinical volume to actually show up in reported numbers, and two years in, it hasn't meaningfully.
The insider activity deserves more weight than the models gave it. Six separate S-Sale transactions on a single day (Aug 5, 2026) totaling ~283,000 shares, with only ~10,000 shares of offsetting awards — that's coordinated post-vest liquidation, not random. At $225, insiders are cashing out into strength. Combined with the fact that the 2025 annual op margin of 18.6% is a massive swing from three consecutive years of GAAP operating losses (including a -$4.18B print in 2022 from GRAIL impairment), a skeptic would ask: how much of the "margin recovery" is just the absence of write-downs versus genuine operating leverage? Gross margin went from 66.1% (2025) versus 69.5% (2022) — actually down. Operating margin improvement is largely opex discipline post-GRAIL, not core business strength. That's a one-time reset, not a runway.
My read: the synthesis is directionally right (overvalued) but the $57 anchor is too punitive. Fair value on a mature-earner framing with 3-5% revenue growth, 20% net margins, and modest multiple compression is closer to $110-140 (roughly 18-22x normalized earnings of ~$6/share, or 15-18x FCF). That still implies 40-50% downside from $225 but avoids the DCF-fantasy trap of pricing this as if it were Kodak. The contrarian bull case — that Illumina is the AWS of biology and clinical genomics inflects in 2027-2028 — is not disprovable from this data, but the tape shows no evidence of it: revenue is flat, insiders are selling aggressively, and gross margins are drifting down not up. I dissent from the $57 target but agree with the overvalued direction. Wait for either (a) a print showing 8%+ organic revenue growth as evidence the clinical thesis is materializing, or (b) a re-rating to sub-$140 that prices the business as the mature platform it currently is.
GPT Reading
Illumina looks like a high-quality business whose stock is still priced for a better growth profile than the numbers currently show. The core operating picture has clearly improved from the 2023-2024 mess: 2025 revenue was $4.34B, essentially flat versus $4.37B in 2024, but operating income swung from -$833M to +$807M, net income from -$1.22B to +$850M, operating cash flow reached $1.08B, and free cash flow was a healthy $931M. Gross margin held at 66.1%, which tells you the franchise is still structurally strong. Quarterly results also show a business that is profitable and stable rather than collapsing: the last four quarters ran between $1.08B and $1.16B of revenue, with net margins from 12.3% to 28.8%. That is not a broken company. But it is also not a growth company in any economic sense. Revenue over the last eight quarters is basically a flat line around $1.1B, and the annual revenue trend from $4.58B in 2022 to $4.34B in 2025 is mildly down, not up.
That disconnect matters because at $224.99 and a $33.97B market cap, investors are paying about 8.1x sales, 31.1x EV/EBITDA, and 41.3x earnings for a business with negative 1.8% revenue CAGR and the most recent quarter down 0.7% year over year. On 2025 free cash flow of $931M, the stock is around a 2.7% FCF yield. Those multiples are not crazy for a dominant platform compounding double digits with clear clinical adoption acceleration; they are very demanding for a company currently proving only that it can restore margins after a strategic error and cost reset. The story the numbers tell me is that Illumina is re-establishing itself as a strong cash generator, but the market is capitalizing that recovery as if renewed growth is close at hand. I do not see that in the reported revenue line. This looks more like a mature diagnostics tools platform with excellent consumables economics than a company deserving a premium software-like multiple.
What stands out most is how much of the earnings recovery appears to be margin normalization rather than top-line expansion. 2025 net margin of 19.6% and operating margin of 18.6% are respectable, but when revenue is flat, there is a ceiling on how long multiple expansion can be justified by efficiency gains alone. Even in the quarterly sequence, revenue went from $1.04B in Q1 2025 to $1.16B in Q4 2025, then back to $1.09B in Q1 2026 and $1.16B in Q2 2026: stable, yes; accelerating, no. The huge 65.3% margin in 2024-09 is obviously non-recurring noise, and the broader annual history still includes two years of heavy losses. That is another reason I resist paying over 40x earnings on a “normalized” year. The recent cluster of insider sales in August 2026 does not prove anything by itself, but it is at least inconsistent with the idea that management sees the shares as obviously cheap after the recovery.
