China has always been a big, fast-moving sequencing market. What’s changed most in the past couple of years?‍

The biggest change is that sequencing in China is no longer just a “best technology wins” decision. In my conversations with various Chinese biotech CEOs, lab directors and other key China-based stakeholders, it’s become clear choosing a sequencing platform provider is a market-structure and risk-management decision, driven by policy alignment, procurement predictability, and supply-chain confidence as much as by raw data performance.

A few years ago, the default high-end answer was Illumina for many labs. Today, the ecosystem has adapted, both commercially and operationally, to a world where foreign platforms can come with added friction and uncertainty.

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You comment on it in recent blog entries on your substack. When you say “risk management,” what are the practical drivers behind that?

Geopolitics and regulation moved from the background to the foreground. Once you introduce uncertainty around approvals, timelines, serviceability, or future access, labs and clinical operators start optimizing for continuity, not incremental performance improvements. For many Chinese customers, the question becomes: “Can I build a stable clinical or service business on this platform for the next 3-5 years?” If the answer is “maybe,” that “maybe” is often enough to shift a procurement decision, especially at scale.

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Illumina still has a strong technical reputation. Why isn’t that enough to “bounce back” quickly?‍

Illumina was recently taken off the ‘Exports Restriction List’ by the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China (MOFCOM). However, it still remains on the country’s 'Unreliable Entities List', which in practicality means it will still be very difficult for them to drive platform sales in China. The China market has learned to operate without relying on Illumina as the center of gravity. There’s now a real installed base of domestic systems, growing reagent ecosystems, expanding informatics stacks, and perhaps most importantly, procurement muscle memory. Re-entry is hard when the ecosystem has re-oriented around different value drivers: predictability, domestic anchoring, and institutional trust.

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So this is not just “BGI versus Illumina” anymore?

Exactly. BGI Group/MGI are still dominant in installed base and sequencing volume, but China’s sequencing landscape is no longer a one- or two-player story. You’re seeing a broader field of domestic platform companies that are investing seriously in chemistry, optics, chips, and software, trying to carve out credible differentiation.

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Who are the newer players that matter, and how should we think about them?‍

A useful way to frame it is: a diversifying domestic ecosystem across multiple technology archetypes, not just “Illumina-like SBS clones.”

A few examples:

• Genemind – High-throughput SBS platforms increasingly visible across oncology, infectious disease, and reproductive health workflows.
• Salus Biomed – A company that spans high-throughput sequencing and spatial omics, signaling ambition beyond core SBS competition.
• Axbio – A hybrid approach blending nanopore and SBS concepts to pursue throughput and cost efficiency.
• Qitan – One of the most visible domestic nanopore efforts, emphasizing end-to-end control across instruments and consumables.

And there are others in the mix as well, some earlier, some more mature, each trying to win credibility in specific segments.

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What’s actually powering this domestic acceleration, pure market dynamics, or something more coordinated?

It’s absolutely more than market pull. China has been explicit, over multiple policy cycles, about self-reliance in strategically important technologies, and sequencing sits right at the intersection of biotech competitiveness, health security, and data sovereignty. When you combine policy incentives, procurement preferences, and national genomics programs, you get a powerful flywheel that rewards local platforms with faster pathways to adoption.

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Help us connect the dots: how do “policy priorities” translate into a sequencing procurement decision at a hospital or service lab?

Procurement increasingly moves up the organization. It’s less “a lab chooses a sequencer,” and more “an institution chooses infrastructure.” If the institution is accountable for continuity, compliance, and large-scale deployment, then platform choice becomes tied to:

• regulatory predictability,
• supply-chain resilience,
• data governance expectations, and
• alignment with domestic procurement logic.

Those factors can outweigh marginal differences in accuracy or throughput, especially when domestic platforms are “good enough” for many workflows.

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Where does Illumina still have strength inside China?

There’s still meaningful respect for Illumina’s performance and a legacy base that won’t disappear overnight. They also still have a company presence there. In some settings, particularly research environments that value global comparability or specialized use cases, Illumina remains very relevant. But the center of gravity has shifted. The question isn’t whether Illumina can sell instruments at all but whether it can become a broad-based growth engine again under the new structural realities.

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If you had to summarize the “new competitive battlefield” for Illumina in China in one sentence, what would it be?

Illumina used to compete primarily on technology; now it competes in an environment where trust, predictability, and institutional risk calculus are part of the product.

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What should global genomics leaders such as sequencing companies, reagent vendors, software players take away from this?‍

Two things:

1. China is no longer just a market; it’s becoming a full-spectrum platform ecosystem. Some of these companies will stay domestic, but others will push outward over time.
2. If you want to participate in China’s genomics economy, you need a strategy that’s built for the system: procurement pathways, compliance realities, local partnerships, and a clear view on where foreign platforms still add irreplaceable value.

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Looking ahead: what are the signals you’ll be watching over the next 1-2 years?

I’d watch:

• which domestic platforms rack up credible, repeatable deployments in clinical and large service settings;
• whether international certifications and validation datasets start compounding for a subset of players; and
• whether the buying center continues to move upward, toward more centralized, institution-level procurement decisions.

Those three dynamics will tell you whether this is simply diversification—or a lasting structural reconfiguration.

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About the guest

Matt Marlowe writes BridgeCross Bio, focused on China’s life-science and biotech ecosystem, with particular emphasis on market structure, policy-driven innovation, and competitive dynamics in platform technologies.

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Editor’s note (DeciBio)

A few public milestones help contextualize the shift discussed here: Illumina was added to China’s Unreliable Entity List in early February 2025, and China announced an import ban on Illumina sequencers in early March 2025. Later, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced it would lift the export ban effective November 10, 2025, while Illumina remained on the Unreliable Entity List with purchases requiring approval.