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  "documentTitle": "Twist Bioscience (TWST)",
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  "authorName": "Scorpion Capital",
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  "presentationDate": "2022-11-15 00:00:00",
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      "text": "The model is simple – Twist investors on one side, customers on the other, and Twist as the middleman flipping cash from capital raises to customers to create “revenue,” with insiders pocketing a vig for the trouble via stock-based comp.",
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      "text": "The model is simple – Twist investors on one side, customers on the other, and Twist as the middleman flipping cash from capital raises to customers to create “revenue,” with insiders pocketing a vig for the trouble via stock-based comp. The CEO, who we shall shortly get to, volunteered odd comments on a recent earnings call: “so we’re definitely not subsidizing...we’re not in the business of subsidizing...” – a doth protest too much moment, in our view, and indicia of mens rea, Latin for guilty mind. An executive in Twist’s space summarized it as “shipping with every gene and every oligo pool a $20 bill to people.”",
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      "text": "They have a very, very large and complicated manufacturing scheme where they overbuild in order to deliver the product [...] The thing I kept on saying is they were shipping with every gene and every oligo pool a $20 bill to people. That's basically that they were fundamentally flawed, that they were trying to keep up with the price, and they were taking it as a loss every time. But what they have never done is fix the fundamental manufacturing flaw that they have. They need to overbuild or do extensive rework in order to deliver these products.",
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      "text": "So we’re definitely not subsidizing anybody else's drug discovery [...] In terms of our ability or our willingness to be flexible on economic terms, we are very flexible. But there's definitely a red line where any deal has to pay for our cost, right? So the bare minimum. We're not going to do a deal that's not a gross margin positive. We're not in the business of subsidizing our customers' research.",
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      "text": "“So we’re definitely not subsidizing anybody else's drug discovery [...] In terms of our ability or our willingness to be flexible on economic terms, we are very flexible. But there's definitely a red line where any deal has to pay for our cost, right? So the bare minimum. We're not going to do a deal that's not a gross margin positive. We're not in the business of subsidizing our customers' research.” — Twist CEO, Q2 2022 earnings call on May 5, 2022. “They have a very, very large and complicated manufacturing scheme where they overbuild in order to deliver the product [...] The thing I kept on saying is they were shipping with every gene and every oligo pool a $20 bill to people. That's basically that they were fundamentally flawed, that they were trying to keep up with the price, and they were taking it as a loss every time. But what they have never done is fix the fundamental manufacturing flaw that they have. They need to overbuild or do extensive rework in order to deliver these products.” — Longtime executive in Twist's space.",
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      "text": "Source: Capital IQ earnings call transcripts; Scorpion Capital consultation calls with experts",
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      "kind": "title",
      "text": "Twist’s subsidy scheme and its Ponzi-like essence appears to be an open secret in the industry.",
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