The best case against my view is straightforward: this is one of the rare life-science tools companies with a genuine platform moat, 66% gross margins, over $1B of operating cash flow, underlevered balance sheet characteristics, and a razor/razorblade model that can inflect hard if utilization improves. If clinical adoption or new instrument cycles reaccelerate even modestly, earnings could scale faster than revenue because the gross margin base is already there. On $850M of net income and $931M of FCF, the current valuation may not be absurd if 2026-2028 can deliver even high-single-digit revenue growth with stable margin. In that framework, the stock is not a busted growth name but a recovering compounder, and the market is looking through today’s flat revenues toward future clinical genomics demand. I weigh that less heavily because there is a long distance between “plausible future optionality” and “observable growth,” and the current price already gives substantial credit for that optionality.
What would change my mind is not another quarter of 15%-20% net margin on $1.1B revenue; the market already knows Illumina can be profitable. I would need to see sustained top-line acceleration: at least two to three consecutive quarters above $1.20B with clear year-over-year growth in the mid- to high-single digits, pushing annual revenue back above $4.6B while maintaining operating margin near or above 18%. If management can show that 2025 FCF of $931M is a base from which growth resumes rather than a peak created by cleanup and discipline, the premium multiple becomes easier to defend. Absent that, I think the shares should trade more like a high-quality but low-growth tools business, which points materially below $225.
Grok Reading
The raw numbers on Illumina describe a franchise that has finally stopped bleeding but has not started growing. Annual revenue slid from $4.58B to $4.34B over the last several reported years, a −1.8% CAGR, with the most recent year-over-year still negative at −0.7%. Quarterly run-rate is stuck in a $1.04–1.16B band with no acceleration. What changed is the bottom line and the cash conversion: 2025 delivered $850M of net income and $931M of free cash flow on only $148M of capex, swinging from multi-year operating losses into an 18.6% operating margin and a 66% gross margin. That FCF recovery is real and high-quality. The market, however, is capitalizing it at roughly 36× trailing FCF, 41× earnings, and 31× EV/EBITDA for a business whose top line is flat-to-down. At $225 and a $34B enterprise, the price embeds a growth trajectory the income statement simply does not show. The August 2026 cluster of insider sales—hundreds of thousands of shares across multiple filings on consecutive days with almost no offsetting open-market buying—adds a concrete signal that those closest to the books are not treating $225 as a bargain.
The contradiction with the quantitative fair-value work is directionally correct even if the $57–58 composite looks harsh. A normalized mid-teens free-cash-flow multiple on ~$900M–1B of sustainable FCF would still land closer to the low-to-mid $100s, not $225; the gap above that is pure narrative premium for the “sequencing-as-compute” platform monopoly story. Competitive share pressure and reimbursement friction are already visible in the stalled revenue line, so the 15–20% clinical-growth path the market appears to be discounting is an assumption, not an observed run-rate. Rule-based tagging as a mature earner at only 0.4 confidence understates how cleanly the financials now fit that box: high gross margin, strong FCF, negligible growth.
The strongest opposing case is that 2025’s margin and cash-flow reset is the first full year of a cleaned-up Illumina, that operating leverage on even modest mid-single-digit volume recovery could expand earnings faster than revenue, and that the installed base plus consumables pull-through still constitute a wide moat the DCF underweights. A bull can also note that $1.42B of cash, a 2.1 current ratio, and sub-$150M maintenance capex give the balance sheet durability to wait out clinical adoption. Those points justify a higher multiple than a fading industrial, but they do not justify 30×+ EBITDA or a near-tripling of a fundamentals-anchored value while revenue CAGR remains negative and insiders are net sellers in size. The narrative intensity is strong; the durability of that narrative is already eroding in the printed numbers.
I would reverse to neutral or better only on sustained quarterly revenue growth back above mid-single digits with stable or expanding gross margins, clear evidence that clinical/oncology mix is moving the consolidated top line, and a cooling of the open-market insider sale pattern. Until those print, $225 is paying for a genomic-revolution story the cash flows have not yet earned.
Big-3 Panel — where each AI stands
Advanced Analysis Forensic deep-dive · separate lenses
Illumina is a mature diagnostics leader that just emerged from a brutal stretch tied to the GRAIL misadventure. Revenue has been flat-to-down ($4.53B in 2022 to $4.34B in 2025), but the P&L just inflected hard: operating margin swung from -91% and -19% in the prior periods to +18.6%, net income turned to +$850M, and FCF reached $931M. Gross margin recovered to 66.1% from a trough of 60.9%. Balance sheet holds $1.63B net cash and the company is self-funding.
