ONT: Pursuing killer apps: takeaways from new CEO meetings

Research evidence excerpt

ONT: Pursuing killer apps: takeaways from new CEO meetings

direct operational experience in each of ONT's three target end-markets. Mr Van Parys has held

senior operational roles in each of ONT's three target end-markets: research tools (GE Healthcare Life Sciences, 11 years),

biopharma manufacturing (Cytiva's Biotechnology Integrated Solutions division, Danaher) and regulated clinical diagnostics (CEO

of Radiometer, Danaher, >$1bn revenue).

Strategic focus to be communicated at H1 2026 results on 19 August: killer apps to be picked. Under the prior CEO, the approach

was to let the market determine where the technology would be adopted, enabling customers and applications to self-select. As

this is such a differentiated technology and was undergoing rapid evolution, it would have been tough at the outset to decide

specific use cases. However, with a degree of maturity in the technology, and with the company having spent several years working

with different customer groups, the new CEO is taking the opposite approach, proactively identifying a focused list of 10-15

applications that ONT can execute against over a 3–5 year timeframe. This will inform investment direction (R&D, commercial,

partnerships) and deprioritisation. He called out clinical sub-segments of rare diseases and infectious disease, and biopharma QC

sub-segments plasmids and contaminants, but reaffirmed support for researchers too. The company expects to articulate this

more fully on 19 August, but highlighted that this focus would also enable the company to shift from a historically inbound-driven

partnership model to proactive, targeted outbound approaches in specific applications.

Core competence clearly defined: hardware, chemistry, and squiggle-to-base-call bioinformatics. ONT will not attempt to