Verify before trusting this (5)
- Whether 2025 operating margin recovery is sustainable or one-time - segment detail on Core Illumina vs any residual GRAIL costs
- Customer concentration and share loss to Element Biosciences, Ultima, MGI - explains the revenue stagnation
- Debt maturity schedule and covenants driving the low Altman Z reading
- Whether the $273M SBC run-rate normalizes now that turnaround incentive grants may be complete
- Detail on the accruals composition - confirm 2025 has clean OCF/NI once GRAIL noise is stripped
The e2e composite fair value of $58.61 (signal-adjusted $57.28) implies a 75% downside that strains credulity - EPV of negative $4 and DCF of $44 are penalizing a business that just printed $931M FCF and $850M net income. On $850M earnings the market cap of $34B is a ~40x P/E, and on $931M FCF it's ~36x FCF - rich multiples for a company whose revenue has declined four years running. The anchored-PE method's $150 is the most credible of the three inputs and probably the right neighborhood for deserved value: it roughly captures a stabilized, mid-teens-growth franchise on quality-adjusted earnings. Against that ~$150 anchor, $225 embeds roughly 50% premium - the price is telling you clinical sequencing adoption re-accelerates, competition (BGI, ONT, PacBio) fails to erode share, and margins keep expanding. That is the platform-monopoly bull case fully in the tape. With earnings quality flagged weak and a distress-zone Z-score in the background, I want to pay less, not more, for that optionality. This isn't a screaming short - the razor/razorblade economics are real and FCF is genuine - but there is no margin of safety here.
Verify before trusting this (4)
- Consumables pull-through and instrument placements in the latest quarter - is the installed base still expanding?
- Guidance on 2026 revenue growth - is the four-year decline finally reversing?
- Competitive share data vs ONT and PacBio in clinical whole-genome sequencing
- Any one-time items or restructuring benefits inflating the $850M net income figure
The tape is mildly risk-on and the VIX is quiet, which is a friendly backdrop for a high-beta (1.46) healthcare name like ILMN that would otherwise get punished in a stress episode. The dominant force here, though, is narrative: Illumina is the archetypal platform-monopoly story ('sequencing is the compute layer of biology'), intensity strong, and this week's Merck/Moderna cancer-vaccine readout gave the whole genomics-enabler cohort a fresh catalyst - ILMN is explicitly named as a picks-and-shovels beneficiary. That's an active, visible tailwind on the ticker. Set against that, price at 225 vs a DCF anchor near 57 tells you sentiment, not cash flow, is doing the lifting - the stock is a sentiment-driven name right now, which cuts both ways. Analyst tone and news flow are constructive (new 1B revolver framed as balance-sheet flexibility, not distress), momentum is strong_positive with +45pp over 3y, and there is no visible crack in the story. Macro headwinds (10y 4.7%, market PE 25.7) are a background drag on a long-duration growth name, but with the narrative this hot and the tape calm, the near-term pressure leans up. Net: tailwind, not strong tailwind - because a story stretched 4x over DCF is fragile, and any narrative wobble (competitor win, reimbursement setback, risk-off flip) would unwind fast given the beta.
Verify before trusting this (4)
- Whether the cancer-vaccine tailwind broadens into sustained fund flows into genomics ETFs or fades within a week
- Any competitor product win (PacBio/Oxford Nanopore/BGI) that cracks the platform-monopoly narrative
- Sell-side target revisions after the vaccine news - are numbers actually moving or is it just price?
- VIX regime durability - the risk-on read is only 1 day old and low-confidence
Genomics demand itself is not the problem — sequencing volumes and clinical adoption keep rising, and the category is in an expansion phase. What changed around Illumina is who captures that demand: China closed off entirely, public research funding turned austere, and a credible field of rival chemistries now exists where for a decade there was effectively one. So the world's genomic output grows while Illumina's share of the dollars per base pair compresses. The offset is that the world's installed sequencing capacity is overwhelmingly Illumina hardware, and switching a validated clinical assay is slow, expensive and regulatorily painful — that inertia buys years, not decades. Net: a growing world, a mature franchise inside it, earnings power more resilient than revenue growth.
When we made this prediction on Aug 26, 2026, ILMN was $226.20. We expect it to be $198.00 by Feb 2027, and we consider it great value under $150.00. This is an early model (v0.6.0) — the direction is more reliable than the exact price. Made Aug 26, 2026.
Blue is our prediction, starting the day we made it. Grey is a slower route to the same place — the same destination, taking longer. Black is the actual price, so you can see how we are doing.
Post-Report Due Diligence NOTES
Evidence for a closer look, not a verdict — no score or designation on this page has been changed by it. Items marked material are ones where a conclusion above moves to the other side of the price.